Biomedicine on Display

We have just started a search for 1-2 positions at the level of Associate Professor (alternatively Assistant Professor).

As readers of this blog probably knows, Medical Museion is an integrated research and museum unit for promoting medical science communication based on the material and visual medical heritage. The research profile is centered around the contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, medical science communication studies, and studies of the production of the material and visual medical scientific heritage. We have a world-class collection of historical medical artefacts and images, an active program for the acquisitioning and preservation of the contemporary biomedical and biotechnological heritage, a permanent medical-historical public gallery, and an innovative temporary exhibition program.

We are looking for two new members of faculty to contribute to our integrated research, teaching, heritage and outreach programme focussing on late 20th century and contemporary medical and health sciences in a cultural, aesthetic and historical perspective. The aim of the programme is to develop new modes of research-based collecting, exhibition making and web-based outreach by combining scientific content, cultural interpretation and aesthetic expression in innovative ways.

On the outreach side, we are developing research-based science communication practices for a variety of audiences – spanning from health professionals to the general public – in the form of exhibitions and web products, and with special attention to the aesthetics of science communication.

On the acquisition side, we are in the process of developing research-based curatorial practices (heritage production) in close cooperation with research institutions, hospitals, pharma, biotech and medical device companies, and patient organisations in the region (‘museum 2.0’) .

The appointees are required to do research at an international level and research-based teaching, however most of teaching obligations are substituted with museum work.

Read the official full job description below.
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Just saw the early spring Monday seminar program at UCL’s STS department. I like the nice British analytical touch to it. Much more interesting than the usual fashionable Latouresque ANTsemiotics and other STS’ese sociolects. For example:

• Jeremy Howick, ‘When can we trust the experts? Defending the Evidence Based Medicine stance’, 25 January
• David Healy, ‘They used to call it Medicine’, 1 February
• Sam Schweber, ‘Writing the Biography of Hans Bethe’, 8 February
• Jane Gregory, ‘Producing the post-Fordist public, or: What is Science Communication for in a post-industrial society?’, 22 February
• Helena Sheehan, ‘What (if anything) has Marxism to contribute to science studies?’, 8 March
• Jeff Hughes, ‘Before the bomb: on writing the history of unclear physics’, 22 March

Wish I were in London more often, would love to discuss production of a post-Fordic public or hear Jeff unfold his ideas about ’unclear physics’ (no typo, it’s an intended joke, says Jon Agar, who sent the programme around).

People interested in medical science communication in museums are well advised to broaden their vision to other domains of science communication studies and practices. There is much to be learned from science communication studies dealing with a wide array of sciences through a variety of media.

One forum for such learning from others is the series of annual ‘Science and the Public’ conferences in UK. These meetings aim to bring together, as the organisers put it, “the various strands of academia which consider science’s relationships with groups generally called ‘the public’”  (I must admit that I love that phrasing, “groups generally called’ the public’”, it sounds so academically keep-a-distance-ish :-).

I participated (and presented) at the meeting in Manchester in 2008 — a very positive experience; very informal atmosphere and high quality presentations; good scholarly karma.

Next year’s meeting is going to be held at Imperial College in London, 3-4 July 2010. Alice Bell and her organiser-colleagues are expecting participants and contributions from a wide range of disciplines, like science and technology studies, history of science, geography, psychology, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, development studies, English literature, science policy studies and much more. And the range of topics covered may include (but are not limited to):

* PUS, PEST, PR.
* Surveying public knowledge and attitudes.
* Science and the arts (including science fiction).
* Science, publics and personal identity.
* The role of industry and/ or the third sector in public engagement
and scientific research.
* The challenges of ‘upstream’ engagement.
* Popular science and professionalization.
* Specific public-science issues: e.g. climate change, MMR, energy policy, GMOs.
* Studies of specific media: e.g. film, books, the internet, museums, radio.
* Science, religion and the ‘New Atheism’.
* Politically engaged scientists.
* Churnalism vs. investigative science journalism.
* Edu-tainment.
* Scientific advisers, spin and secrecy.
* Patients and publics in health services.
* Science and the sceptics.
* Amateur science.

I guess that would cater for most science communication palates. Send a 300 word abstract to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 1 March 2010. You can also send in a panel proposals.

(Thanks to Alice for the info).

I’ve always wondered why bioethics and research ethics are routinely referred to as obligatory passage points in most biomedical and life science PhD programmes — and why science communication is more rarely emphasised in postgraduate training.

Does this emphasis on ethics and the corresponding  lack of attention to science communication reflect a deeply felt need from the side of biomedical and life scientists? No, not necessarily, at least not if we should believe the results of a survey made by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) about the importance of a variety of useful ‘transferrable skills’.

Of the transferable skills listed in the survey, management and grant application skills are considered the most desirable by senior scientists. But they also value the importance of improving their skills in public communication. Whereas skills in research ethics/bioethics are considered much less important. 

When ~400 senior Europan life scientists were asked which complementary skills they would have liked to receive training in earlier in their career, 37% and 33% mentioned public communication and peer-to-peer communication, whereas only 17% and 11% mentioned research ethics and bioethics:

When asked which complementary skills they would like to improve, public communication and peer-to-peer communication was chosen by 28% and 13% respectively, while research ethics and bioethics was chosen by 3% and 5% only:

Another interesting angle to this is that senior scientists value the importance of research ethics and peer-to-peer communication skills for research students (in contrast to themselves) very highly (4,4 and 4,2 points on a scale from 5-1), whereas bioethics and public communication skills are valued less important for the students (3,6 and 2,8 on the scale). In other words, senior faculty values more general mind-expanding skills for themselves and wants their students to stick to narrow technical training.

All in all, it seems like science communication skills in the biomedical and life sciences — either public engagement skills for senior faculty and peer-to-peer communication skills for PhD students — ought to be upgraded.

(thanks to David Karlin, Wellcome Trust, for making me aware of the EMBO report on transferrable skills)

In late March, Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard (which several of us here at Medical Museion met when she gave a seminar here a couple of years ago and who is now working at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge) is organising a meeting of great relevance for anyone interested in biomedicine on display, whether in museums or on the screen.

Titled ‘Have you ever seen a molecule? Art, science and visual communication’, the two-day meeting at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), 25-26 March, concentrates on the correlation between art/design and molecular biology, in particular structural biology, and on the impact of the arts and artistic practices on scientific culture. Current molecular biological research is very dependent upon visualisation methods, both in the production of intepreted data and in the communication to other scientists and the public at large. The call for papers explains the relevance of this topical issue, both for scientists and for science communicators, understood broadly:

Despite the fact that structural images of individual projects are made by thousands of researchers in laboratories around the world, there is as yet no general consensus on what makes a good image. Consequently, there is no obvious and necessary correlation between the images made for pragmatic and heuristic purposes in the laboratory, those chosen for posters and conference presentations, the images accompanying article submissions, and finally those that will be selected or further designed for public engagement and communication. Instead, how specific traits should be visualised, which colour schemes should be applied and how to pick the perfect image for specific purposes depend to a large degree upon pragmatic categories and local factors within individual laboratories and research groups, as well as on editorial decisions and a stronger promotional value, at least to some degree independently of scientific preferences and arguments.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in visualising molecular structures lies at the very core of contemporary research processes and products. Bringing art, design and science together is far more than just an interesting experiment in transdisciplinary cross-communication, it is a necessary step in exploring new ways of optimising imagery at the molecular level and thus breaking new ground. We depend upon this in the arts as well as in the sciences in the future university to make things better and to advance our knowledge of life at a molecular level.

Rikke/CRASSH welcomes submissions for presentations broadly within visualisation of science. Send a <250 words abstract, a brief CV and a few lines about your interest in the conference before 1 February 2010 to rsk@mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk (and please use the form here).

Registration fee (includes catering) is a bargain (£30 for faculty, £15 for students.). Registration will be available from the conference website shortly.

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010.

This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.

The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to intervene with the body at the ‘molar’ and tangible level — limbs, organs, tissues, etc.

The rapid transition in the medical and health sciences and technologies over the last 50 years — towards a molecular understanding of human body in health and disease and the rise of a host of molecular and digital technologies for investigating and intervening with the body — is still largely absent in museum collections and exhibitions.

As a consequence, the public can rarely rely on museums to get an understanding of the development and impact of the medical and health sciences in the last 50 years. Biochemistry and molecular biology have resulted in entirely new diagnostic methods and therapeutic regimes and a flourishing biotech industry. The elucidation of the human genome and the emergence of proteomics has opened up the possibility of personalised molecular medicine. Advances in the material sciences and information technology have given rise to a innovative and highly productive medical device industry, which is radically transforming medical practices. But few museums have so far engaged seriously and in a sustained way with these and similar phenomena in the recent history of medical sciences and technologies.

The contemporary transition in medical and health science and technology towards molecularisation, miniaturisation, mediated visualisation, digitalisation and intangibilisation is a major challenge for the museum world; not only for medical museums, but also for museums of science and technology, and indeed for all kinds of museums with an interest in the human body and the methods for intervening with it, including art museums, natural history museums and museums of cultural history.

Contemporary medicine is not only a challenge to exhibition design practices and public outreach strategies but also to acquisition methodologies, collection management and collection-based research. How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of intangible scientific and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

The meeting will address questions like (but not limited to):

• How can an increasingly microanatomical, molecularised, invisible and intangible (mediated) human body be represented in a museum setting? Does the post-anatomical body require new kinds of museum displays?
• How can museums make sense of contemporary molecular-based and digitalised diagnostic and thereapeutic technologies, instrumentation and investigation practices in their display practices?
• How can museums make use of their older collections together with new acquisitions from contemporary medicine and health science and technology?
• What is the role of the visual vs. the non-visual (hearing, smell, taste, touch) senses in curatorial practice and in the public displays of contemporary medical science and technology?
• What can museums learn from science centers, art-science event venues etc. with respect to the public engagement with contemporary medical science and technology? And, vice versa, what can museums provide that these institutions cannot?
• How can museums draw on bioart, ‘wet art’ and other art forms to stimulate public engagement with the changing medical and health system?
• How does physical representations of contemporary medicine in museums spaces relate to textual representations in print and digital representations on the web?
• How can museums integrate emerging social web technologies (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the build-up of medical and health exhibitions?
• What kind of acquisition methods and policies are needed for museums to catch up with the development of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts and images?
• What kind of problems do museum encounter when they expand the acquisition domain from traditional textual, visual and tangible material objects to digital artefacts (including software, audio- and videorecordings, and digitally stored data) and non-tangible scientific objects.
• How can participatory acquisitioning, crowd-sourcing, wiki-based methods, etc. (‘museum 2.0’) be employed for the preservation and curation of the contemporary medical heritage?
• How can curatorial work in museums draw on medical research and engineering and on academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences? And, vice versa, how can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?

The conference will employ a variety of session formats. In addition to keynotes and sessions with individual presentations of current research and curatorial work there will also be discussion panels and object demonstration workshops.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of scholars and specialists — including, for example, curators in medical, science and technology museums; scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of medicine, science and technology; scholars in science and technology studies, science communication studies, museum studies, material studies and visual culture studies; biomedical scientists and clinical specialists; medical, health and pharma industry specialists with an interest in science communication; engineers and designers in the medical device industry; artists, designers and architects with an interest in museum displays, etc.

We are especially interested in presentations that involve the use of material and visual artefacts and we therefore encourage participants to bring illustrative and evocative (tangible or non-tangible) objects for demonstration.

The meeting will begin on Thursday 16 September (noon) and end on Saturday evening 19 September, 2010.

100-300 word proposals for presentations, demonstrations, discussion panels, etc. shall be sent before 28 February 2010 to the chair of the program committee, Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk.

A meeting website for registration and hotel bookings will be established in early January 2010. A number of hotel rooms will be prebooked.

Programme committee:
Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London
Robert Bud, Science Museum, London
Judy Chelnick, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden
Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (chair).

Local organising committee:
Anni Harris, Bente Vinge Pedersen, Carsten Holt, Morten Bulow and Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.

For further information about the academic programme, please contact Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk. For practical information about travel, accommodation, etc., see http://www.mm.ku.dk/sker/eamhms.aspx, or contact Anni Harris, konference2010@sund.ku.dk after 4 January 2010.

The conference is hosted by Medical Museion; further information will be posted on the museum’s website (www.museion.ku.dk) and on this blog.

Three months ago, Nature Biotechnology (27: 514-18, 2009) published a commentary titled ‘Science Communication reconsidered’, a topic we are of course very interested in here at MedMus.

I believe the commentary is still worth a comment, because it was written by 24 (sic!) more or less well known ‘experts’ in science communication, including Matt (”framing science”) Nisbett.

The co-authored commentary — which is based on a workshop on the changing nature of science communication “focusing specifically on biotech, biomedicine and genetics” held in Washington D.C. earlier this year — describes the state of science communication in general and in the printed news media in particular, and then ends with some recommendations for how to make the situation better.

The recommendations are peculiar for at least two reasons:

First, I’m surprised that none of the 24 authors seem to have noticed the importance of science, technology and medical museums for today’s science communication arena. True, many STM museums still have their focus on science, technology and medicine of the past, but more and more museums both in Europa and North America are increasingly identifying themselves as venues for science communication.

This total lack of mention of museums is all the more surprising because the 24 authors have a pronounced trust in government-sponsored science communication. In fact, they are wedded to a mixture of old mass media, newspaper journalism and a mid-20th century understanding of government-induced democracy.

The authors believe that the alleged threat to science journalism posed by corporate science media is thus best met by increasing funding of university- and government-supported science journalism.

Accordingly they don’t have much trust in science blogging. It’s mentioned in passing, but otherwise they believe blogging is “unlikely to become an effective solution” to what they perceive as a crisis in science communication.

Well, apparently the 24 authors are not entirely up-to-date with today’s media situation. Not only has grassroot blogging (both blogs by scientists and blogs by non-scientists about science) proved to be enormously vigorous. It is also much more likely to provide a democratic balance to corporate science newsrooms.

Why this nostalgic cry for an old-style public media and gvmt-sponsored science communication policy? Part of the explanation may lie in the  professional backgrounds of the 24 authors. Despite their focus on ‘biotech, biomedicine and genetics’, surprisingly many of them are affiliated with schools, departments and centres of public and community health.

My general impression is that scholars of public health tend to be more bound to have faith in goverment-sponsored health campaigns and less bound to trust bottom-up citizen health initiatives. Also that the basic rationale for much public and community health is a tendency to support government solutions for health policy issues.

If so, this co-authored plaidoyer for enhancing science communication is just classical public health communication policy writ large. I doubt a group of writers from departments of medical engineering would come up with similar recommendations for science communication. And Medgadget would probably find the commentary outrageous.

A few weeks ago I attended the Science Online London 2009 conference – a conference on science communication in the new era of “the Web”. As they wrote on the conference homepage:

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The conference itself made good use of the online tools. As an apropriate feature it was possible to attend the conference online via Second Life (SL) instead of on site (in ‘First’ or ‘Real’ life). So I attended the conference while sitting in my living room in an appartment in Denmark, joined in virtual reality by people from various parts of the globe and quite different time zones. Blogger Dave Munger even gave his presentation through Second Life, as the screen picture below is an image of (notice also my freshly created SL avatar sitting in the lefthand corner):

The Second Life feature in itself made the conference interesting, so let me start there and come back to the actual contents of the conference later. By doing this, I am also letting you experience one of the unfortunate aspects of doing conferences in Second Life: the technology is not only a media but also distracts you from concentrating on what is going on. Or in one case when there was only a bad audio available from a breakout session, it made attending the conference difficult. Then again, there were other benefits.

One major benefit (and major distraction too) was the ongoing commentary and debate going on in Second Life while speakers were presenting. The presentations were communicated by video and audio streaming (see programme and streams here), while powerpoint slides were visible on the virtual screen you see to the left in the picture above. Ad to this a chat browser with ongoing commentaries and an ability to rotate your view around the virtual amphitheatre that set the stage for the SL conference – to view the often very elaborate, fancily dressed avatars, whom you were chatting with – and you get an idea of the set up. Commentaries varied from quick resumes of what was just said to parallel discussions or sharing of links and jokes (like this one) – kind of like handing notes to each other during a lecture. This was really helpful for a newbie like me, and it also gave a feeling of inclusion and made a great opening for networking, since everyone spoke to everyone in the chat.

From a museum-outreach perspective the chatting also gave me a couple of unexpected examples of what SL can do. Chek for instance the HMS Beagle (Darwin) exhibit in SL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Elucian%20Omega/175/103/23. Second Life may be a relatively small online community and you may need a lot of computer skills to pull something like the HMS Beagle off, but – for me at least – it opens up for a whole new perspective on the use of online tools in a museum context.

As for the actual content of the conference there were several interesting presentations: aforementioned blogger Dave Munger, science editor of The Times Mark Henderson and ‘Genetic Future’ blogger Daniel MacArthur talked about ‘Blogging for impact’, how to use the blog as a tool to achieve fame, present journalists with a good science communication opportunity, and further/damage your academic career. Basically saying that blogging is the future of science communication and of becoming a popular academic, and that comments are usually of a much higher quality in blogs than on the mainline web (please feel free to prove them right ;-)). But also that not all universities recognize this (yet), and that being publicly critical of collegues on your blog may damage your career. There was a breakout session on institutional barriers afterwards, but I’ll skip that here. See here for videos of most of the conference or here for a blog that has links to all the blogposts on the conference and its different sessions.

Another interesting presentation was on managing online scientific communities – both on the technical issues involved (tech support, spam, legal aspects etc.) and on building communities on the Web. Taking the online scientific community ResearchGate as a good example, the presentation stressed the need for learning from the community what their needs are, continously developing the online resources (search engines, interface, applications), and engaging visitors. 30-35% of ResearchGate’s registered users are active ca. once a month (doing literature search, asking a question etc.), so it seems they have found a productice way of making an online community. Knowing what your audience is interested in and would want to know about or be able to do seems to be the way of creating an actual community. Interaction and involvement are important.

The conference ended with a presentation by science fiction writer and former research scientist John Gilbey under the headline: Far Out: Speculations on Science Communication 50 years From Now. Gilbey not so much outlined a future of science communication as he asked a lot of questions relating to the current way things are heading. The questions also (kind of) summarized the underlying questions in, and pointed to the context of, the conference’s different presentations. While thinking on a concept like New Museology, these questions made a lot of sense to me, so let me just end this post with some of Gilbey’s questions:

In a changed future who will our [insert scientist/blogger/profession etc.] sponsors be? How free will we be? Will we be encouraged to deal with public by employers? Would you blog against ‘evil’ organisations anonymously?

Will virtual reality be an obiqutiuos part of science communication in the near future? Scientists’ location becoming irrelevant?

Would a future environmental event spur more interst in science? Or would society crash totally following an unrecoverable internet failure? How many would loose information they couldn’t recover?

Most of the persons in SL answered in the positive to these questions. Would you?

I was supposed to give a presentation at the one-day meeting ‘Stories Between Art and Science’ in Oporto, Portugal, next week but had to decline because I’m on paternal leave with my youngest daughter in September and October.

Anyway, the programme has just been distributed and it looks tantalising. Speakers include:

* Michael Punt: Provisional Connection
* Monique Sicard: Between Painters and Scientists/The Paradox of the Concomitant Emergence of Pictorial Abstraction and Photographic Realism
* Shirley Wheeler: Tracing the Invisible
* Maria Esteva: Endless Possibilities: Digital Collections as Crossroads between the Humanities and the Sciences
* Len Massey: Drawing the Invisible
* Jane S. Richardson: Drawing 3D Protein Structures
* Laura Salisbury: A Neurological Modernism: Language, Materiality and the Twentieth-Century Word
* David A. Kirby: Big Screen Science: Scientists’ Backstage Role in the Production of Hollywood Films
* David Frankel: Visuality/Sound and the Economy
* Deanna Petherbridge: George Stubbs’ Comparative Anatomical Exposition (1795-1806) and its Relationship to Theories of Degeneration of the Primordial Species
* Daniela Coimbra: Psychology, Music and Performance
* Vincent Barras: Report on an Art-Science Doctoral Program: Neurosciences, Psychopathology and Arts, XX-XXIth C.

I would have loved to hear and discuss at least half of these papers. For obvious reasons, I would have been very interested to hear Shirley Wheeler’s talk, because she curated the ‘Design4Science’ exhibition that we displayed here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen last spring.

But I would particularly have loved to hear Jane Richardson talk about her work on 3D protein structure drawings — Richardson famously developed the now ubiquitous ribbon diagram (a.k.a. Richardson diagram) of protein secondary and tertiary structure models in the 1980s.

This representation of the enzyme subtilisin Carlsberg (Protein Data Bank nr 1c3l) that we are currently displaying in the ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’-exhibition is a nice example of a ribbon diagram:

The amino acid sequence is sequentially coloured — from dark blue at the N-terminal end through light blue, green, yellow, orange, and finally red at the C-terminal end. The spiral patterns represent α-helices. The arrows represent parallel β-sheet-forming β-strands in the core of the protein. The thin tubes represent the loops in the structure. The transparent outer layer represents the van der Waals surface, which encloses the molecular volume of the whole protein. (from ‘Protein Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research).

Today’s ribbon diagrams are based on graphical display programmes like PyMOL. But when Jane Richardson first developed these diagrams around 1980 she did it in hand-drawing. It would have been great to hear her personal story of the ribbon diagram and the development of this mode of representation, from hand-drawing to computerised design.

The program for the Artefacts meeting at Science Museum, 20-22 September, has been finalised. It looks great! Medical Museion’s former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen (now at the Copenhagen City Museum) will present some of the ideas behind the current exhibition ‘Split+Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’. Here is the whole list of papers for the meeting:

• Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University.
  Can museum visitors learn about the relation of science and technology in museums?
• Peter Donhauser, Vienna Museum of Technology.
  Science versus technology in a museum’s display. Changes in the Vienna Museum.
• Benjamin Gross, Princeton University.
  “The Antithesis of the Attic”: Historical Artifacts, “Interactive” Exhibits, and the Presentation of Science at the Franklin Institute Museum.
• Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis University.
  “DNA at 50” in Museums of Science and Technology: Regional Culture, Medium, and Message.
• Søren Bak-Jensen,  Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
  Relaying the aesthetic and artistic aspects of recent biomedical technologies.
• Alfons Zarzoso, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya. Gabarro’s Chess-Board Excision and skin grafting: medical exile in Word War II England.
• Alison Taubman,  National Museums of Scotland.
  From Ships to Chips:  Collecting contemporary Scottish engineering.
• Ben Russell, Science Museum.
  James Watt’s Workshop: from steam pioneer to creative professional.
• Dirk Bühler, Deutsches Museum.
  Portraits of Architectural and Engineering Achievements.
• Klaus Staubermann, National Museums of Scotland.
  Science and Technology as Practice: Dividing Engines in Museums.
• Dirk van Delft, Director, Museum Boerhaave.
  The Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry & Cold.
• Jane Wess, Senior Curator of Science, Science Museum.
  Pure Mathematics?: The Cleaning up of Context.
• Jennifer Landry, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  Beyond the Black Box: A different approach to interpreting the history of chemistry.
• Frank Dittmann, Deutsches Museum.
  Paper on Robotics (title to be confirmed).
• Tom Crouch,  National Air and Space Museum. Capable of Flight? The Interplay of Science and Technology In the Aeronautical Work of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
• Jennifer Levasseur & Margaret A. Weitekamp, National Air and Space Museum.
  Moving Beyond Earth: Exhibiting the Space Shuttle and Future Human Spaceflight.
• Paul Forman, National Museum of American History, Reflection on the workshop

Anastasia Filippoupoliti at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
(afilipp@gmail.com) and Graeme Farnell at MuseumsEtc, UK (graeme@museumsetc.com) are soliciting papers for a forthcoming book that will explore:

• the processes involved in developing new science exhibitions in and for museums
• the issues involved in transforming scientific ideas or events into exhibitions
• the challenges faced by museums in communicating science to a wide audience.

Much has been written about the difficulties of disseminating science to the public through a variety of new and traditional media. It is, indeed, a complex subject to tackle in the exhibition space, yet a challenging and multidimensional one.

How best to understand the process of working from scientific data to the ideas-based exhibition? What exactly is lost during the transformation of factual information into an exhibition environment? And more importantly, how can the exhibition work most effectively as a tool for narrating science, its past and present?

They welcome a range of submissions including, but not limited to, the following issues/themes:

• both theoretical perspectives and case studies relating to science exhibitions
• exhibition design for science: problems and opportunities
• successful design techniques and approaches in relation to science displays
• science communication in the museum: interpretation issues
• learning activities and science collections
• developing learning resources for science exhibitions
• object stories and science learning
• exhibitions interpreting the history of science

Please submit an abstract (up to 400 words) and a biographical note (up to 250 words) by email to both editors above. Deadline for abstracts and bio 30 September 2009. Selection for inclusion 30 October 2009.

While we’re at it, here is another interesting conference coming up. (See here or here for recent posts about interesting conferences.)

The Danish research center DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials) have organized a one-day conference at Roskilde University, September 22nd 2009. At the conference there will be presentations about a.o. the (maybe not so) new possibilities of using digital communication in a museum context; critical discussions about museums as learning institutions; and discussions about the relationship between the public and museum institutions in a new museological context.
These are themes which are discussed regularly at Medical Museion – and Museion will be represented among the conference participants. Some presentations will be held in English and some in danish according to the conference programme. Here is a rough translation of the danish conference teaser:

The digital culture brings forth new opportunities to strengthen communication to more, potentially interested users. But external communication is not only good communication of an academic subject. Communication influences, changes and distorts the subject. More, and more diverse, communication changes the relationship between communicator, message and recepient at the same time as boundaries between leisure centers, knowledge centers and museums are erased.
DREAM invites you to discuss these changes. What happens with the changed forms of communication? Who is communicating with whom? What is changed? And who is changed? What does the new forms of communication mean for the self understanding and development of museums and science centers?

Make a note in your 2010 calendar already — for the 15th Congress of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS), which will be held here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, 17-19 September 2010.

The congress theme revolves around the question: How can medical history museums contribute to the popular engagement in contemporary medicine and health science?

Medicine is in rapid transition. The last fifty years have witnessed tremendous changes in medical science and the health system. Molecular biology has introduced entirely new methods for diagnostics and specific therapeutical regimes, and has boosted a flourishing biotech industry. The digital revolution has given rise to whole new areas of medical technology and medical device industries. The elucidation of the human genome has opened up the possibility for personalized medicine and promises to change the authority relations between the medical professions and the public.

This late 20th century transition in medicine and the health sciences is a major challenge for medical history museums – with respect to their research programs, their acquisition policies, their collection management procedures, their exhibition design practices and their public outreach strategies. Contemporary medicine thus raises important historiographical and museological questions which medical history museums need to address:

• What kind of research programs will help establish new collection and exhibition practices?
• What kind of acquisition policies are needed to cope with the rapid developent of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts?
• How can collection management procedures adopt to the many new kinds of artefacts that produced in the medical system, including molecular and digital artefacts?
• How can exhibitions contribute to the popular engagement with the rapidly changing medical and health system?
• How shall public outreach handle emerging web 2.0 communication technologies for the benefit of museums? 

These and similar questions are increasingly asked by museum curators in science, technology and medical museums, historians of science, technology and medicine, scholars in science studies and science communication studies, medical and health professionals with an interest in medical history and medical history museums, and so forth. The congress will therefore also be open to presentations by scholars working in these and similar fields.

Congress participants will get an opportunity to visit museums of interest in the greater Copenhagen area, Denmark, and southern Sweden before and after the meeting.

A first call for papers, sessions, panels and other presentation channels will be distributed by the end of the summer 2009. For further information, please contact me on this address: ths@sund.ku.dk

Over and over again I’ve praised Derek Lowe’s blog ‘In the Pipeline’ (see for example here). Derek delivers almost daily insights into the world of drug research, from chemical lab work routines to Big Pharma management and economics.

Yesterday’s post (‘A cure for the common cold …’) is a fine comment on the problematic quality of pharma communication on the mass media. I quote in extenso (hoping that Derek doesn’t sue me for infringing his copyright :-):

If you want a good example of the way that the popular media handle a drug discovery story, take a look at all the headlines this morning on the news of the sequencing of the common-cold rhinoviruses.

There are a couple of “Cure For the Common Cold Unlikely” ones, but most of the others seem to regard this as a big step forward. “Cure May Be Found”, “Getting Closer” , “May Lead to Cure”, “Could Help to Cure” – that’s the sort of thing. The problem is, how many viral diseases can we cure? I mean, really cure with drugs after a person’s been infected, wipe out and make go away? Right. Do I hear a zero? Viral diseases can be very difficult to get a handle on, because there aren’t many moving parts in there. If none of them are amenable to small-molecule drug approaches, people like me are pretty well out of the game.

The best chance you have with a viral infection is with a vaccine. But what this genomics work is telling us, actually, is that a vaccine is going to be rather hard to come by. This paper sequenced ninety-nine different rhinovirus strains, and if there are that many, there are surely that many more. Or there will be, after the next cold season – just wait. These things are mutating all the time – which is, of course, why we get colds year after year. The team working on this project was able to bin the viral genomes into fifteen different classes, but what are we going to do, develop fifteen different (and simultaneous) vaccines? Against a scurrying, hopping, moving target like this one?

No, this is very interesting work, and it’ll tell us a lot about how viruses do their nasty viral business out in the real world. But I wouldn’t start throwing around the “C” word. All that can do is disappoint people, I’m afraid.

I’ve always been skeptical of claims to revolutions in science and technology. Thomas Kuhn actually made a great disservice to historical awareness among scientists and to science communication with his 1962 bestseller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Every now and then a new finding is described as a ‘revolution’ in science, technology or medicine — despite the fact that it it almost always more of the same, rather than revolutionary.

Therefore I don’t like the title of the two-part video ‘Medical Revolution’ — about personalized medicine — which was awarded with two gold medals at the New York Festivals’ International Film & Video Awards 2008.

‘Medical Revolution — From Molecule to Medicine’ schematically shows how pharmaceutical companies develop new medicines and addresses questions like why it takes so long time to develop a new drug. See it here.

‘Medical Revolution — The Future’ is about body scans, DNA arrays and personalized medicine. See it here.

It was selected as ‘World’s best work 2007′ in two categories, viz., ‘Health/Medical Issues’ and ‘Health Care Professional Education’. It’s very professional and smooth, but too overly pedagogical for my taste. Why are these videos accompanied by a voice that sounds like he/she is teaching us how to drive a car or operate an automatic bread toaster? I mean, if they REALLY mean ‘revolution’ seriously, I would expect a somewhat more excited speaker — a shrill voice, even an hysterical laughter, whatever — but not this clinical didactic monotony. The voice betrays the claim for revolution.