Biomedicine on Display

A rapidly increasing number of scientists and scholars are learning about the advantages of using the blog medium for both internal and external research communication — see for example Batts, Anthis and Smith’s recent paper “Advancing science through conversations: bridging the gap between blogs and the academy” in Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) (discussed in an earlier post here).

But it can surely be pretty demanding to keep up a quality blog. As Stanford bioinformatician Russ Altman writes under the heading “Blogs are hard!” on his excellent Building Confidence blog (about biomedical informatics, genetics, medicine, and bioengineering):

Well, maybe you all know this, but I am having a heck of a time coming up with material that is relevant and (hopefully) interesting for this blog. These difficulties are occurring despite help from my blog angel (she knows who she is) who is constantly feeding me excellent ideas. Why are blogs hard?

• Things are busy and you need to take out time to be a little reflective about stuff. That’s hard when you are just running and running all day.
• In order to opine, you need to know what you are talking about. That usually requires doing some homework.
• It is difficult to formulate ideas alone. Almost everything I do is as part of a team, and this is a much better way (generally speaking) to draw conclusions or make decisions. If I really wanted excellent blog items, I think I should work with a team to formulate good thoughts, debate them and then present them. But I’m not sure that’s part of the blog culture, which is marked by rugged individualism

OK, that’s my thoughts about why I have blog block. I will get going again soon. Blog angel has sent some great ideas, and I just need to ponder them, form opinions, and commit them to screen.

A sobering voice amidst all the exhausting enthusiasm that’s swirling around the science blogging multitude. Searched for “blog block“, and got a staggering 8,331 hits.

(thanks to Deepak for the tip about Russ Altman’s post)

In yesterday’s issue of Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) bioscientists Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith have an interesting article titled “Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy”.

The authors notice that scientific institutions have been pretty slow to adopt the blog medium, in spite of the fact that both institutions and bloggers have a common interest in advancing public engagement with science. They suggest that:

By combining the credibility of institutions — trusted gate-keepers for scientific truth — with the immediacy and networking infrastructure of blogs, we believe that these shared goals can be better served with benefits to both partners.

More specifically, they propose “a roadmap” for turning blogs into educational tools for institutions (mainly universities). They present examples of collaborations that can serve as a models for others to emulate, and they offer suggestions for improving upon blog platforms to make them more acceptable to institutional hosts.

In many respects, this is all very commendable. The PloS-article describes and evaluates a number of interesting institutional blog initiatives, like Rudd Sound Bites (www.ruddsoundbites.typepad.com), the ChemTools blog (chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog, the Berkeley Lab Energy and Environmental Research Blog (bleer.lbl.gov), and the Oxford Internet Institute (www.oii.ox.ac.uk), and so forth. Very useful stuff, which many academics (and not only scientists) could learn a lot from.

One important critical point though. The authors seem oblivious of a crucial aspect of the relationship between individual science bloggers and institutions engaged in science communicating, namely the power dynamics involved. True, they are aware of the fact that the science blogosphere is a bottom-up driven network. But they don’t expand this observation into an analysis of the conflict patterns involved.

For a thorough understanding of how blogs and institutions relate to each other in a science communication network, however, one has to take such potential and actual conflict patterns into account. After all, institutional actors have quite different set of political and economic agendas than singular science actors.

This was in fact one of the themes we discussed in the ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0′ session at the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference in June (see paper here).

Generally speaking, I’m afraid the growing literature on science blogging reflects a widespread naïve view of the medium. Like the authors of the PLoS-article, most commentators on blogging as a genre of science communication are pushing for the medium with their critical mindset on standby, even disabled. In other words, there is too much technological optimism, and too little critical analysis involved in the current discourse on science blogging.

Our good colleague Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has made an interesting observation about trends in science communication in the Times Literary Supplement (‘No strings’, March 28, pp.28-29).

Reflecting on a number of newly published books on cosmology, Jim points out that the role of the individual science writer seems to have been enhanced. Science communicators nowadays (compared to when Jim was a student, or what?) have a stronger personal presence in their writing, as though they “have decided that their readers need to see them as human beings”. It’s no longer sufficient to rely on writing technique and style, he notices — “personal reference, opinion and anecdote are now the favoured tools”.

Jim doesn’t sound too enthusiastic about this trend, although he seems to realise that it’s here to stay: “If history is autobiography, it seems that popular cosmology is going the same way”.

Despite his somewhat dismissive attitude to this personal stuff, Jim is right. Science writing is indeed becoming more author-centred (and in my humble view this is definitely to the better). What’s surprising is rather that — compared to other genres of writing — the arrival of the conspicuous first-person narrator and his/her whereabouts in science writing is such a late phenomenon (I’m not sure that it such a new thing, but let’s leave that for another post).

In other words, science communication has been one of the last bastions of impersonal writing. In journalism, in contrast, the self-reflexive and visible author has been around for decades. And in academia it all began in the 1970s and 1908s with anthropologists who wrote about the relation between themselves and their subjects. Today, the media abound with scholars who excel in self-presentation — just look how celebrity historian Simon Schama managed to fill the screen in his BBC series A History of Britain (2001), reducing the past to a mere background and extension of his own ego. Speak about history as autobiography!

However, the presence of the author in science communication isn’t restricted to the professional popularizers. ‘Real’ scientists too have become much more relaxed when it comes to flashing their egos in newspaper and magazine interviews. Many science magazines (like my favourite The Scientist) carry personal interviews with scientists. Websites and (especially) blogs are media that are tailor-made for scientists who are eager to present their science with a personal touch (see here for an earlier post on scientific self-presentation practice on the web). The genre of scientific autobiography too is having a revival with the publication of celebrity scientists’ memoirs, like James D. Watson’s (see here), Craig Venter’s (see here) and so forth.

The only kind of science communicators who seem to resist the self-presentational trend is apparently science museum curators. I still haven’t seen Jim expressing his ego through the Museum of the History of Science. Or perhaps I’m just blind — as Camilla pointed out earlier this year, cultural history exhibition curators employ rather subtle ways for sneaking themselves into their shows.

Have said it before, and am saying it again: In the Pipeline is a damned good science blog. Why? Because Derek Lowe (a bench chemist in a pharma company) tells us about laboratory practice in a way that makes you feel you understand what the craft is really about. The posts almost smell and sound like a lab itself.

Take, for example, today’s post about why chemists use vacuum devices so much and what havoc a wrongly applied water aspirator can create. Science studies people — not to mention science communicators and us science museum folks — have something to learn here. Science communication is very much about immediacy. That’s the skill Derek brings to his posts.

Here’s the audience gathering for the session on ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0′ organised by Gustav Holmberg for the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (PCST-10) held in Malmö a month ago (read more on our joint session blog).

And here’s my own paper for the event (responses are welcome, it needs a lot of improvement and re-writing before it can go to publication):

Abstract:
Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

And here’s the talk:

1. Those of you who have followed the field of science communication over the last decade have seen how earlier approaches to public understanding of science — usually based on what is often called the ‘deficit model’ — have repeatedly been challenged by demands for more participatory (dialogic, two-way, etc.) models for science communication.

2. In spite of these attempts to foster more participatory modes of engagement, however, the traditional one-way public understanding of science through institutionalized mass media, such as newspapers and magazines, radio and television, museums, etc., still constitutes the ruling paradigm, both in communication practice and in communication studies. Even the internet and web-based science communication is more often than not used for institutionalized one-way communication — a kind of digital broad-casting. More dialogic practices are still a largely utopian vision.

3. However, the possibility for developing more dialogic science communication practices has become much more realistic with the recent emergence of the participatory web, i.e., web platforms and services that aim to enhance user-driven content, easy and informal information sharing, and collaboration among users. Podcasting, image and movie content sharing services like Flickr and YouTube, social networking services like Facebook, wikis like Wikipedia, and not least blogging provide the means for a new flourishing of dialogic science communication.

4. In other words,  Continue Reading »

Participatory web media are increasingly being used for raising the medical scientific awareness of patients, caregivers and doctors (I guess this is the basic idea of ’formation of biocitizenship’). Latest example is a video channel launched Monday by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in co-operation with YouTube:

with “the goal of promoting earlier diagnoses and getting more patients into research studies and clinical trials” (quote from the press release).

The UCSF people are also experimenting with two other forms of online communication. To the right you can see their widget with links to the YouTube channel and their own site.

They have also created a ”Defeat Dementia”-group on Facebook.

Says the director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, Bruce Miller:

The YouTube channel and these other forms of online communications will enable us to engage a broad audience in the fight against these illnesses … One goal is to increase awareness about the earliest signs of some of the less well known diseases … If we can promote accurate diagnoses of patients, we can get them into clinical trials sooner

Looks like a very conscious strategic use of web media for the formation of medical scientific awareness. Expect to see much more of this kind from universities and research centers in the near future.

A few minutes ago — as I was sitting in my beautiful and quiet room in Schokofabrik (the best B&B in Berlin), struggling with my paper on art and science in medical museums for the SLSA-session on Friday – a mail dropped in announcing a lecture by science writer Phillip Ball on Thursday 10 July, which may be quite interesting for us in the medical museum business.

Phillip Ball lecture is occasioned by his receipt of the 2007 Dingle Prize for communicating the history of science and technology through his book Elegant solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005):

Scientists frequently talk about ‘beauty’ in their work, but rarely stop to think quite what they mean by it. What makes an experiment beautiful? Is it the clarity of the design? The elegance of the apparatus? The nature of the knowledge gained? There have been several recent attempts to identify ‘beautiful’ experiments in science, especially in physics. But Philip Ball argues that, not only is chemistry often neglected in these surveys, but it has its own special kinds of beauty, linked to the fact that it is a branch of science strongly tied to the art of making things: new molecules and materials, new smells and colours (my emphasis)

The making of new molecules and materials, smells and colours isn’t restricted to chemistry, of course. Same with biotechnology, tissue engineering, etc. The beauty of, say, a new bladder tissue should then lie, pace Bell, in its new materiality, smells and colours. Good point. Must read the book!

The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, at 7pm

(thanks to Patricia for the mail).

Three reflections on the synthetic life conference in Roskilde in August.

First, it would be great to bring the science/art perspective into the discussion. Art works inspired by the idea of synthetic/artificial life forms (like Reiner Matysik’s) will probably contribute to the production and circulation of popular doxa in the field, which will in turn speed up funding of the research effort.

Second, the Roskilde University based organising committe (Vincent F. Hendricks, Poul Holm, Frederik Stjernfelt, Anette Warring, Jeppe Dyre, Jacob Torfing, and John Gallagher) have backgrounds in philosophy, history, literary theory, physics, political science, and computer science—but nobody from the life sciences is taking part. Which raises the interesting question whether current research on synthetic life in general is actually advancing outside the framework of the life sciences?

Third reflection: if the synthetic life theme is pursued by computer scientists, nanoengineers and physical chemists, and is considered too ‘far out’ for mainstream life sciences, are we then actually witnessing a situation analogous to the rise of molecular biology 60-80 years ago? Historians of molecular biology have convincingly demonstrated that most biologists were oblivious to the questions raised by emergent molecular biology in the 1940s and 1950s, and that the coming of molecular biology (later molecular genetics, biotechnology etc) was to a large extent nurtured by people trained in physics. Is the synthetic life movement a kind of redux phage group?

Here’s the preliminary programme for the Third Annual Science & the Public Conference 2008 in Manchester Sat 21-Sun 22 June (Medical Museion is represented too):

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I wrote last week about the 3rd annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester, 21-22 June. I thought I had missed the dead-line, but it turned out they had extended it, so I sent in an abstract—and to my pleasure it’s just been accepted by the program committee. Here you are:

Science blogging, singularities, and the multitude of technoscience

Within the last couple of years, blogging has emerged as a new genre for STM communication. The number of medical blogs and science blogs is growing exponentially, and famous science blogs like The Daily Transcript, In the Pipeline, MedGadgets, and Partial Immobilizaton have tens of thousands of readers each week. How can the rise of science blogging as an alternative form of science com-munication be understood? Is it best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’, or does the science blogging phenomenon suggest other, more critically based, dichotomies? In this paper I will argue that science blogging is better understood in terms of Michael Hardt’s and Tony Negri’s conceptualisation of globalisation in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global technoscientific field entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively. Blogs can thus be intepreted as ’singularities’: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as ”an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Tormey, 2006). Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. Furthermore the current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is (at least now) one of criticism and resistance.

There are meetings on the public engagement with science, technology and medicine all over the place, with different scopes and in different formats. The big international meeting PCST-10 in Malmö in late June has an official science policy-making ring about it, although some of the individual papers and seminars (like this humble one) make their best to avoid the meainstream promotional approach that still dominates much of the science communication field.

For a more critical approach to the study of the public communication of technology and/or medicine, the third annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester 21-22 June is probably a better choice. The conference topics include:

Patients and publics in health services
Notions of expertise in the public
Public science and science policy
Technological development and the public
Science communication theory in practice
News and entertainment media
Science on the internet
Science, technology and medicine in museums
Public interest and ‘the public interest’

Unfortunately the deadline for submissions is overdue (14 March), but it will probably be possible to attend without a paper — see more on the conference website.

Emm Barnes has just summarised the ‘Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’ workshop in Manchester, Friday 7 March. Her report focuses on the relation between medical history scholarship and medical curatorship. Read it here. (For an earlier report, see here.)

At the occasion of the 60th birthday of Svante Lindqvist, Director of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm (and member of our Advisory Board), a one-day celebration seminar will be held on Friday 25 April. Under the heading ”Science on Stage”, John Heilbron, Tore Frängsmyr, Paolo Galuzzi, Sven Widmalm, Jim Bennett, and Kjell Espmark will raise questions about the role of science in public life and the relation between science, theatre and music, and their talks will be interspersed by music and theatre performances. Access is restricted to registered participants—contact Ulf Larsson, ulf@nobel.se, before April 14. Full program (in Swedish) below:
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Swedish scholarly blogging pioneer Gustav Holmberg (Det Perfekta Tomrummet), popular science blogger Malin Sandström (Vetenskapsnytt) and myself (part of the Biomedicine on Display blog team) have just got our session proposal titled “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0″ accepted as a seminar at the 10th conference of The International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-10) in Malmö-Lund, 23-27 June 2008.

Here’s the session abstract and our individual abstracts:

Session abstract: “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0″

In parallel with calls for more public and democratic involvement with science and technology, the theoretical and in some cases empirical basis for studies of science communication has changed. Earlier studies focused on how the cognitive content of science is being communicated to nonexperts. Studies of the mutual interaction between scientists and the larger population (’public engagement with science’), have shown examples of the co-production of cultural understandings of science. Another recent development has been seen on the web, where new technologies facilitating easier engagement (’web2.0′, ’social media’) have enjoyed a wide popularity for years. These technologies are an integrated part of a new landscape of communication, hitherto quite understudied in the literature. This session consists of a three studies that look at the intersection of science and the public on the web.

Gustav Holmberg (Research Policy Institute, University of Lund): “A study of the distributed computing community Folding@home“.

Computer simulation and large-scale data analysis used to be the province of scientists proper. Distributed computing is a kind of public engagement with science that involves large numbers of participants. The worldwide user-base of citizens interested in donating computer power to proteomics and bioastronomy are modern examples of the mutual interaction between scientists and nonscientists. This paper will look into questions such as why people decide to collaborate in the distributed computing projects and analyze the discourse surrounding bioastronomy and proteomics. It will look at how ideas about protein dynamics and bioastronomy are articulated through various participatory platforms: weblogs, computer fora, wikis, YouTube videos and the Folding@home software. The paper also analyses the flow of skills from subsets of the user pool into the core of the distributed computing project, suggesting that a group of users have knowledge about the intricacies of software technologies that have been useful in the evolution of the Folding@home project.

Malin Sandström (Computational Biology and Neurocomputing, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm): “Beyond the “cool stuff”: science blogging as a democratic tool”.

Traditionally, media’s reporting of non-medical science rests on small numbers of articles published in a few major journals; with a heavy emphasis on the “cool stuff” and framed in ways that are poorly adapted to science reporting. The common use of the scientist as an impersonal expert does little to foster interaction between science and the public. In contrast, blogging leaves the choice in the hands of the bloggers, who can decide for themselves what to say, how and when. Blogs are by their nature personal and interactive, making the medium an attractive platform for contact between scientists and laymen. Outside of the scientific world, access to published research is very limited: few people can afford expensive journal subscriptions and don’t have the language skills required. Scientists blogging in their native language can do much to alleviate this gap. Furthermore, science blogging – especially interactions between bloggers - can incorporate and spread other underreported fundamentals of the research process, such as patterns of reasoning.

Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen): “Science blogging between Empire and Multitude”.

Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

Ours will be one of 25 seminars in all; in addition there will be a number of parallell sessions with individual papers. So we are looking forward to three very busy days about publication communication with science and technology in late June. I’m glad there is a bridge over the Øresund now; it’s only an hour’s train ride from Valby to the conference venue in Malmö.

PS: For some peculiar reason my paper above in the individual abstract file has been assigned to a Zhimin Zhang — alas this is not my Chinese avatar but a mistake from the side of the organisers :-)

The programme for the 5th European conference of The Society for Literature, Science and Arts (SLSA) in Berlin, 2-8 June—on ”Figurations of Knowledge”—is now available on-line.

The programme committee has not only put together an unusually rich, varied and exciting carneval of presentations which (in my humble opinion) leaves the usual social studies of science meetings organised by EASST and 4S in the desert of oblivion. It has also developed its own colour-happy program aesthetics:

Anyway, it’s not for coloro-political reasons that Medical Museion is participating with/in two sessions:

On Wednesday 4 June, Jan Eric Olsén is organising a session titled ”Recent Biomedicine and Vitality” with papers by Sniff Nexø (”A matter of disposal: Enacting aborted foetuses in hospitals”), Hanne Jessen (”Vitality of a scientific model: The coming into being and trajectory of a new laboratory animal”), Susanne Bauer (”Risk assessment software and the biopolitics of prevention”), and himself (”Life struggles and the invaded body”). See their abstracts here.

Two days later, on Friday 6 June, I will give my paper on ”Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together” in the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences”, organised by Ingeborg Reichle.

There is a plethora of tickling offers on this year’s program and we are in heavy competition for hundreds of SLSA souls. (Not to mention the sad fact that one of the papers I’d really love to hear, viz., Matthias Bruhn’s ”Life in layers. Art history of microtome”, is simultaneous with my own talk :-). That aside, the SLSA meeting in Berlin promises to become the event of the year for all science, technology and medical museum faculty or staff members who wish to expand their horizon. Dead-line for registration (details here) is 30 April.