Biomedicine on Display

Medical Museion is on Facebook. Not because because we love it, but because we follow the siren calls of other museums that believe they need this part of the social media spectrum to be visisble online.

Personally, I just hate Facebook. It’s not just the sneaky way they treat their customers (see the long list of their objectionable activities here), it’s also their business idea — to commercialise the need of human social interaction — which turns me off. For a short period I had a profile on it but left when I realised Facebook has effectively made the word ‘friend’ devoid of any useful meaning.

Micah White suggests that earlier protests against Facebook (like the outrage against the Beacon system) were made under the assumption that it was a cool hangout community that could be changed from the inside.

But with the new ’social plug-in’-system that gives commercial websites access to your personal information through ’I like’-buttons this myth is about to be shattered. White describes it as a sinister reinvention of Beacon. The bottom line is that Facebook is about to cash in its former reputation as a hip online social medium and is turning into just another MySpace.

Ready for some digital intoxication again:

Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate student in the Department of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida has made a social media museum research survey which says something about how (American) museums intend to and actually use social web media.

Facebook is considered the most effective medium, with Twitter on a second place. Typical time spent is 1-2 staff members for an average of 45 minutes a day. Fletcher’s summary of the results is that:

American museums believe that social media are important but are not currently using it for high levels of dialogic engagement. For the moment, museums are mostly involved with one-way communication strategies using mostly Facebook and Twitter to focus on event listing, reminders, reaching larger or newer audiences, and promotional messaging. However there does seem to be some evidence to suggest that museums are trying to increase their use of social media for more two-way and multi-way communication strategies.

Sounds pretty plausible, also for European ears.

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).

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science.

As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in the world today. Financial crisis, atomic weapon threats and global warming  aside — the rapid technical development in biology and biomedicine raises some pretty hefty social, political and ethical questions which we, as a museum, can hardly avoid dealing with if we want to stay just minimally atuned to the world around us.

Take the issue of synthetic biology. Forget about the potentials benefits and risks of stem cell biology, nanotech, gene therapy, and so forth. Synthetic biology — the design and construction of new biological systems not found in nature, for example, constructing living cells from simple molecules (proto-cells); creating new biological systems based on biochemical pathways not found in nature; etc — is potentially more powerful, not least for medical therapy and human enhancement. 

Is it safe and secure? Well, of course it isn’t! In yesterday’s issue of Public Service Review: Science and Technology, Markus Schmidt, who leads the SYNBIOSAFE project at the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management, raises some of the problems involved in the development of synthetic biology:

With the availability of genetic sequence information available on the internet and outsourcing of DNA synthesis to specialised synthesis companies, we are facing the risk that some person with malicious intents might place an order for pathogenic genes.

But there is always two sides to new technologies. In the future, more and more people will probably be able to construct new biological systems (read: democratic technology). Already, the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston invites students from all over the world to construct new biologies. And there are several DIY biotech groups who want to get the techne out of the laboratory, to bring it to the people. Such democratisation of synthetic biology might, as Schmidt rightly observes, lead to a creative revolution similar to that we have seen in the computer industry and the internet. Imagine synthbio 2.0 — love it or hate it.

Schmidt’s institute is only the last in a row of initiatives to discuss the safety and the political, governance and ethical issues involved in synthetic biology. Two years ago a report from the J. Craig Venter Institute discussed the governance problems associated with synthetic biology, and last year a report from the International Association of Synthetic Biology proposed a number of technical solutions for improved biosecurity. And there are several other initiatives around — enough to fill the agenda of a future-looking medical museum.

Schmidt’s analysis is expanded in M. Schmidt, A. Kelle, A. Ganguli-Mitra and H. de Vriend, eds., Synthetic Biology: The technoscience and its societal consequences (2009); there is also a 55 min video here: SYNBIOSAFE: Synthetic biology and its social and ethical implications.

Last week, Computerworld carried an interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that in 30 or 40 years from now nanomachines will travel through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases:

The full realization of nanobots will basically eliminate biological disease and aging. I think we’ll see widespread use in 20 years of [nanotech] devices that perform certain functions for us. In 30 or 40 years, we will overcome disease and aging. The nanobots will scout out organs and cells that need repairs and simply fix them. It will lead to profound extensions of our health and longevity

What’s interesting is not whether the prognosis is right or wrong, naïve or realistic. Like all med-tech forecasts it probably better reflects our own time than it predicts the future.

What’s interesting is that it is said by Kurzweil. Or more generally speaking: Much forecasting about health and longevity comes from people in the computer and IT world, whereas medical doctors rarely indulge in such frivolous mental activities (see also the earlier ‘What makes the human enhancement movement tick?’ post). Why are IT people more wedded to the idea of enhancement and longevity than medical and health scientists are?

Rose Sherman (Director of Enterprise Technology at the Minnesota Historical Society) is circulating a survey about how museums are engaging their communities through social media technologies — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

Rose asks a lot of relevant questions, like:

• How frequently, on average, are your social media web sites updated?
• What function(s) in your organization has staff assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• What function in your organization is primarily responsible for actively using social media tools to engage communities?
• On average, how many hours per week do staff spend on actively using social media tools to engage communities, e.g. they Tweet, update Facebook pages, post photos to Flickr, post videos to YouTube, etc. ?
• Do you have a full time position(s) assigned to engaging with your social media networks?
• Do you have a social media policy? (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook?

Thought-provoking questions which remind me that the function of such surveys is sometimes to make you aware of what you haven’t done yet. A small museum like ours is particularly provoked by questions like “How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?”.  I would rather have preferred: “How many infinitesimal part time equivalents …”.

So we’ve got lots to do on the social web media side.

You can fill in the survey here.

In an interview for the Danish daily Information about his new book The Politics of Climate Change — which is scheduled for publication in May, with laudatory pre-blurbs by Martin Rees, Ulrich Bech and Bill Clinton on Amazon.com — British sociologist Anthony Giddens reminds us that Martin Luther King famously said ‘I have a dream’, not ‘I have a nightmare’. In other words: dystopian thinking is not a good basis for political action.

I guess he’s basically right. There is much that supports the idea that climate policy changes will be served better by what Giddens (1990) called ‘realistic utopianism’ than by fear scenarios (even though critical and negative scenarios sometimes are necessary stepping stones towards more positive agendas).

However, it makes me wonder: could the same reasoning be applied to the way we talk about biomedicine and medical technology?

I’m asking because almost everything I have read about biomedical and medical technology policy in books and articles by social scientists and humanities scholars over the last decades has been guided by what one could call a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion‘.

The scholarly literature is carried by a strong, mostly unexplicit, undercurrent of skepticism and negative criticism. Biomedicine and medical technology invariably poses ethical, political and social ‘problems’ and ’challenges’ — rarely opportunities, possibilities or means for liberation. Social science and humanities scholars writing about the future of biomedicine and medical technology have nightmares, rarely dreams.

I guess the ubiquity of this critical and negative scholarship could be understood as a kind of collective gut reaction against the commonplace (and often pretty naïve) scenarios of a bright biomedical and medicotechnological future envisioned by scientists and engineers. The biotech revolution has to a large degree been carried by enthusiastic utopianism. Pharma websites are cluttered with pictures of happy children playing on lush green meadows with beautiful mothers and benevolent-looking grandpas in the background.

So I understand the need for a balance. But why do we have to choose between naïve scientific and corporate enthusiasm on the one hand and academic skepticism on the other? Why is it so difficult for social science and humanities scholars to develop a more ‘realistic utopianism’ with respect to the future development of biomedicine and medical technology?

At the moment, academic designers (like Suzanne Lee) seem to be more upbeat than social scientists and humanities scholars. Could we learn from the attitude of bio-designers and bioartists to avoid the quagmire of negative scenarios?