Biomedicine on Display

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish live in the Cuyuni and get a good estimate of their abundance. After two weeks of fishing, the team had more than 5.000 specimens in their nets. But then trouble came:

“In order to get the fish out of the country,” says Bloom, “we needed an accurate count of each species.” The team’s research permit required them to report this information to the Guyanese government. “We couldn’t leave the country until we turned over our data to the authorities.” Time was of the essence, as Sidlauskas, Bloom and OSU graduate student Whit Bronaugh had to return to North America as soon as possible. But how could a handful of people possibly identify 5,000 fish in just a few days?

The answer became facebook. A Ph.D –student suggested uploading the fish to facebook, and within 24 hours the 5.000 fish had been identified with the help of a network of ichthyologically-minded friends.

This story made me think of the points that Andy Clark makes in his book Supersizing the Mind – Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension about the functioning of what he calls the extended mind. Facebook and other social web media has the same potentials as other tools in our cognitive environment -  like pens, smartphones, computers, fingers or calculators – to become part of our extended mind. And a powerful one at that, given the distributed power of a network of that size.  This raises serious questions about how social web media will influence the way our extended minds work. How will it impact scientific production and what new forms of life will it produce? Crowd sourcing certainly opens for scientific experimentation in new and interesting ways – www.fold.it is one of my favourite examples.

I’m getting more and more email-invitations to join the brand new tool shtyle.fm from people I trust (including Pnina). I’ve searched for some serious review of it, but cannot really find any. I don’t like logging in to sites with virtually non-exiting information about them. Can anyone help me out here?

As a newcomer to a social networking service called Facebook (maybe, you’ve heard about it?), I’m intrigued by the fact that so many profile face images show only parts of the face. In this random selection of profile images displayed when I click ”People You May Know“, 50% show part-faces only:

It seems to be a fairly new fashion (maybe a couple of years old). Does it mean “I’m not so naïve that I believe one can present anything but a partial personality on Facebook”? Partial faces, partial friends. Or is it a general trend in photography these days?

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not?

All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered?

Mitch Joel (TwistImage) believes so (March 6), and I think he has a good argument.  If you think about how people find and connect to brands, they don’t necessarily do so through Google or other search engines anymore: “In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that website is about to become extinct. But it means that institutional branding is much more than one, big and centralized website:  “it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities”. And even if institutions use microblogging and other platforms, they usually think about them as instruments to drive people back to their own, controlled, website: “The truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it”.

Worth some thought.

I’m thrilled by the fact that an historian of medicine (Richard Barnett of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge) will chair a panel debate on health care in the digital age (taking place in Cambridge, UK, on Thursday) — it sustains the tendency that historians of medicine are becoming more engaged in contemporary debates about the health care system; and almost always for the better.

Titled ‘Saved by SMS’, the panel debate is about a worldwide healthcare system in crisis and the future prospects of bringing health care practitioners and patients into the digital information age:

From tracking malaria drugs in the developing world by SMS, sharing information about disease outbreaks via social networking sites, to empowering patients and doctors to share diagnosis and treatment ideas, significant changes to the digital and social infrastructure of the global healthcare system could revolutionise the way we look after own health, and other peoples.

Bertalan Meskó (Science Roll) and others have been instrumental in putting medicine 2.0 on the agenda. Historians of medicine and medical museum could play a much more active role in these crucial discussions. The fact that Richard Barnett will chair the meeting on Thursday is a good sign — hopefully he will also infuse some historical perspective into the discussion.

Recently I announced a quiz to get more information about a historical syringe that a couple of friends had bought for me. This quiz was far from easy since we had no information on the syringe whatsoever. Medical Museion’s guest researcher and former chief physician Sven Erik Hansen was the first to make a suggestion on our Danish blog — he thought it might had been be used to treat haemorrhoids.

Sven Erik’s was a qualified guess, but it seems like the area of expertise that we are dealing with here is rather odontology. Thomas put a query about the syringe on rete, the mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments, and immediately received some very interesting answers. First out was Frank Manasek: 

This type of syringe was common in dentistry or in minor surgery where local anesthetics (such as lidocaine) would be used. Later syringes of this style were designed to use disposable ampoules of anesthetic, and disposable needles. (This one predates both.) The needle on this example is long, suggesting its use in mandibular blocks.

Following Franks lead Alistair Kwan elaborated:

I was just about to write almost the same thing. The last time I asked a dentist about the move away from these, he said that patients are more scared of them because they are big and shiny, and harder to
keep out of sight — convenience and cost of disposables did not play into his decision, though they are primary issues in debates between surgeons, surgical nurses and hospital administrators.

If you compare with today’s common disposables, the plunger design involves a different handhold that increases control through tight spaces and increases pressure on the contents. If you try them out, you can experience how the palm-grip hold is much less subject to little wobbles in the finger and thumb joints. (A high-stability grip for the disposables is to wrap them in all four fingers of a fist, which limits where you can work.)

You can also experience how the palm-grip hold and the lighter two-finger hold are suited to injecting targets at different heights and orientations. You cannot comfortably inject straight down with the
palm grip hold unless you are leaning right over the patient. But your forearm is positioned for easy aiming sideways or forwards or upwards, as into the nerves in the mandibular joint.

For times when you want a pistol or palm grip (e.g. in veterinary medicine), there are handles for disposable syringes. The handles derive from earlier syringes in which they were inbuilt. In recent years (decades?) they have simply had the syringe removed, leaving a hollow or brackets in which to insert a disposable. Similarly with ring grips, now marketed for use by non-medical people with frail hands who need to administer to themselves or family members, and for cake decorating.

Easy disassembly makes cleaning easier but it sometimes owes more to manufacturing processes than concern for scrubbing and autoclaving. A device like this is often cheaper to mass-produce from standard stock than by building all components from scratch. If it goes together easily, it often follows that it comes apart easily as well. Today’s one-way barbed fasteners and sonic welders have of course
cancelled that rule.

Now what began as an artefact without a history suddenly had spawned a fascinating insight into the world of dentistry. Peter Morris continued (still on the rete list):

These syringes are still in very common use by dentists in the UK. I don’t recognise the disposables mentioned by Alistair. Personally I always try to avoid the jab if I can which provokes friction between me and the dentist. I would say the needle is a little bit thicker than it appears in the photograph, but it may just be a matter of the scale of the photograph (and the psychological effect of it going into your mouth). A quick look on the web throws up JS Dental Manufacturing Inc of Ridgefield Connecticut. I cannot find out how long it has been in business but it seems well established.

And back to Alistair:

I should clarify a bit though: the common disposables are less stable than the big dental model when used in the mouth owing to how they  have to be held. What I originally wrote (in a low-energy moment at the end of work yesterday) was unclear, though I’m sure that your exhibit writers will have no trouble doing better. (I’m now at the start of the day so am more critical of what I write!)

And that critical attitude might be what made Alistair return with one last comment:

It might also be worth indicating that some anaesthesia techniques begin with aspirating by withdrawing the plunger to suck a little on the tissue that the needle has entered. This tests whether you are in the right place: the colour of the liquid obtained indicates the extent of blood supply. If you get blood, you know to withdraw the needle and start again. (I find needle-guiding techniques very clever. Other common rules are to locate external markers for guidance, and to hit bone or a sudden resistance change as an indicator for depth. Some markers for mandibular anaesthesia are in the ear which is why the dentist puts his finger there — as target to aim for — while inserting the needle.)

Aspiration is reflected in some plunger handles: they have a ring for the thumb.

It’s more difficult to aspirate with pistol-grip and palm-grip syringes because pulling and pushing require different holds. That may entail having an assistant steady the patient’s head.

Following Peter’s post, I had a quick look at some on-line catalogues and saw that both metal and disposable plastic syringes are sold by dental equipment suppliers.

So thanks to our fellow histrorians and curators on the rete list, we’ve been able to construct a much more detailed curatorial story about the syringe than I ever imagined when I first posted the original quiz.

And so we need a winner. The stern panel of judges (who will remain anonymous) has decided to a name Alistair Kwan the winner. So Alistair, whenever you come to Copenhagen, please visit us here at Medical Museion and claim your prize.

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.

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?

There are several kinds of cooperations between sci-med-tech museums, and I’m not particularly critical of any of them (except one). But I’m nevertheless waiting for someone to take the initiative to a SciMedTechMusGang.

I’m thinking of something analogous to the BioGang — “an informal, distributed collection of geeky life scientists who have come together to try and think of cool problems and ideas that can be solved collaboratively”. Neil Saunders characterizes a biogang as a group with ”lack of respect for institutional boundaries and restrictions”.

Someone might say that sci-med-tech museum people aren’t geeky enough, or that we are not confronted with any particularly cool problems, or that the fact that we work in very stable institutions will usually make us skeptical to people of lack respect for institutional boundaries.

But that aside, I believe that the creation of new interesting future sci-med-tech museum practices— especially practices on the border between physical museums and web solutions — would benefit from a SciMedTechMusGang.

The Director’s office of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen announced today that the museum will put all its collections on Twitter.

Hundreds of thousands of material artefacts (from electron microscopes to conjoined twins in pickles), tens of thousands of medical historical images, and hundreds of shelf meters of archival documents will be compressed, catalogued and publicly communicated in the Twitter format.

“This is a revolution in museum collection management”, says the Director of Medical Museion, Thomas Söderqvist. “We have considered a number of systems for putting our rich medical historical collections online — but they were either too complicated, or too expensive. Twitter solves all our problems”. 

Putting collections on Twitter is simple. Every morning, the Head of Collections, Ion Meyer, will distribute boxes full of artefacts — of all sizes, material composition and age — among the members of staff. After logging into their Twitter accounts, staff will then spend the day ploughing through the boxes and curating the objects in whatever order they are picked up. “We call this stream-of-consciousness-curating”, says Thomas Söderqvist: “It gives the necessary subjective and personal touch to the curatorial work”.

Each item will be described in 140 characters, no more, no less. ”This gives an enormous advantage to conventional online cataloguing systems”, explains senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen, who is responsible for new acquisitions. “A lancet gets 140 characters, and so does a PET scanner. In this way all instruments are made equal. This is huge step towards a more democratic acquisition policy”:

Outreach officer Bente Vinge Pedersen sees enormous future possibilities for public engagement with medicine: ”The lack of indexing and tagging systems will make a search in our Twitter catalogue so much more exciting”, she says. “It will enhance the surprise effect that all museums want to give their online visitors. When you follow the stream of one of our staff twitters, you will come across the most unexpected items. First a gene chip from 2005, then a syphilitic skull from the 18th century”.

Twittering the collections is a major contribution to Medical Museion’s ambition to foster a sense of immediacy and presence in the public’s relation to the museum collections. Postdoc Jan Eric Olsén sees the decision to go on Twitter as a fantastic opportunity to develop the visual and haptic dimensions of the museum experience: ”We all want to touch and gently caress museum objects”, he explains: ”Twitter could be turned into a medium for enhancing that special IRL feeling: the smell and the taste of medical objects and especially the tactile experience of being in immediate touch with the physical world around us”.

At today’s staff meeting there was widespread enthusiasm over the initiative. ”This is an alternative to old-fashioned crowdsourcing and other outdated museum 2.0 social technologies”, said Monica Lambert, who is responsible for organizing the visitor flow to the museum. “We expect the Multitude to tweet back”, she added: ”All visitors will have to show a tweet on their iPhone to prove that they have made a contribution to our collection management”.

Administrator Carsten Holt was enthusiastic too. He is now contemplating to put the budget for 2009 on Twitter, thereby reducing the need for too many numbers. “140 characters is a great opportunity to reduce our budget to the essentials”, he tweeted back.

Head of Exhibitions, Camilla Mordhorst, who will soon leave Medical Museion for a new position as Head of Public Outreach in the Copenhagen City Museum, says she too intends to implement Twitter as a core museum technology, and thereby turn the venerable old city museum into a global village gossip park.

On Thursday 1 April, 2010, Medical Museion’s new Twitter-based collection outreach system will be evaluated by the museum’s international Advisory Board (on Twitter of course).

Our colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (in DC) are right now experiencing a dramatically increasing traffic from all over the world to their unofficial Repository of Bottled Monsters blog. From about 100 views a day to 300 views an hour last week.

The reason for this stunning outreach success is that Wired.com and many other websites have spread the news about the NMHM staff’s work to put the museum’s picture archive on Flickr. In a few week’s time, more than half a million Flickr users have seen the exquisite collection of images, especially of American war medicine.

The US Army (which owns NMHM) are imposing a general ban on letting its employees and institutions have access to Flickr (and other social network sites), so the NMHM staff decided to put the pictures on Flickr from their home computers in their spare time.

Many other institutions already do this (in their working hours :-). For example the Smithsonian has a great photostream on Flickr Commons. So do Powerhouse, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Swedish National Heritage Board (two weeks ago), and many others. But what the NMHM example shows better than these is that a presence on the Commons can make a small institution and its blog blossom.

Here at Medical Museion we have so far been somewhat reluctant to think in these terms, not only because it’s a big and expensive operation to put our rich image archive online, but also because we are already getting some direly needed income from selling images.

But maybe we should put the image collection online for free? We will miss a few thousand DKK a year in monetary revenues, that’s right. But the good-will revenue from posting them in the public space, for example, under a Creative Commons license, will probably be much higher — and in the long run it might, as a side-effect, increase our overall revenues.