Biomedicine on Display

The Hybrid Art Science Networking Association, which is led by Leeds-based artist Paul Digby and Sheffield-based scientist and artist Lizz Tuckerman, enables artists and scientists of all disciplines to meet, and encourages cross-disciplinary interaction. It is supported by Arts Council England, Yorkshire.

The Hybrid Art and Science Exhibition was held in various locations around Sheffield. My drawing was part of a collection of work on display at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery.

The piece selected for the exhibition is called ‘Bacteria Drawing’ and was made in May 2009. The drawing is a collaborative piece and is constructed from 22 drawings which form one large piece. It is about 170 cm in height, approximately150 cm approx wide and spreads about 170 cm along the floor out from the wall.

The drawing was made in Lisbon in May 2009 and is an outcome of my involvement in an invited residential project with Drawing Spaces at Fábrica Braço de Prata in conjunction with the Gulbenkian Institute of Science.

Over the last ten years my research has been created in the lab or dissection room rather than in the traditional setting of the artists’ studio. As a way to bring the lab into the gallery and to demonstrate the role of drawing, I allowed bacteria to grow on Petri dishes left in the project/gallery space at Fábrica Braço de Prata.

Using a microscope and drawing attachment, I invited members of the public to come and draw the bacteria they saw when looking down the microscope. The bacteria growing was formed from the breath of those who walked in and out of the project/gallery space. The participants were effectively drawing their own breath. Therefore they contributed both to the existence of the object they observed and to the method of revealing their continuous insights and understanding of their encounters with this phenomenon.

Using a drawing attachment on the microscope which allowed them to look down the microscope and see the bacteria whilst simultaneously seeing a projected image of their own hand holding the pencil meant they were effectively ‘tracing’ what they saw directly onto paper. They engaged with something that would normally repel them and through the activity of drawing, they saw the beauty and detail in bacteria. Rather than being concerned with the mechanics of making a drawing, they concentrated on the activity of actually looking, something we all frequently forget to do.

Joining together all the drawings made, the piece ‘Bacteria Drawing’ grew and developed collaboratively, paralleling the growth of the actual bacteria itself.

This drawing brought about further evidence of how important the activity of drawing is to understanding and dignifying observed subjects. The public saw the beauty of the unfamiliar by drawing. The project showed that drawing is not mere documentation but is about participation. This participation is embodied in the relationships that develop between artist and object and that the object observed is dignified through the respect and understanding gained in the activity of drawing.

As Bente writes on our Danish blog (Museionblog), we thought at first that Sven Erik Hansen (former consultant rheumatologist, now guest researcher here at Medical Museion) had a fit of belated Xmas nostalgia when he hanged this ’thing’ made of coloured gift wrappage ribbons in our lunch room earlier today.

But it’s actually more museum-related than we first thought. Turned out it’s a play on one of the central images involved in the preparation phase we’re in right now for the next show in our external exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences.

 We — i.e. Sven Erik, Adam Bencard, Bente Vinge Pedersen and myself — have decided that the exhibition (to be opened in October) shall be a reflection on some of the central aspects of current research on the relation between obesity and type-2 diabetes.

We have started reading some of the scientific literature on G-proteins and G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR, not be confused with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution :-), which play a crucial role in these and many other metabolic processes.

Sven Erik’s coloured ribbon decoration is a spontaneously made simple model of such a GPCR receptor. Here’s a more scientifically accurate one:

(from here)

I’m not suggesting that we shall aim for a low-budget exhibition. But it reminds me that sometimes you don’t need fancy 3D-software to make evocative molecular models.

We’ll get back with more news about the progress of the exhibition in the next couple of months.

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.

Seed is running a series of monthly portraits of workbenches of interesting people (like Oliver Sacks, a renowned bat expert, an industrial designer, etc.)

The latest portrait, published in yesterday’s online issue, is the lab bench of Martin Chalfie, one of the three who won a medical Nobel last year for the discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP).

The image on seedmagazine.com is interactive (of course) — that is, you can blow up details with accompanying texts.

Nifty, but …. what struck me when I first saw the image was that Chalfie’s lab bench doesn’t look authentic. Take a look at the magnified version below — it is way too neat and tidy! It looks like the photographer has cleaned up and arranged everything in orderly fashion before shooting the image.

Then I read the caption to the small glass bottles detail on the shelf above the microscope — it explains why:

I have to admit, I haven’t done a lot of experiments recently. I spend most of my time in my office next door, working on papers or talking with post-docs about their studies.

That’s the fate of most senior scientists — and Seed doesn’t seem to have realised that this fact corrupts the authenticity of the image. The difference between a used and not-so-much used lab bench is subtle. But it is there. Maybe they could have presented it as ‘the dead workbench of Martin Chalfie’ instead.

So, please, in the forthcoming issues, let’s get some images of lab workbenches that reflect some real lively untidy 24/7 lab work.

(thanks to Bertalan Meskó for the tip about Seed’s article; that said, however, Bertalan wrongly, in my view, believes that the image ”lets you look behind the scenes of the workbench of a famous and successful scientist”. That’s exactly what it does not — it’s lets you see pure surface, no behind.)

The Brain Observatory at UCSD is right now showing the slicing of the brain of an amnesic patient into histological sections on streaming video.

The whole brain of the dead patient (called H.M.) was frozen to -40C and is now being sectioned in a whole-organ microtome during one continuous session that they expect will last about 30 hours. After sectioning the brain they will do ex vivo MRI and so called blockface imaging, and will of course store all the histological sections. The whole sectioning process is streamed on video and will end later today. Watch the live video here.

This is as far as they came at 9.30 am today when I made a screen-dump:

Fascinating histology live!

(thanks to Alex for the tip)

Is it really the case that almost all museum exhibitions dealing with medical themes these days are displaying DNA-images and colourful neuroscanning pictures?

Well, at least this is what the organisers of a meeting in Dresden next April seem to be suggesting. I think they are exaggerating a bit :-). But that said, the theme of the meeting — KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen [contemporary bodies, new technologies, new collections] — is right on the spot.

The point of departure for the meeting — jointly organised by Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin and Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden — is that the colonisation of the body by means of the life sciences has resulted in a gradual retreat from the immediately visible and material body.

An invisible biomedical body

The concepts, models and findings of contemporary biomedicine defy immediate visualisation, collecting and conservation. Therefore museums like Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, which was founded with the purpose of displaying the body, find themselves in an entirely new situation.

I couldn’t agree more — this is actually the central point in the paper on biomedicine as a challenge to museums that Adam, Camilla and I have just published. So we have every reason to participate (if we can: the meeting language is German and my German is rusty at best :-).

Rusty or not — it’s worth participating, because the meeting will address three types of timely questions for medical museums: first, the history of the techniques, tools and concepts by means of which the human body has been cut, dissected, interpreted and displayed; second, whether current biomedicine has made the body immaterial; and third, how the new biomedical body affects museum collection practices.

The meeting takes place 22-24 April next year. Read the call for papers here. If you want to participate, send a note to Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, tagungszentrum@dhmd.de, or contact one of the four organisers: Sandra Mühlenberend (sandra.muehlenberend@dhmd.de), Susanne Roeßiger (susanne.roessiger@dhmd.de), Uta Kornmeier (kornmeier@zfl-berlin.org or Katrin Solhdju (solhdju@zfl-berlin.org).

Curators in medical museums that plan to get involved with the powerful practices of contemporary biomedical visualization (we all do, don’t we?) might learn something from the announced ‘Biomedical Visualisations and Society’ seminar and workshop series at the University of Warwick Medical School next spring with the aim 

• to critically explore the social and political implications of biomedical imaging
• to gain technical knowledge of visualisation
• to foster collaboration and networking between early-career researchers

Each of the four two-day workshop will combine a key-note lecture, time for discussion and an opportunity to engage with visualisation in practice. What distingushes this seminar series from many others is exactly the combination of theory and practical approaches.

• The Transparent body? Diagnostic Radiology, 26-27 January 2010. Keynote Speaker: Kelly Joyce, College of William and Mary, VA, USA. Includes a guided visit to the radiology department of the local hospital with Richard Wellings, Consultant Radiologist, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire.
• Anatomical Bodies: Plastinated Prosections in Medical Education, 13-14 April 2010. Keynote speaker: Maryon McDonald, University of Cambridge, UK. Includes an introduction to anatomy using plastinated body parts, by Peter Abrahams, Professor of Anatomy, University of Warwick.
• Virtual Reality and its Application to Healthcare, 24-25 May 2010. Keynote Speaker: Rachel Prentice, Cornell University, USA. Includes a visit to the Digital Lab, University of Warwick, guided by Professor Vinesh Raja.
• 3D Foetal Ultrasound, 6-7 July 2010. Keynote Speaker: Lisa M. Mitchell, University of Victoria, Canada Includes a visit to 4D scan provider ‘Babybond’, with company director Jan Steward.

The only thing that troubles me about this initiative is that the workshop/seminar website is so visually challenged. I mean, this is a scholarly field with plenty of first-class visual material — and then the website that is supposed to lure postgrad students to attend the workshops looks like it’s competing for the UKPVB (UK prize for visual boredom). Maybe they should have added an aim about tthe aesthetic implications as well :-)

Here are some images from last month’s show with Phillip Warnell swallowing a pill camera in Medical Museion’s anatomical theatre:

See more images here (the event was originally announced here).

(thanks to Bente who published the images on our Danish blog the other day)

Here’s an innovative way of putting biomedicine on display:

As Vanessa (Street Anatomy) says,

the menstrual cycle has never looked so exciting! [...] Perfect for explaining the menstrual cycle for the first time to a young girl … or to a 26-year-old.  I had no idea I went through a luteal lunacy!

Created by I Heart Guts!, “the brainchild of an anatomically obsessed illustrator who loves internal organs and all they do”.

Maybe the next generation of the classic biochemical pathways wall charts could learn a lesson or two — or better, I Heart Guts could make a version of:

(click here for a larger version)

I have often been amazed by the steps taken to prevent people from smoking and I have found two gadgets to keep people from the habit quite fascinating: A year’s worth of tar and Smoking Sue.

It now seems that the Danish government wants to play hardball. For quite some time smokers have been used to having warning signs on packages stating that cigarettes are dangerous and potentially deadly. I find it surprising to what extent even the size and font of the letters of the warning are regulated by law. Here’s a quote from § 10:”The general warning […] must cover 30 pct. of the surface of the relevant side.” And a bit further down in § 11, part 1: “Printed in black, bold characters in font Helvetia on white background.” Here taken from the Danish law regulating tobacco.

There is just something fascinating about public health in the language of bureaucrats. One can imagine how the fight over the exact percentage has been waged and a compromise made.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the Danish government has just proposed putting images on cigarette packages. Pictures that show what smoking will do to you. And they are quite nasty as one can see from this article in the Danish newspaper Politiken. I know that this is practised in other countries also (take a look at these from Brazil but be warned – they are really disgusting), but I’m really in doubt as to the effect of these images. Do they really work?

When I was a student, announcement boards — with flyers for conferences, graduate courses, seminars, new books etc. — were centrepieces in the hallways of Academia.

In many departments they still are. Like this well-groomed one in the Dept of Philosophy at the University of Leeds (where I visited to give two talks last May).

But with all these emerging new social web media, will the academic announcement board have a future?

Well, maybe not if you think in terms of the board above. Seen without people in front of it, it could as well be substituted with a Facebook dashboard. But what about this:

(from here)

This image (from the University of Kaunas, Lithuania) illustrates the fact that a physical announcement board allows you to touch the news of the academic world, even touch them together. Touching news together (even if it’s news in text and image format) is an entirely different social experience than viewing the news on a screen.

As some of you may have noticed, the online Image & Video Library of The American Society for Cell Biology has been closed since February, and nobody knew whether it would be opened again.

Last Thursday the ACSB announced, however, that the site will be re-opened and developed further by means of a $2,5 million ’stimulus grant’ from the NIH (one of the consequences of the new Obama administration).

According to ACSB’s press release, the present image and video collection will be turned into “a comprehensive, international digital library” and furthermore, by “developing a systematic protocol for acquiring, reviewing, annotating, and uploading the images”, the ASCB will create “an efficient platform for building the library at a rapid rate”.

These are exciting news for all cell image fans!

The art of animation of cellular and molecular processes has developed immensely in the last decade. One of the interesting trends is the increasingly sophisticated practice of mixing scientific footage with animation procedures.

A nice example is ‘The Golgi apparatus’ movie (Sougrat R. The Golgi apparatus. ASCB Image & Video Library. 2008;VID-142) that was awarded 1st Place Public Outreach Video at Celldance 2008, the annual cell film and image contest for members of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), organised “to open the eyes of the world to the best in visually stunning videos and images that illuminate cell biology”. See it here: http://cellimages.ascb.org/ 

The Golgi movie animation takes you inside a mammalian cell where you can see the nucleus and its envelope that is connected to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Transition electron microscopy and tomography was used to create an animated image of a portion of a Golgi ribbon, where the trans-Golgi network peels off from the cisternae while a new component from the ER enters the cis-element of the Golgi. Very dynamic — very instructive — even looks nice!

This video is the first project by the Biovisualization program at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. Computer science and animation students collaborated with researchers to produce this visualization. As they say: “While the main focus was scientific accuracy, aesthetics were also considered”:

To convey the sense of scale, a progression is made, from actual confocal microscopy into an SEM style animation and then into non-photorealistic rendering of what can be seen at TEM level magnification. The software tools utilized for this project include Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, Final Cut Studio, Mercury Amira and Imod. 

The winner of the 2009 Celldance contest will be announced at the ASCB meeting in San Diego, 5-9 December.

Yuwei Lin and Christian Greiffenhagen are planning to organise a panel on ‘video methodologies and STS’ at next year’s EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) meeting in Trento (September 2-4, 2010), and want to know if others are interested.

As they rightly point out, despite the rapid technical developments and a general turn to the visual in the social sciences, “video methodologies are still not widely used within STS, and most researchers continue to rely on ‘traditional’ ethnographic or other qualitative research methods using other means, such as talk or writing.

However, video technologies clearly offer exciting possibilities of capturing the dynamics and complexities in the field. Video constitutes a new form of evidence that can be exploited by researchers. Not only can it be used for the purposes of observation and documenting, video can also be used for ‘action research’ as a research tool through which field participants could represent their experiences through new media production and exchange (e.g., de Block and Sefton-Green 2004). When applied in STS, video helps to understand the complexities and multi-modalities in scientific and/or technical development and implementation processes more fully.

Would everyone agree with these arguments? What are the challenges of applying video-based methods in STS-like research (e.g., nuisances of using video technologies, field workers’ informed consent, interaction with the field workers, ethics of publishing video data)? How have video-based methods been applied in different types of research? What are the implications of video-based methods to STS research? Is it possible to capture ‘where the action is’ on video, or is scientific and technological work too distributed, both spatially and temporally, to allow such capture?

Interesting initiative! Anyone who would like to get involved in the panel should contact Yuwei (yuwei@ylin.org) before 5 October.