Biomedicine on Display

For dyed-in-the-wool academics it can sometimes be hard to understand what it feels to be a science amateur. So last spring I decided to become a member of Galaxy Zoo, i.e., one among many thousands of enthusiastic astronomy amateurs who spend hours in front of their computer screens, classifying about 900.000 images, provided by a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, of far-away galaxies.

The real astronomers (RA) have assured us that as a group we, the citizen scientists, are making some serious contributions; six scientific papers have been completed (I’m NOT a co-author :-); in addition, one of us, a school teacher in the Netherlands, once discovered a curious cosmological object which the RAs marvelled over for weeks.

Even though the Galaxy Zoo community is constantly appreciated and nursed by the professional team, classification work becomes a bit tedious after a while, because, even though decision making can be quite difficult sometimes, we only have four pigeon-holes to place the galaxy images in, viz., left spiral, right spiral, elliptic and merger.

So now Galaxy Zoo is moving into a new phase. Having proved that the amateurs do indeed match the professionals when it comes to classification skills, the RAs are now giving us a new task: to sort through the 250,000 brightest galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo sample. Instead of spending 1-20 seconds on each image, we will now be able to spend more quality time with each galaxy: “the chances of seeing something spectacular have never been greater”, the RAs say.

One thing is galaxies. The real accomplishment of Galaxy Zoo, I think, is the social technology employed. Galaxy Zoo is the astronomers’ counterpart to the Obama presidential campaign. Thousands of online individuals are networked into a great, enthusiastic, web-based social movement — for electing Obama, classifying galaxies, modelling protein folding, or whatever.

Which makes me think – would it be possible to do something similar with respect to the preservation and curation of the medical heritage? And what would such a social technology platform look like? A wiki for physical objects?

The recently launched online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos“, curated by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, offers a fascinating tour through a paradigmatic, but also highly controversial, aspect of the history of medicine: the engagement with and displaying of human embryos.

The exhibition invites visitors to move thematically through the development of different aspects of how embryos have been depicted through time. We learn about how research into embryology gradually moves from the secrecy of the laboratory to the public sphere in connection with debates about human development, birth control, and reproductive technologies like IVF. The curators also inform us on pathbreaking visualisation technologies, like ultrasound, and on the cultural impact of popularised images like those produced by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.

The exhibition also gives rise to some interesting conceptual questions. To be sure, the images and models, beautifully presented through excellent illustrations and photos, are the kinds of visualisations of the human embryo that have reached the widest audience and which have had the greatest impact. But if the show is really about visualising, and not just depicting and modelling, it seems to me that the centuries-long tradition of making specimens can also be taken as a pivotal technology.

This point is relevant for museums like Medical Museion. Without doubt, the best-known group of objects in Medical Museion is the collection of wet and dry specimens of human embryos, formally named Museum Saxtorphianum.

Like other anatomical specimens, these were produced to facilitate the study of embryology and teratology by making embryos and fetuses visible to researchers. And, as is well-known to any conservator, producing and maintaing these visualisations over time is an arduous and delicate task.

Whereas images and models of the fetus are now everywhere, as the curators of “Making Visible Embryos” state in their conclusion, displaying preserved specimens of embryos is still highly problematic in a museum setting.

Travellers who would like to visit local medical history museums may find the list below useful.

The list — which is taken from the website of the German Central Medical Library (Deutschen Zentralbibliothek für Medizin) — begins with German museums followed by museums in other countries, including a few web-based virtual museums. For example, I didn’t know there is a Virtual Toilet Paper Museum (not precisely a medical museum, except that it’s got something to do with public health, I guess)!

Unfortunately the list is non-discriminative, i.e., it lists all kinds of museums, whether big or small, good or bad, without any evaluation (typical librarian style). See the original here.

Continue Reading »

The museum blog-feed aggregator MuseumBlogs.org, launched by Jim Spadaccini (Ideum) in 2006, is a major source of information about what museum affiliated bloggers think. Due to overload it has now been rebuilt with a lot of structural changes, a somewhat revised interface design, and (claims Spadaccini) much better performance. It now carries feeds from 274 museum-related blogs.

Jim isn’t sure what to do with the aggregated collection of 224,093 posts in the archive: “it may not be worth saving as it contains only partial posts and the majority of the original blogs are still available”. But where else can future blog historians and historians of museology get an overview of the museum segment of the blogosphere in the years 2006-2008? Please, think like a historian would do, don’t delete the archive!

“Can something that exists with no physical form be considered an object?”, asks Amber Arnold on Sev Fowles’s Columbia University “Thing theory” class web site. The answer is ‘yes, of course’. Computer people operate with virtual ‘objects’ all the time.

Amber’s conclusion — “Although blogs are virtual things in the electronic world, their role in the often emotional conversations of society cement their identity as an object and their importance in our lives” — reminds me that blogs and websites devoted to discussing the acquisition and display of museum objects, are museum objects too.

How to tag this kind of object — a museum object that comments on other museum objects — in our registration data base? Maybe it’s a ’metamedical object’?

(thanks to Adam for drawing attention to Amber’s essay)

Telemedicine has already been around for a while — especially in image-based diagnostics where specialists can, in principle, be located anywhere in the world when they interpret, say, photos of dermatological conditions or CT/MRI scanning images (and have flexible working hours and earn a lot of money).

Telemedical practices thus sustain the general trend of out-sourcing and marketization of medicine in the last decades, because the increasing number of specialists available diminish the constraints of local bottle-necks. Telemedicine is a truly globalizing technology.

In Europe, the private Telemedicine Clinic (TMC) in Barcelona, founded in 2002, has become a leading provider of large-scale image readings, serving public hospitals and local health authorites, including over 60 National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the UK and several Swedish hospitals, among them Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and Lund University Hospital. Political demands for the reduction of waiting lists is one of the reasons why hospitals take this step; another reason is that small, regional hospitals, like Esbjerg Hospital in Denmark have difficulties recruiting specialists.

The American company Telerays has now gone a step forward in this out-sourcing and marketizing trend by establishing an auction-based market place for telemedical diagnostics in radiology. Hospitals and imaging centers send in orders for the interpretation of batches of images to a virtual auction room (Telerays’ website) where only accredited radiologists have access.

The job goes to the lowest bid (”Cut costs one bid at a time”, as Telerays’ webiste proclaims). The price is established solely by the hospital/imaging center and the bidding radiologist; but Telerays takes a flat 15% of the final price.

As Health Business Blog points out “Telerays could set the basis for lower priced, foreign competition to emerge”, but that there ”will have to be a relaxation of regulation, payment policies and attitudes before that happens”.

(thanks to Radiologic Technology for the tip)

Some time ago, the National Library of Medicine opened a new exhibition called ’Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health’ in the library foyer on NIH campus, Bethesda. Featured stories include the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US, the Chinese barefoot doctor movement, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and the WHO smallpox eradication program.

I haven’t seen the physical exhibition, only the web version. Admittedly, public health is probably one of the most difficult topics for exhibitions (physical or web-based). But given NLM’s huge economic ressources, one could expect something much better. For example, take a look at the online games on the Online Activities & Resources page. If you haven’t seen a late-1990s interactive website before, here’s your chance; it’s against the odds.

A laudable aim — to illustrate ”the importance of clean water, safe housing, nutritious food, affordable healthcare, and protection from violence in fostering health and wellbeing” — is lost in a pretty boring web product.

A group of people from geography and STS departments at University College London, Cambridge and Southampton (Gail Davies, Kezia Barker, Brian Balmer, Richard Milne, and Rob Doubleday) have put together an online reader on the geographies of contemporary technoscience.

“Part of a more general ‘spatial turn’” (i.e., yet another turn!), the explicit aim of the project is to draw attention to the way that space matters in the production of science and technology and to the implications of the circulation of expertise and materials in the situating of science and technology.

A nifty web resource of potential great use also for people interested in medical science studies and the contemporary history of medicine. See the introduction to the project here.

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.

Back in 2006 we wrote enthusiastically about the first issue of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments — the aim of which is to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. A ”YouTube for test tubes”, as it was then called.

Since then JoVE has published more than 200 videos of laboratory procedures. Now (says Nature, 4 Sept, p 13), the content of JoVE will be indexed in the MEDLINE base and thus available through the PubMed search engine. An interesting policy move from the side of the National Library of Medicine, because it means that the video format is now being endorsed on a par with text articles as an acknowledged form of publication (cf. how NLM last year began to endorse blogs as publications, see earlier post here).

JoVE is a potentially great source for exhibitions on contemporary biomedicine, either for direct use, or indirectly, as an inspiration for producing new videos for public outreach of laboratory practices. The videos demonstrate how the laboratory has its roots in manual labour, and are a reminder about how thoroughly materially grounded biomedical practices are.

These and similar video repositories are a great complement to ethnographic description of laboratory practice and may contribute further to the rejuvenation of studies of the laboratory as a knowledge production space that Dominique Vinck and others are currently involved in (see, for example the special issue on laboratory studies in Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, vol. 1 (n° 2), 2007).

There are many ways of finding biomedical images on the web for exhibition use, and some are better the others.

Getty Images, which is otherwise a fantastic online repository of professional high-quality images, is practically useless for a small museum like ours. Search ‘protein’, for example, and you get over a thousand images of eggs, tofu and pork meat and other everyday stuff associated with proteins, but very few scientific images — and the few they have are excruciatingly expensive (the cost for using a single ‘beautiful’ electrophoresis image is around 600 USD). I dare not reproduce even a thumbnail size image from Getty Images here because we risk being persued for violating their intellectual property rights; in fact, I’m not even allowed to show their company logo!).

Wellcome Images is much more useful for our exhibition purposes. Search ‘protein’ and you get over 500 images of protein molecule models, fancy microscopic images, high-tech protein research instruments, and so forth — like this image of a computer-enhanced analysis of a 2D protein gel (credit: Nicoletta Baloyianni; Wellcome Images). They’ve also got some good images of protein-rich food items and other everyday stuff. And best of all for a poor university museum like ours — their images are freely available for download under a Creative Commons licence.

Both Getty Images and Wellcome Images are collections of ’beautiful images’ — that is, the kind of immediately aesthetically pleasing pics that science magazines fill their pages with and scientists like to hang on their office doors. The Yale Image Finder search engine developed by Michael Krauthammer’s lab at Yale Center for Medical Informatics is different (read more about the project here). It allows you to find the image content of (presently) some 35,000 open access articles from PubMed Central by key word searches in figure texts, captions, abstracts, titles and even full article texts. For example, searching for ‘protein’ in captions and figure texts gave 19,000 hits, like the Western blog analysis image to the right.

Yale Image Finder is developed as a tool for scientists, not for curators. Right now it’s somewhat bothersome to use, because you have to sift through so much material. But it gives you rapid access to hundreds of thousands of close-to-the bench kind of images which do not find their way to Wellcome Images, and as such it may become a useful supplement to the ‘beautiful image’ online repositories.

Sorry, there was no posting yesterday. Some of my co-contributors are on vacation, some are busy-busy writing chapters for our forthcoming book, and one is on parental care leave. And I didn’t post because I spent my spare-time yesterday reading a blog that I’ve never heard about before — Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0.

I found it because I had a chat with my colleague Bodil Busk Laursen at nearby Danish Museum of Art & Design the other day. We talked about user-driven acquisitions, user-generated exhibitions and such things, which in turn led to questions like: Is the ‘museum and web 2.0′-discussion restricted to using Facebook for building visitor networks, writing museum blogs etc? Or can museums also learn from the general idea of web 2.0? Can we use the experiences from the participatory web to develop the notion of ‘the participatory museum’?

Well, these days one can rarely come up with a web 2.0-related idea which hasn’t already been around for a year or two. A quick search revealed the existence of Nina Simon’s power-house of a blog, launched in late 2006 and filled with interesting, innovative views about museums and the web. Some of the content it pretty well-known stuff and sometimes it’s a trifle verbose — but more often than not Museum 2.0 is an innovation machine for thinking about the future of museums.

Nina expresses very succinctly what Bodil and I were stumbling to formulate the other day, namely that the participatory web is a powerful analogy for developing the notion of the participatory museum:

The web started with sites (1.0) that are authoritative content distributors–like traditional museums. The user experience with web 1.0 is passive; you are a viewer, a consumer. Web 2.0 removes the authority from the content provider and places it in the hands of the user.

And she then suggests that museums have “the potential to undergo a similar (r)evolution as that on the web, to transform from static content authorities to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing”:

I believe that visitors can become users, and museums central to social interactions. Web 2.0 opens up opportunity, but it also demonstrates where museums are lacking. The intention of this blog is to explore these opportunities and shortcomings with regard to museums and interactive design.

Her point of departure is the following four key elements of the participatory web:

1. venue as content platform, not content provider
2. architecture of participation with network effects
3. perpetual beta
4. flexible, modular support for distributed products

and then she translates, very convincingly I think, these four elements into the basic features of the participatory museum. This 20 minute slideshow is a good starter.

There are some bits that I’m not happy with, but the general direction of Nina’s point — to apply the philosophy of the participatory web to the museum world — is excellent. Not to be followed slavishly, but as inspiration for fostering creativity with respect to the way museums relate to their custom… (sorry) visitors in a more participatory way than we usually do. Much food for thought.

So here are four questions for my colleagues when they return from their vacations and chapter writing:

1. what does it mean to turn a medical museum into a ‘content (or aesthetic experience) platform’ rather than just a provider of content (and aesthetic experience)?

2. how can one think of a medical museum in terms of an ‘architecture of participation?

3. how can our exhibitions be ‘perpetual beta’ rather than finished?

4. and what does a ‘flexible, modular support’ look like (other than the obligatory museum café)? What other kinds of museum widgets could we imagine? 

More results of playing with Wordle: here are the 221 members of the History of Biomedical Research Interest Group (BRHIG) gathered for a ‘group picture’:

A nice touch is that Wordle incidentally uses its one and only institutional member (because it has such a long name) as a ‘rope’ from which the rest of the group hangs. And please note that it’s Wordle that situates me right in the middle, below a lila coloured Carsten Timmermann.

If you want an enlarged and printable cloud, click this image:

And if you want to construct similar images from other digitalised membership directories, note that it took approx. one (!) hour for the data to travel forth and back between my computer and Wordle’s server to transform BRHIG’s membership list into a cloud! Okay, I could do other things simultaneously, but it’s not a rapid thing to do.

I should add that the BRHIG is open to everyone interested in the history of biomedical research:

In addition to the presentation and discussion of work-in-progress, the group will serve as a forum for discussion of issues of common interest, such as the identification and development of source materials; the uses and pitfalls of oral histories in research; and collaborations between historians and the biomedical community.

Register as a member here.

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 »

A couple of days ago I tried to make a cloud of eDrugSearch’s latest list of health and medicine blogs. But since I couldn’t make Wordle process all 883 blog names on the list into one single display, I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names (see the result here).

Wordle doesn’t explictly say there is a size limit, however. So I ran the list again and — lo and behold — after 90 minutes heavy traffic between my Thinkpad and Wordle’s server (it takes time because it’s a phrase cloud and not a word cloud), this image of all 883 health and medicine blogs on eDrugSearch’s list gradually emerged on my screen:

Cannot find yourself in it? Well then either you’re not a visible health-and-medicine-blog — or you just need new glasses. Or click on this image (if it doesn’t open properly you have to update your Java version to make it work):

Such a huge cloud isn’t very useful, of course, it’s mainly for the fun of it. Again, here’s the list of blogs that went into the image above: Continue Reading »