Biomedicine on Display

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.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Reader at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) invites us all to participate in a webinar organised in connection with the first event of the 2010 series of the World Health Organization Global Health Histories Seminars (you can see the full list of seminars here).

The topic of the webinar is ‘SARS: Learning from an epidemic of fear’, and it takes place this upcoming Wednesday 17 February, 12:30-2:30 pm (Central European Time):

The 2003 outbreak of SARS, a deadly new infectious disease, sparked worldwide alarm. It caused more than 8 000 cases and almost 800 deaths in at least 25 countries. Its spread was halted only by emergency international action.

In the opening presentation of this new seminar series, health psychologist Professor George Bishop describes his studies of how ordinary people respond to illness threats. He focuses particularly on the impact of SARS in Singapore, public responses to the epidemic, and the lessons learned.

Dr Cathy Roth, a WHO expert on the disease, explains the role of WHO in leading the struggle to contain this unprecedented threat.

The WHO’s webinar system only allows up to a thousand users logged-on simultaneously, so you’d better reserve access now — register here. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

I just had a long and nice phone conversation with Jim Edmonson at the Dittrick Museum in Cleveland. We talked, among other things, about museum blogging – and Jim claimed, among other things, that writing blog posts is probably a good preparation for writing artefact showcase labels.

I agreed in principle, but after hanging up I realised that Jim is both right and wrong. In fact, the best preparation for writing artefact labels isn’t blogging, but microblogging. And if Twitter were restricted to 70 characters instead of 140 it would be the ideal training ground for exhibition curators. No showcase labels should be more than 70 characters.

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.

The ICOM subcommitte on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) has set up a moderated list to facilitate exhange of information between university museums. The list is open also to non-UMAC members. See more here — for subscription, go to: https://listes.u-strasbg.fr/sympa/unistra.fr/info/umac-ml

Like most other kinds of historical artefacts, medical objects from the past are scattered all over. Some are safely deposited in museums, small or large; others are in private collections; others again are circulating between private collectors, mediated by eBay and other auction services (and some, especially plastic objects from contemporary medicine, are contributing to landfill).

Whereas most public collections are online, most private are not. An inspiring exception from this internet invisibility of private collections is Donald Blaufox’s Museum of Historical Medical Artifacts. Working as a professor in nuclear medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University Dr. Blaufox has spent much of his spare time in the last thirty years building up a collection of medical artefacts “that could serve as a nidus for a museum of medical history as evidenced by the objects that contributed to its development”.

Some objects “were acquired simply because they have some medical significance, others for their beauty, but all of them because they help to understand the evolution of medicine over the centuries”. He didn’t have the ambition to transform it into a public museum, but entertained the idea of prodcuing a catalogue in book form instead. Then, two years ago, he decided to go online. Now the web-based MoHMA contains over 1000 objects representing a wide range of medical practices and of craftsmanship.

Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage.

I performed my fist knee operation today. Not in real life though but on my pc. Videogames inspired by medical practises or diseases has been discussed on this blog before but I don’t think that this particular game has been mentioned. In the game one takes on the role of a surgeon (or a surgeon’s assistant, I’m a bit in the dark on that one) and I must admit that I found the game to be surprisingly unpleasant.

I guess that working at a place like Medical Museion one gets hardened by telling stories of how the medieval surgeons performed their work or how the cholera epidemic infected people in the middle of the 19th century. Nevertheless this game, where one gets to perform surgery on a knee, really struck me. One thing is the images of the opened knee but I believe that it’s really the sound on the game that gets to me. Especially the sound of the saw going through the knee is really disturbing. Urg!

I must admit that I found it rather educational and apparently my patient survived. To be quite honest I’m not sure that it’s possible to actually ever fail. The game also reminded me of an article I read recently (”Inscribing surgery in digital culture” by Jan Eric Olsén, Årsskrift for Medicinsk Museion, vol. 3, 2006: 49), in which he links computer gaming and virtual surgery:

Future surgery may not require knowledge in handling the scalpel but rather familiarity with computers. It has also been suggested that surgeons who often play computer games sharpen their ability to coordinate the senses of vision and touch, when performing keyhole surgery (Satava ed 1998: 143-144)

That might be right, but I’m quite sure that the above-mentioned game does not train the necessary skills :) (For an online article about the link between surgery and computer gaming click here)

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!

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.

As a comment to the current weeding out of physical copies of scientific journals in many libraries around the world (because more and more older journal series are put online), Karen Reeds points out (in a recent comment on the H-SCI-TECH-MED list, #105, 2009) that there are good reasons to save the actual physical copies of books and journals with all their marginalia instead of relying on digitised copies only:

The evidence of actual use makes the marked-up copies unique and very good both for teaching and rousing public interest in the works (not to mention your library). And scholarly interest in such annotations growing

she writes and adds:

I’d urge taking a minute or two for each volume to check for signatures, marginalia, bookmarks and other indications of provenance and readers’ reactions to the works

Agree! Marginalia are sometimes more interesting than the printed text itself. But it also makes me think that such alleged scholarly interest in annotations may be growing precisely because of the progressive destruction of the paper-based literature. In other words, if Google and others had not started putting library books and journals online, and therefore induced more and more (smaller) libraries to weed out their paper copies, few scholars would be interested in such marginalia.    

There has been rather scarce posting on this site for the last couple of weeks. Several of us are extremely busy preparing the new exhibition, Split and Splice, which will open on Friday, 11 June, in our main building — hopefully, we will be able to come back with a few appetisers in the next few weeks.

But posting has also been slow because I have developed tendonitis (”mouse arm”) by using the computer mouse too much. My GP has ordered me to abstain from any sort of writing for the next month (80% reduction in working capacity). However, one on my friends in Gothenburg (Jan Nolin), who has had the problem for several years now, recommended a speech recognition software, Dragon, which I just bought and installed, and which I’m now training.

It is quite fabulous. I can write in Word, I can use Outlook — and, as you can see, I can also dictate text here into the WordPress blog (it even recognises when I say ‘WordPress’, although it cannot put the name in inverted commas, and it cannot end the sentence with a smiley, which I have to do by hand, as in the old days :-).

It has taken me three minutes to dictate the paragraph above (should be paragraphs, not paragraph, you need to be distinct when you speak to it! — and it cannot end a parenthesis for some reason). I’m trying to figure out if it can also link as well. It probably can, let’s see! The more tricky exercise will be to add pictures from Flickr (wow!, it can spell Flickr!), and to place them where I want to have them.

Does anybody have any experiences from working with Dragon in WordPress?

Sonia Horn, current Director of Collections at the Medical University of Vienna, has recently announced on different email-lists that the collection of specimens from the university’s Department of Forensic Medicine has now been catalogued and digitised in its entirety.

Great initiative! But I also noticed that for “ethical reasons” they will not make the collection available on the web; they only give researchers access.

Please, satisfy my curatorial curiosity: In our present forensicomedicalized media world, in which TV channels compete feriously about who can show the most revulsive CSI images (like in BBC’s excellent drama series ‘Waking the Dead‘)— what are the ethical reasons for not showing historical forensic science specimens on-line?

Read more about the forensic collection project (in German) here.

My good friend and colleague Jim Edmonson (who is Head of the great Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio) sent me and some of his other colleagues an email the other day.

Jim tells the story about how one of his friends, an obstetrician and collector of obstetric and gynaecological instruments, has recently been in an auction bidding war against another collector, named Randi Joe Grantham. It turned out that

Grantham was bidding on destructive instruments (cranioclasts, basiotribes, curettes, &c, &c), and paying ridiculous sums for this category of instrumentation. Turns out, it was all acquired to be featured on his anti-abortion website — beware, it is not for the faint of heart: http://www.abortioninstruments.com/ (quoted with Jim’s permission).

Jim thinks this “takes the new top prize for creepy co-opting of medical/surgical antiques for perverse purpose”.

I partly agree, partly not. Grantham’s web site is creepy, indeed, and will probably be used for all kinds of bad political purposes by the pro-life lobby.

But it’s also absolutely fascinating. If ever the word ’sublime’ is appropriate, it’s here. Some of these instruments give associations to medieval torture instruments of the worst kind, like this one:

“This abortion instrument works by pushing the spike into the child’s head. Once it is inside, the button is pushed. When it flattens, you can pull the child out.”  

The site also reminds me that the abortion issue is not a black and white thing. The debate is all too often divided in terms of absolute women’s rights (pro-choice) and absolute foetus rights (pro-life).

But there are no easy solutions here. My immediate impulse is to defend women’s rights over their bodies — yet one shouldn’t close one’s eyes to the facts of revulsive earlier abortion practices.

In other words, as much as I support the pro-choice stand, I also support Grantham’s rights to put these disgusting images on his web site — and also his moral right to overbid the obstetrician/gynaecologist collector.

So I don’t think Grantham is perverse, he just believes otherwise. I will forever struggle politically against him, but I don’t think we should ostracize him and his confederates.

I had a medical museum curator’s nightmare early this morning. Last night I read that Galaxy Zoo expects 1 million visitors on their site to help classify galaxies during the next 100 hours. “Completing this challenge will not only be another significant step towards our goal of producing the world’s largest and most detailed catalogue of classified galaxies, but it’s also a good chance to demonstrate just how effective all of your efforts are when taken together”, they wrote in a mail. My nightmare? 1 single patient citizen curating 1 single medical historical object in 1 million hours! What makes astronomy so sexy?