August 2006

The 1½ year old internet video clip broadcasting system YouTube (the moving pictures counterpart to flickr.com) is expanding rapidly. Much of it is private rubbish from the horizon of a mobile camera and the technical quality of most clips is still pretty mediocre. But the range of topics is astounding and with an acquisition rate of about 65,000 new clips a day (yes!), there will soon be quite a lot to see, and statistically there will be some interesting quality stuff in between.

There are actually already a few pieces of interest for the biomedical museologist if you use their search engine creatively.
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I’ve just finished reading (or rather struggling my way through) Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Possibility of an Island (originally published as La possibilité d’une île). It’s crafted as the autobiographical story of a few years in the life of a successful stand-up comedian David who, after being co-opted by a religious sect and disbandoned by his female lover, commits suicide; his DNA is used to clone him into a so called neo-human, with eternal life.
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Liv Carlé Mortensen, “The Amazone” (from Huskegruppen’s website)

Medical Museion’s new exhibition, ‘The Face of Disease’ (‘Sygdommens Ansigt’), inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal, and now classical, essay Illness as Metaphor (1977) opens today, Thursday 24 August. The (uncensored) exhibition can be seen 24 hours a day in the 25 basement windows of Medical Museion at the corner of Bredgade and Fredericiagade until 15 October.
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Earlier today I went to the opening of Mette Bersang and Louise Bøgelund Saugmann’s exhibition “Suspended between breathing in and breathing out” in the subterranean passage between the Panum Institute and the Danish National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen (see announcement and flyer here). It’s a fairly small exhibition (only 14 pictures) of photos of interieurs of lab benches, storage rooms, instruments etc. from two clinics/laboratories. Soft colours (ink jet print on aluminium), no people visible, only traces and remains of their activities. A series of aesthetically very pleasing works that would fit nicely on the walls in the lunch room, but in my mind don’t raise any questions — perhaps other than: where goes the line between aesthetic and documentary photography?

We tend to think of recent biomedical artefacts as more or less spectacular high-tech things, like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines or knock-out mice. But many vital artefacts in the biomedical laboratory or medical clinic are mundane things — like plastic gloves, ink markers and centrifuge tubes. They may not be so fancy, but they are essential for the way the lab works.

Some of these mundane objects are more sophisticated than they immediately appear, however. Take, for example, the Eppendorf tube:

(thanks to Goodies: Things we would like to share)
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Like all historical research, the study of contemporary science, technology and medicine partly hinges on the existence of rich archives. (It’s also dependent on interviews and field-work, but that’s another issue.) The status of such archives is not without problems, however. They pivot on scientists’ interest in depositing material; their widespread use is closely connected to the possibility for on-line access; and perhaps most importantly, their existence is based on the willingness of funding agencies to support them.

These and other problems related to scientific archives will be discussed in this guest seminar with Dr. Peter Harper from the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists at the University of Bath, UK, on Monday 2 October. The seminar is organised by Finn Aaserud at the Niels Bohr Archive and takes place in Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen @ 2.15 pm.
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Celebrity plays an enormous role in popular culture — just think of film making and Academy Awards (Oscars). Yet with some exceptions, e.g. a recent conference and a follow-up blog, Academia (of the university kind, not the film industry’s!) shuns the phenomenon of celebrity.

Neither have historians of science, technology and medicine paid much attention to it. A notable exception here is Janet Browne who wrote an article on “Charles Darwin as a celebrity” in the journal Science in Context (vol. 16, March 2003), in which she explored the imagery of the famous evolutionist as a 19th-century scientific celebrity “by comparing the public character deliberately manufactured by Darwin and his friends with images constructed by the public”, and argued that “Darwin’s outward persona drew on a subtle tension between public and private”.

Janet Browne’s paper is the exception that proves the rule, however. And the rule includes science, technology and medical museums who also seem to be pretty uninterested in scientific celebrities. Take a tour around the Science Museum in London, for example, and you will hardly find a single individual, not to mention a famous one. You will have to walk across the city, to the National Portrait Gallery, to find pictures of individual celebrious scientists, engineeers and medical doctors, like Dorothy Hodgkin.
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The Danish National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen has an exhibition “Suspended between breathing in and breathing out” by photo artists Mette Bersang and Louise Bøgelund Saugmann. The exhibition can be found on the lower level, at staircase 42. It opens on Wednesday 23 August at 4PM and closes on Thursday 28 September:

The Scientist is now running a series of personal profiles of scientists that resonates with the classical Greek tradition for biography writing. The old Greeks didn’t primarily think about life writing as a kind of history, but as an ethical genre. By reading about someone else’s life you were supposed to learn how to shape and live your own life, including how to behave virtuously, i.e., how to become great and good (kalos k’agathos, see e.g., Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, book 8, section 1249a).
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Here’s the final programme of the 11th meeting in the “Artefacts” series, titled “Constructing and Deconstructing Icons of Achievement in Science and Technology”, which takes place in Stockholm, Sweden, 14-16 September 2006 (Note: this is now a closed meeting)
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