May 2007

I’m stunned by this picture which was recently published in the Danish medical weekly (Ugeskrift for Læger, 23 April 2007):

(see original article here) 

It’s not oyster shells — it’s the remains of artificial pacemakers found in the ovens of the crematorium of the city of Odense (Denmark) between October 2004 and July 2006. Heated to the high temperatures used in the incineration of corpses, a pacemaker will explode. The Zn/Hg batteries used in the 1970s and 1980s sometimes even cause damage to the ovens, while today’s Li/ion-PVP-batteries cause less damage (yet the staff will immediately hear when a ‘client’ with a pacemaker gets through the flames).

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The previous post made me think about how we use the word ‘display’. I always use it as a synonym for visual display. But in principle, I guess, the display of medicine could involve any of the senses: auditory, olfactory, tactile etc..

My spontaneous ‘visualisation’ of the display category reflects, I suppose, what has been called the ‘hegemony of the visual’ in contemporary Western culture. That is, the other senses are subdued in cultural representations. It’s an issue that has been explored by, for example, Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell in their edited volume Interpreting Visual Culture: Exploration in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (1999), and which also underlays a classic essay on ‘scopic regimes of modernity’ by Martin Jay.

‘The hegemony of the visual’ is probably often pretty unproblematic since much of the contemporary world can safely be reduced to its visuality (just see all those who walk around town with an iPod that blocks out all urban sounds). In representations of medicine, however, such hegemony seems inappropriate. Even though medicine is characterised by so many ‘scopic regimes’ (from microscopes to PET-scanners), it is also a very multisensuous practice.

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The public understanding of biomedicine can be promoted in many forms and disguises. In the last issue of the online journal Genome Biology, Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H. Miller from the Department of Microbiology, UCLA, report the preliminary results of their search for a way to convert genomic sequences to piano music. Their purpose was both to widen the field of public understanding of science and to help blind scientists:

By converting genomic sequences into music, we hope to achieve several goals, which include investigating sequences by the vision impaired. Another aim is to attract young people into molecular genetics by using the multidisciplinary approach of fusing music and science.

To do so, they had to overcome some technical problems, including how to turn a non-rhytmic sequence pattern into rhythm, and how to squeeze 20 amino acids into a smaller number of notes. Read more about their result here — fascinating stuff! 

(thanks to MedGadgets for the tip)

MedWorm! What a nice surprise discovery! MedWorm is a RSS feed provider which daily collects updates from (at the moment) over 3500 4000 medical data sources (medical blogs and web sites, medical journals).

You can then subscribe (e.g., by using Google Reader) to its outgoing RSS feeds which are conveniently diveded into a number of medical categories (see here for a list of blogs and here for a list of article categories).

(And even better — MedWorm’s database is searchable.)

There are already two museum sites for the display of contemporary objects (in a historical context) in the street of Bredgade in central Copenhagen: the Danish Museum for Art & Design (Kunstindustrimuseet) in Bredgade 68 and Medical Museion in Bredgade 62.

A few months ago a third site — Drud & Køppe gallery contemporary objects — opened in Bredgade 66 (nr. 64 is for less contemporary objects = the Catholic Church).

They (Birgitte Drud and Bettina Køppe) will show “contemporary objects created and produced exclusively as unique exhibits” and to “express points of view, comments on human existence, artistic traditions and perspectives”.

Their present exhibition (with ceramic artist Michael Geertsen) leaves me pretty cold, I’m afraid — but otherwise the gallery room is absolutely great, and I think we could learn much from their display practices. Drud & Køppe remind me of the porosity between cultural history museums, art museums and art galleries. Maybe we could exhibit our newly acquired electron microscope (see the Picture of the Month, November 2006) in their gallery? Or a selection of pill cameras?

The Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA) are holding their next conference at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, 3-7 June, 2008. Here’s the call for papers:

Recent and current research in Science Studies has devoted increasing attention to semantic transfers, translations, and changes of register between forms of knowledge. In terms of studying the relationship between literature, science, and the arts, this implies a general reinterpretation of how scientific knowledge affects literature and the arts or how it is represented in them. For the ‘and’ linking established oppositional pairs such as ‘art and science’, ‘literature and science’, or else ‘sciences and humanities’ ultimately presumes a homogeneous situation on both respective sides. It is only under this precondition that the clear dichotomies between knowledge cultures can be formed that have been so consequential for the emergence of the modern science system. Yet the arts – as well as the historical hermeneutic sciences – have always worked empirically, and the sciences have long dealt with questions calling for the interpretative capacity of the humanities or the creative potential of the arts – questions such as those about free will or consciousness.

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Anybody still believing that biomed & biotech STS is something that only goes on in Europe and North America and that universities in South/Southeastern/Eastern Asia are shunning STS in favour of robust but mindless lab bench work?

Think again! This job announcement from The National University of Singapore just came in through my mailbox. They are seeking applicants for open-range research & teaching positions in the STS area, and they put few restrictions on the specialised field of work:

Excellent research opportunities in Singapore exist in the areas of new media & visual studies; biology and biotechnology; and cultural or anthropological studies of science, technology, and medicine, although applicants’ interests need not be restricted to these topics, themes, and geographies.

Add to this “generous compensation, allowances for overseas conference travel, access to grant funding, subsidized housing, one of the finest libraries in Asia, superior digital connectivity, and a stimulating, English-speaking intellectual environment” — and you wonder vwhy any serious-thinking STS postdoc would consider staying in Europe or North America longer than necessary. For further information, see http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/sts/index.html.

IT geeks come up with one great visualisation project after the other. They have whole websites for visualising data related to information and communication technologies. Even self-ironic ones like the webcomics site xkcd which just aired this Lord of the Rings lookalike representation of online communities of the world:

(click here for a larger version)

(from xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language)

Biomed and biotech communities don’t seem to map their fields in this wonderfully childish fashion. Why? Does it have something to do with the fact that biomed & biotech people are geared towards solving problems of ultimate life-and-death importance? Whereas IT and Web 2.0 people are basically kids in adult skinbags that play around to invent the next gadget for entertainment and conspicuous consumption?

Most of us believe that high-tech biomedicine and biotechnology are the only roads to better medical therapies in the future. Yet low-tech treatments also flex their muscles now and then. For example, News(at)Nature reports how creepy crawling maggots can be used to treat wounds infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in diabetes patients:

There are many other examples of succesful low-tech technologies. My favourite one is to use phone books against gastric acid reflux/heartburn. It goes like this:

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The Google Books project is perhaps not that relevant for our field because we almost only refer to recent (and thus copyrighted) books which are only available in truncated form. But otherwise the project is potentially fantastic. Imagine having all books online that have published in the 500 years from the dawn of printing to the near present. Searchable!

But the owls are not necessarily what they seem. Robert Townsend, assistant director at the American Historical Association has tried to use Google Books for his own research over an extended period of time and has now written a scathing critique of the project in a recent post on the AHA blog. Poor scan quality, faulty metadata and a truncated public domain are some of the problems according to Townsend. The comments to his critical article give a fairly balanced view of the pros and cons of the Google Books project.

My personal experience is that Google Books is a marvelous search engine for browsing the literature — but when you’ve found the source you should quote from the original, not from Google.