August 2007

Just found a short, but updated and quite useful bibliography of cellular and molecular imaging books and articles from a history of science and STS perspective, compiled by Maura C. Flannery, a St. John’s University professor, who’s major research interest is the visual aspects of biology and the aesthetics of science. Even better, Maura also has a page with a number of useful links to cellular and molecular imaging websites. Browse and enjoy!

Medical blogs vary enormously with respect to quality, updating frequency, and aimed audience. Some are useful and interesting for medical museum curators. I believe Medgadget is one of them.

Founded in December 2004 (same month as this humble blog was born) by San Francisco anesthesiologist Michael Ostrovsky, it was announced as “an independent on-line journal covering the latest medical gadgets and technologies, medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”.

From the very beginning Ostrovsky and his team of editors and other contributors (who write 3-10 posts a day together) have invested a lot of enthusiasm in the project. In their own words, they have a passion for medical gadgets, constantly jotting down “snarky commentary on cool new gizmos”.

In other words, they are the true geek-peekers of the new medical technology world. But with a serious aim — they want to help medical professionals “make informed decisions based on objective analysis and honest editorial writing”.

Now they can add medical museum curators to the aimed audience list. Because many postings provide quite useful information for curators interested in collecting contemporary biomedicine, medical engineering and biotechnology. They identify all sorts of new medical objects, they provide background stories and they often contextualise them. And they almost always bring pictures of the items.

Medgadget doesn’t have any contemporary historical or museological ambitions (yet). But they are museologically quite useful — by default.

Genetics has become progressively important for medicine during the last 50 years — primarily for biomedical research, but also clinically. Consequently the history of genetics is bound to play an important role in the history of contemporary medicine, and historical studies of genetics in different varieties do in fact take up much of the shelf space in libraries of the history of medicine.

There are also a number of associations and networks of interest. One of these is the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN), founded in 2002 by medical geneticist Peter Harper at Prifysgol Caerdydd (Cardiff University), with the original aim to help preserve sources for the documentation of human/medical genetics, particularly in the UK.

In 2005 the GMHN received a three-year Wellcome Trust grant, primarily for “identifying and conserving key written records, including personal scientific records of workers, records of societies and institutions, and images”. In other words, basically to build up a history of human genetics archive. They are also actively promoting interviews with older medical geneticists in collaboration with the Oral History of Human Genetics Project. So far, however, they have not followed the advice from some of their foreign colleagues to add the acquisition of the material culture of genetics to the project aims. But this may come at a later stage, particularly if the Wellcome Trust prolongs the grant.

The third network meeting, organised by Toine Pieters (Amsterdam) will be held in Barcelona, 1-3 June 2008. Read more about it in the last GMHN Newsletter (#11) here.

Plato and Aristotle did it, Cicero did it, and many other classical authors too. Montaigne wrote a long essay on it, and Henry David Thoreau a whole book. Friendship is one of the perennial topics in the history of philosophical thought.

Some sociologists say that friendship relations have perhaps never been as strong as they are today, when individualism flourishes and traditional social institutions and solidarities have broken down, at least in Western societies.

Now, Western societies are also science-based societies — and science is an extremely individualist enterprise — ergo, one could expect friendship to be quite a pervasive kind of social relationship in science, technology and medicine, including biomedicine. In his autobiography (What Mad Pursuit, 1988) Francis Crick said that friendship was crucial for scientific collaboration: “certainly you have to be personal friends” (on p. 93).

Crick’s point is underlined by the ubiquitous references to friendship in book prefaces. In almost every book, in the humanities as well in the sciences, authors thank their colleagues and/or friends. And even if they may exaggerate, or include people they would never dream of having a really friendly relationship with, the ubiquity of the term ‘friend’ seem to reflect at least an widespread expectation that friendship in crucial for scholarship.

What has been written in history of science and science studies? The other day I searched through some of the standard book and article data bases (Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Google Scholar; and RLG’s Eureka for history of science) — and found almost nothing.

True, historians of science, technology and medicine have written quite a lot about concrete friendships, but I didn’t really find anything about friendship as a social or cultural category in the HoSTM- and STS-literature.

The only interesting item I did in fact find was one made in passing by veteran STS-scholar Evelyn Fox Keller who wrote in a memorial article to one of her old friends, mathematician Lee Segel, that in their case friendship came first: “work grew out of friendship, and gradually became the very medium of friendship” (E. F. Keller, “Science as a medium for friendship: How the Keller–Segel models came about”, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, vol. 68, 1033–1037, 2006; on p. 1034).

Maybe there is a rich literature on friendship in science that I have missed in this preliminary literature search? But it may also be the case that friendship has been overlooked among historians of STM and STS scholars.

Maybe the general opinion corresponds to the naïve idea expressed by F.J. Ayala that “scientists are inclined to transcend ideology, nationality, friendship, monetary interest and other prejudices when the mettle of scientific knowledge is at stake” (“On the scientific method, its practice and pitfalls”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. 16, 205-240 1994).

That kind of naïvité has been surpassed when it comes to ideology, nationality and monetary interest, but may still be valid with respect to friendship. I don’t know. Does anyone have any good ideas?

It’s fascinating to see how cultural studies are embracing old alternative health agendas. Take breathing (see my earlier post), for example.

Breathing used to be the prerogative of Reichian therapists: Wilhelm Reich (a student of Freud) thought unrestrained and natural breathing was the clue to all kinds of health and happiness. He has, in turn, inspired generations of therapists from the 1960s and onwards, like Norwegian physiotherapist Lillemor Johnson, who developed a treatment program (Integrated Respiration Therapy), based on breathing exercises to help build up underdeveloped muscles; and there are numerous others, e.g. here.

What’s interesting from a contemporary historical point of view, is that the new body history — which has emerged as a purely intellectual and academic movement, for example out of New Historicism, in the last decades (see Adam Bencard’s forthcoming PhD thesis) — has now reached a point where it begins to interact with the therapeutic movement. Where will this lead? Will cultural historians begin to practice the old breathing therapies? Will therapeutic practitioners begin to distance themselves from their practice in a traditional academic fashion?

… and then sign up for the “Take a deep breath” conference at Tate Modern in London, 15-17 November 2007, an interdisciplinary meeting on the social, cultural and scientific ramifications of — yes: breathing.

As the organisers quite rightly point out, “breathing is a vital practice, yet most of us hardly ever think of the process”. The aim of the conference is thus to rethink “the value of breath and its manifestations in culture and beyond”. It will explore “the influence of breath on the work of various theorists and practitioners and encourage a critical discussion by featuring talks, visual art projects, performances, film screenings, and musical events”.

The organisers ask for submissions (due 10 September) that address the following themes:

• Visible/Invisible Respiration: There is general agreement that it can be heard and smelt, yet why is it taken for granted that respiration is an invisible manifestation of our being alive? Artists have often explored this paradox. What lies in this tension between the visible and the invisible breath?
• Contaminating Breath: The exhaled breath brings out in the world an amalgam of volatile components ranging from vital oxygen to poisonous carbon dioxide. Breathing is vital, yet it can also be fatal. To breathe upon is potentially to infect or contaminate.
• Hold It Exercise It Manipulate It: Breathing can be subjected to active and passive forms of control. What are the ways with which we control and manipulate our breath? Does the loss of breath result in the loss of control, or perhaps is it the other way round?
• Beyond Breath: Can we think of breathing beyond its principal corporeal function? Breath as pneuma and psyche has always been of great significance to psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and religion. What are the effects of euphoria and phobias, panic attacks or asphyxia? Is there life after breath?

The whole thing is organised by the excellent London Consortium Masters & Doctoral Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. For further info, see their news website here — and then breath out and relax.

The Gesellschaft für Technikgeschichte (GTG) will hold its next annual meeting at the University of Salzburg, 23 – 25 May 2008. The theme is “Wo steht die Technikgeschichte? Chancen und Herausforderungen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts”. Among the questions the organisers ask are to what extent emerging biotechnologies are questioning the traditional borders between the given and the made? Dead-line for abstracts are due 30 September (they don’t say if they accept contributions in English). Much more info here: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=7691