September 2007

This blog has been silent for almost a week — because of the Art and Biomedicine meetings and events here in Copenhagen.

Thursday 30 August through Saturday 1 September we had some 30 scholars around the meeting table at the Museum of Art and Design discussing biomedicine and aesthetics in a museum context. (pics added here)

On Sunday night, September 2, about 180 people come to the Medical Museion auditorium to listen to the premiere performances of Jacob Kirkegaard’s new sound work Labyrinthitis. (pics added here)

And finally, on Monday, September 3, over 200 people attended the Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body conference to hear Ingeborg Reichle, Wolfgang Knapp, Steve Kurtz, Richard Wingate, Ben Fry, Ken Arnold, and James Elkins speak. (pics added here)

There are hundreds of pictures from the three events in my handy little Sony Cyber-shot, but I cannot find the USB-port connection cable! I’ll be back when the connection has been re-established. (established now, find pictures above)

On Friday 14 September William F. Crowley from the Massachusetts General Hospital will talk about “Changing Models of Biomedical Medical Research or Interregnums are Tough for Young Investigators” in the History of Biomedicine Lecture series at the NIH. He will address a basic phenomenon in biomedical policy in the postwar period:

Over the past 60 years, biomedical research has operated under Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision outlined in “Science: The Endless Frontier”. This unidirectional vision of bench to bedside movement of science has served the government, academia, and industry quite well. However, with the recent availability of more powerful phenotypic tools such as those of the Human Genome Project and ‘omic’ technologies, the starting point of biomedical inquiry has become patients, their tumors, and their diseases. The policy implications of each of these two models of biomedical research in terms of space, resources, and academic recognition are somewhat different and their implications are discussed.

This is an interesting topic — actually one that Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio dealt with in Biomedical Platforms (2003). If I remember their point righly, they meant that ‘biomedicine’ is the intertwining of these two ‘models’ and that it therefore doesn’t make sense to set them up against each other.

Further info from Joseph November, novemberj@mail.nih.gov. (Cannot find a website about it)