October 2007

One of my students wrote to me last week and said she was going to London and that she would take the opportunity to attend the event tomorrow evening arranged at the occasion of the publication of Jim Watson’s new book Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science at the Dana Centre, and also buy a signed copy in the Wellcome Collection Blackwells bookstore earlier in the day. Having just read the Nature Network Boston blog editor’s report from a similar event with Watson at Harvard Square two weeks ago, and expecting yet another good read from his acerbic pen, I asked her to buy a copy for me too.

We may get our desired signed copies (see below) — but the evening event will come to nothing, because the Science Museum has just decided to cancel it with reference to Watson’s stupid remarks in the interview with The Sunday Times about the alleged inferior intelligence of Africans (see report in The Independent here). Here’s Science Museum’s press release:

We know that eminent scientists can sometimes say things that cause controversy and the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics. However, the Science Museum feels that Nobel Prize winner James Watson¹s recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are as a result cancelling his talk at the museum this Friday. If people want to know about the science behind genetics and race, they can book onto other events looking at this at the Museum’s Dana Centre over the next year.

I believe Science Museum have made the right decision for wrong reasons. I certainly don’t subscribe to Watson’s opinions in the interview (he has a long track record for saying prejudiced and provoking things), but it would have been better to contradict him head-on at the event instead of cancelling it.

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Anthropologist Mark Auslander and philosopher Andreas Teuber at Brandeis University are convening a symposium called “Visualizing Science: Image-Making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge” (part of their fall 2007 meeting series, Mirrors of Science) on Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 3.40-7pm at the Rose Art Museum:

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The third annual ‘Science & the Public’ conference will be held at the University of Manchester, Saturday 21 – Sunday 22 June, 2008. As the organisers point out, science communication is a much more complex thing than scientific journals and scientific meetings:

Today the´sciences are linked to society through many different channels of communication. The public interfaces with science during controversies that involve scientists as well as journalists, politicians and the citizenry as a whole. This intersection of science and the public raises many questions about the motivations of, and constraints on, actors involved in producing information about science for non-professional audiences. It also raises some fascinating questions about the nature, contexts and goals of the public communication of science from both a contemporary and historic perspective. This conference aims to bring together the wide ranging strands of academia that consider science as it intersects with non-scientific cultures.

And the list of possible topics runs as follows:

Needless to say, the organisers encourage critical approaches to studying the public communication of technology and/or medicine, and they would also like to  see full panel submissions and roundtable sessions on all topics related to the social, cultural, political, and ethical issues surrounding science & the public.

Panel proposals shall include both a panel abstract and individual (up to 300 words) abstracts + contact information (name, affiliation, email).

Further inquiries and submissions to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com, not later than 14 March 2008.

(based on a mail from David A. Kirby, CHSTM, University of Manchester earlier today)

Medical Museion’s first large temporary exhibition — “Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing” — 

opened last Thursday (11 October) and the following night (which was the Copenhagen Culture Night) we had about 2500 visitors in six hours between 6pm and 12pm. Here are some photos from Friday night (click for more here): 

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Until recently blogs and blog posts have not been accepted as legitimate references in scientific writings. This state of affairs is seemingly about to change, however. The 2nd edition of the authoritative Citing Medicine: The National Library of Medicine Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers (2007) includes a new section (26C) with detailed instructions for how blogs and blog posts are best cited in scientific publications.

Okay, we are still a step away from peer-review of blog posts, but the mere fact that the NLM Style Guide now includes rules for blogs and blog posts is a step in the right direction. We may see big changes in scientific publishing practices in the years to come.

(thanks to medgadget for the tip)

In earlier posts (e.g., here, here and here) I’ve discussed new buzz-notions in contemporary biomedicine, like ‘translational medicine’. Another ubiquitous buzz-notion is ‘personalised medicine’ — i.e., “the use of detailed information about a patient’s genotype or level of gene expression and a patient’s clinical data in order to select a medication, therapy or preventative measure that is particularly suited to that patient at the time of administration” (quoted from Wikipedia) — which has been widely spread in the wake of the Human Genome Project.

‘Personalised medicine’ is one of those notions that disclose how most current science policy language users seem to lack basic historical awareness. For example, those who enthusiastically speak about ‘mode 2’ as a new mode of knowledge production often seem to be utterly unaware of the fact that mode 2-like science has been around since the 17th century. Same with ‘evidence based medicine’ — and ‘personalised medicine’.

Physicians in the 1960s didn’t have access to genome data, but their therapeutical measure were nevertheless of course based on detailed information about the patients’ clinical data in order to select medications, therapies or preventative measures that were particularly suited to each individual patient.

Postgenomics will provide much more extensive data sets, and may even give more precise basis for therapy. But the personalised approach as such of course didn’t emerge with postgenomics; it goes much further back. As Otniel E. Dror at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem points out, it actually goes back to Hippocratic medicine:

I am working on the concept of “personalized medicine” from a historical perspective. Looking back at ancient medicine (especially Greek and Roman) one can easily use the concept of the “The four Humors” embedded in the works of Hippocrates and onward as a source for the personalized differentiation of the medical treatment procedures and outcomes, e.g moving from Dyscrasia to Eucrasia.

Quoted from today’s issue of the H-SCI-MED-TECH-list, where Otniel Dror is also asking for help from other historians of medicine:

However I am missing specific examples in the literature describing actual use (if there are any) of such concepts for developing diagnosis and treatments adapted to the personal characteristics of the humoral state.

You can respond below or contact Otniel directly on otnield@ekmd.huji.ac.il.

45 faculty members and about 20 PhD-students throughout the University of Aarhus (Denmark) have just started a new interdisciplinary network for science, technology and medicine studies. See their website at www.stm.au.dk for news about conferences, seminars, PhD-courses, etc.; send an e-mail to stm@au.dk if you want to subscribe to their newsletter or if you are interested in learning more about specific events. If you are interested in their visitor’s programme please contact Assoc. Prof. Peter C. Kjaergaard (idepck@hum.au.dk).

Apropos biomedicine and aesthetics — this week’s (28 September) issue of Science presents the winners of the 5th annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge which the magazine organises in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Here’s one of the two winners in the photography category:

— which is a rendering of a CT-scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease. 182 thin CT ‘slices’ were stacked together to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head (more here).

And here’s a screen shot of the winner in the category non-interactive media:

— an advertising video called “Nicotine: The Physiologic Mechanism of Tobacco Dependence”, created by the scientific visualization company Hurd Studios and used by Pfizer to market their anti-smoking drug Chantix.

More winning photos in Science vol. 317 (no. 5846) pp. 1858-1863 (28 September 2007).

Nice pics, okay, and probably good advertising iconography — but where’s the aesthetic power?