November 2007

It’s not directly history of contemporary medicine — but we could nevertheless learn much from the curation project “Från matematikmaskin till IT” (translation probably not necessary 🙂 initiated in 2004 by the Swedish Computer Association (Dataföreningen i Sverige) together with the Department of History of Technology and Science at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

The project focuses on generating new historical source material through interviews, witness seminars and autobiographical narratives. They are also collecting and curating images, artefacts and archival material relating to computers and information technology from the last 50 years.

The scope and size of the project is impressive, as is the enthusiasm and the logistics. Readers of Swedish (a north Germanic language spoken by about 12 mill. people in Sweden and parts of Finland and Minnesota) can read more on the project’s website/blog (powered by Drupal).

(thanks for the tip, Isabelle)

If you happen to pass by Oxford (UK) early next week, use the occasion to attend the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine seminar on Monday 12 November, when Miguel Garcia-Sancho will speak about “Creating a genetic language: DNA sequencing and the emergence of the modern biological databases (1965-1985)” (47 Banbury Road at 2.15 pm).

Here’s some background info extracted from the net:

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Couldn’t sleep last night. Giorgio Agamben‘s books use to be the perfect over-the-counter remedy against insomnia, so I began reading his latest collection of essays (Profanations, Zone Books, 2007) and was just about to fall asleep when my eyes fell on this line (on p. 83):

The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact.

which made me wide-awake again. So here it goes:

The ‘Museum’ in Agamben’s vocabulary is not just a physical place (building) with collections and exhibitions, but “the separate dimension to which what was once — but is no longer — felt as true and decisive has moved” (p. 84). Agamben’s ‘Museum’ thus also includes the hundreds of properties on Unesco’s World Heritage List, national parks and other nature reserves (like Grand Canyon), protected ethnic groups, and so forth.

The ‘Museum’ pace Agamben is “the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing”, and as such it “occupies exactly the space and function once reserved for the Temple”. Once pilgrims travelled to sacred sites; today tourists “restlessly travel in a world that has been abstracted into a Museum”.

This contemporary mass pilgrimage involves a separation from the world of everyday practice:

the tourists celebrate on themselves a sacrificial act that consists in the anguishing experience of the destruction of all possible use,

Agamben says, and adds (p. 85) that “nothing is so astonishing” as the fact that the 650 million people who visit the ‘Museum’ each year

are able to carry out on their own flesh what is perhaps the most desparate experience that one can have: the irrevocable loss of all use, the absolute impossibility of profaning

Needless to say, Agamben’s analysis of the ‘Museum’ (including museums) is quite different from that of the museum and tourism industry. But this shouldn’t keep us from asking if Agamben is right in suggesting that “the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation” (p. 92)

And if this is the case, what are the implications for museum politics in general? And for Medical Museion in particular? And what would ‘profanation’ imply in the contemporary medical (history) museum field?

Grab your mouse and click for a discount ticket to Prague later this week to see the 3rd International Festival for Arts, Sciences and Technologies (enter3), 8-11 November.

Some of the works displayed seem to be very relevant for our biomedicine-on-display-project, for example Linda Čihářová‘s Streptomyces installation where “science methodology meets artistic creation in ‘performative’ photography'”:

Says Linda Čihařová:

I decided to study the photographs of the Laboratory of Bioinformatics environment by similar tools which scientist use there to study Streptomyces bacteria. Their research is based on analyzing, modeling, and simulating regulatory processes in the cell and they use bioinformatics approaches, tools and databases to interpret the data. In my work I perform similar processes on several photographs made in their laboratory and from this semi-artistic, semi-scientific and even pseudoscientific method, I hope to gain a different view of the photographs themselves and the limits of the medium (quoted from this site)

Or this one (Pavel Kopriva, Nanoface):

which he describes as a “new chapter of portrait history in the age of nanotechnology”:

Video and photography document an artistic experiment with nanofibres used in modern medicine to create artificial tissues. On the scale of the cell, small fibers are formed and the resulting nanoarchitecture is used to filter harmful elements. In the artwork, the nanoarchitecture is used for creating ‘artistic’ scaffold by actively changing the organization of nanofibres. The complicated technique of using electrospinning and the difference between the conducting and non-conducting base is used as a new type of portrait technique.

Cool!

I spent an hour last Wednesday at the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, DC. It’s not a museum in the usual sense of the word: they have not one single artefact (neither historical nor contemporary). But I understand why they don’t want to call themselves a Science Center, because that term smacks of a building with herds of school kids running around pressing buttons to try make laser-illuminated giant plastic dinosaurs roar.

This is not what the Koshland wants to do. Owned by the National Academy of Sciences (US) they cater for educated adults who want to be informed about some of the important science-related challenges in our contemporary world, like global warming, infectious diseases, etc.

One needs at least a high-school degree to make sense of some of the texts and the advanced interactives. It’s not for the feeble-minded. But that said, the Koshland does it very well. 

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Some medical (history) museums and exhibitions — like the Wellcome Collection in London — are easy to find and have a welcoming (!) attitude to visitors. Others are more of a challenge.

Last Tuesday I went to the (US) National Museum of Health and Medicine for a visit behind the public area. Curator Alan Hawk guided me around their rich collections, and personally I felt taken very well care of. But for the general public a visit to the NMHM is mildly off-putting.

Located in the northern part of Washington DC the museum is quite difficult to reach by means of public transport. It is placed on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, there are no signs to help you find it, and visitors have to undergo two security checks: first at the campus gates and then again at the entrance to the museum where they take a photo and a copy of your ID.

And finally, after having made your way through the security thicket you are confronted with this behemoth: Read More

British historian of science Jim Endersby’s learned and charming A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (a sort of history of biology through the lens of its experimental organisms, i.e., fruit flies, zebra físhes, bacteriophages, cress plants, etc.) is the first history of science book I’ve seen that is being marketed by means of specially designed badges and posters.

Here are the badges placed on copies of the book on the University of Harvard Press book table at the History of Science Society meeting in Arlington, Va. and the matching poster:

(it’s the humble author of this blog post to the left browsing the book). Together with the website the badges will probably contribute to this becoming a bestseller. I’ve only read half of it so far, and it’s really good — and charming!