January 2008

In May last year a workshop on visualizations in the life sciences (“Graphing Genes, Cells and Embryos”) was held in Naples. The papers included a number of historical studies of interest for displaying biomedicine in a museum context, including studies of the history of:

• the visualization of chromosomes
• 3D-models of the Golgi apparatus
• representations of RNA
• the use of physical models to explore protein structure
• virtual 3D-embryos
• representations of gene regulation and cell signalling pathways and networks

and so forth (the abstracts from the 2007 meeting have been put together on this website).

The 2007 workshop will be followed up by a meeting at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, June 11-15, 2008. This second meeting will focus on a  fascinating and useful topic for medical and life science museum curators, viz., “how the life sciences visually mastered to manifest the dimensionalities living organisms exhibit when taking shape”: Read More

One of the great meeting events for us folks in the outer provinces of medicine science studies is the joint annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) — this year the theme is “Acting with science, technology and medicine”, and the meeting takes place in Rotterdam, 20-23 August.

As usual dead-line for abstracts and session proposals is tight, viz. 16 February. There are online submission forms on the 4S website. More information on the society websites: http://www.4sonline.org/ and http://www.easst.net/.

These use to be huge meetings with ten or more parallel session. But it is a good chance to get an overview of what is going on in some areas of science, technology and medicine studies. And the fact that this year’s program chair, Roland Bal, comes from the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam is an indication of the prominent place that medicine studies has got in the field — what used to be STS (science and technology studies) is now rather STMS (science, technology and medicine studies).

If you have seen our temporary exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing, you have probably also seen the room with Liv Carlé Mortensen‘s photo collages, ‘100 Light Years’. If so, you may be interested to read what the chairman of the Novo Nordisk Art Association (Novo Nordisk Kunstforening), Thomas Christiansen, writes about it on his blog. I quote (in free translation):

One of the fundamentally important — and most difficult — things in portrait art is to catch the personality behind the person portrayed, regardless of the medium: marble, oil, photo. As a spectator you usually relate to the portrait in two ways: either you get a general sense of a personality behind the portrait, or you really feel that you are meeting a real personality; the last situation is probably only possible if you know the person ‘in person’ and only rarely takes place. But when it happens it is a powerful experience.

What happened was that Thomas Christiansen suddenly discovered that his grand-aunt Gudrun was among the 16 collages in Liv’s collection: “The everyday was suddenly converted into art in a rather unusual and very personal way”.

Isn’t this a case of presence effects in art? 

The Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI) has just opened its Waywiser website. As of today it only contains 764 records out of the total of 20,000 objects in the collection, but the database is growing with a few hundred records every month; CHSI Director Peter Galison says (in a circulated email on Mersenne) that they will also add films and archival material to the site as time goes on.

The site mainly contains physical and chemical instruments and some anatomical models used in the teaching of psychology at Harvard, but not many medical objects so far. Nevertheless, it is worth visiting for medical museum curators, especially for its good interface and picture quality, which lives up to current standards for public collection databases; for example, they use Zoomify to enable zooming-in and paning of the pics, and the resolution is so high that one really gets something out of the zooming function. Several objects are photographed from many different angles and in exquisite detail.

The site is not without problems, however. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide links to other related websites (when will historians of science learn to link?). And I also found a disturbing case of possible copycat curating. Here’s a screen shot of a record of one of the (somewhat atypical) items:

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This test for colorblindness, a box with bundles of dyed wool in different colours, was invented by 19th century physiologist Frithiof Holmgren at the University of Uppsala, and became “a reliable and standard routine check for railway and shipping employees” in the early 20th century. Actually, postdoc Jan Eric Olsén here at Medical Museion published his dissertation about Holmgren’s physiology of vision a couple of years ago (Liksom ett par nya ögon: Frithiof Holmgren och synsinnets problematik, Lund 2005; abstract here).

I don’t know much about these bundles of wool — they look like a nice example of how low-tech scientific instruments can play an important social and cultural role (cf. David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old) — so I made a quick internet search and discovered that the University of Toronto Museum of Scientific Instruments also have a ‘Professor Holmgren’s Test For Color Blindness’.

In fact the similar object in the Toronto collection is better curated. Their record describes in detail how the test was used, it puts the invention in its historical context, and, most importantly, it contains references to some relevant secondary literature. Furthermore — and this is what is disturbing — when you compare the two object records, it looks like the Harvard collection record is simply a resumé of the Toronto museum record.

Particularly striking is that both contain the same uncommon spelling error of Holmgren’s first name (Fithiof instead of Frithiof), and that both have misspelled the name of the railway line where Holmgren made his colorblindness test (“Uppsala-Gabole line”, should be “Uppsala-Gäfle line”). (On the other hand the CHSI curators haven’t bothered to mention the relevant secondary references.) In other words, it looks like the Harvard CHSI curatorial team has made a shortcut and simply condensed the text from the Toronto museum database without proper reference.

Hopefully, what seems like a case of copycat curating is not a general feature of this otherwise nicely designed and potentially important on-line historical instrument database, but a singular mistake in the rush to get the site ready for public introduction.

The possible copycat mistake shouldn’t draw attention away from the very fine use of iconographical material on the site. The Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments is to be congratulated to an overall good and useful product — and with some revisions in their curatorial procedures it may well set standards in the field.

Is there a point in making a medical museum like ours part of an ‘internet of things’ — i.e., a global network of miniaturised sensors and radio transmitters attached to physical things, thus connecting the material world to the digital internet?

The rapid technological development invites to leaps of museological imagination. RFID-tags and barcodes open up for a seamless connection between museum showcases/storerooms and internet sites. Just a decade ago, the ‘internet of things’ was nothing but techno-fiction. As usual when it comes to IT nothing seems to be impossible, however. There are indeed tons of technical, economic, legal, political etc. problems to be solved first, but both academia and industry have been moving along towards a realisation of the vision for some years now (see, e.g., The Internet of Things 2008 conference in Zürich in March).

I didn’t expect anything about museum applications on the Zürich programme, but I thought there would have been a workshop or session about the ‘internet of things’ on the program of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference in Montreal in early April. This doesn’t seem to be the case, which is a bit disappointing (even though there may be a few barcodes hiding behind more innocent session titles).

Because the topic has been thought of for a while. For example, archaeologist Shawn Graham (Electric Achaeologist) envisions internet-of-things-based exhibitions where visitors spot artefacts on the shelves and when pointing to the object barcodes they instantly get access to excavation reports, secondary literature etc. through the web. Internet pundit Clay Shirky imagines how even “the smallest relic in a collection” can get a RFID tag which makes it “traceable, updateable, auditable, Google-able and even be its own Web page, living on-line as well as in a glass case” (cited from Archimuse here).

There are skeptics, of course, including Shirky himself:

If we can search nationally for certain objects, would our funders then be able to ‘rationalize’ the duplicated collection items? It could be like the way national supermarket chains use EPOS (electronic point of sale) technology to track inventories and control stock levels on a hourly basis: good from one point of view – keeping tabs on collection items would be easy, but bad in that it could diminish local, regional or personal responsibility for curation and collection policy.

To such political warnings one could add aestetic and existential questions. What about the relation between unmediated material presence, on the one hand, and mediated digital information and visualisations on the other? Will the constant interpretative power of the on-line connection kill the immediacy and aesthetic apprehension of the artefact ‘itself’?

And what about the joy of being off-net? Today, museums are internet-free zones outside the ubiquitous Google empire. Can they remain cultural reservations. Will the possible invasion of RFID tags and barcodes destroy this quality? And is it a quality?

The European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) is holding its 14th congress at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 17–21 September 2008. The congress theme is ‘The Body: Simulacra and Simulation: models, interventions, and prosthetics’. Here’s the synopsis:

Models in wax or plastic, wood or metal, plaster or papier-mâché are held in almost every medical museum in the world; while the development of surgical interventions and prosthetics has also led to a range of materials being used to replicate and imitate external and internal parts and movements of the body. Congress 2008 will explore aspects of the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, surgical interventions and prosthetics. It is hoped that the conference will be the catalyst for the development of a European-wide electronic catalogue of models and prosthetics held in medical collections.

Keynote speakers for the Congress include Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen) and Ken Arnold (Head of Public Programmes, Wellcome Trust).

There will be more info on the EAMHMS’s website later.

Unfortunately the Edinburg meeting partly overlaps with the congress on university museums in Manchester 16-20 September (see earlier post here). Hopefully there will be a possibility to attend both without sacrificing too much.

The Bio-Rad corporation has released a music video called “Scientists for better PCR” to promote their new 1000-series of thermal cyclers (PCR machines).

It’s well done indeed. But I think MedGadget get it wrong when they write that “it does successfully fill the time between test tube changes”.

The model for the Bio-Rad video is apparently the 1985 bestselling “We are the world” song by Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones, which was produced for charity reasons, to raise funds to help famine-relief efforts in Africa. The 45 singers gathered as artists for a better world, like Bob Geldof‘s Band Aid and Live Aid concerts.

Bio-Rad is probably not interested in raising funds for anyone else but their own shareholders. So the biotech company is just exploiting the good vibrations of popular culture for commercial reasons. Bad taste! What would Naomi Klein (No Logo) think of this?

Better fill the time between test tube changes with some serious reflections about the advertising strategies of the transnational biotech market instead.

Like many museums around the world, Medical Museion is owned by a university (University of Copenhagen); and like other university museums we are not only a player on the international academic arena but we also constitute a link between the university and the surrounding local and regional community. Our research projects are oriented towards an international audience, but our exhibitions are mainly visited by people from the Øresund region (the Copenhagen area, Malmö etc). 

Same with our internet activities. This blog is written in English for visitors from Chile in southwest to South Korea in northeast, while our website is in Danish.

I came to think about this balance between the global and the local when I read the recent call for papers to the 8th International Conference of University Museums and Collections (UMAC) to be held 16-20 September 2008 at the University of Manchester on the theme ‘University Museums and the Community’.

For much of their history, universities were elite learning environments, sheltered from the outside world by their ‘ivory towers’, and taking their model from the monastery. Since at least the 1960s, though, universities have been playing an increasingly important role in their local and regional communities. One of their early roles was to form extra-mural departments which offered courses to members of the public. More recently, universities have begun to recognize their cultural, economic and social role within their communities. Universities are often major employers; some historic universities play a major role in the tourist economy; and some make a significant contribution through spin-off companies formed as a way of bringing commercial applications to university research.

The theme of UMAC’s 8th International Conference therefore focuses on one of the most pressing issues today for university museums across the globe, which is how they can best act as two-way bridges between the world of the university and the many and varied communities, outside the university, within it in the form of students and staff using the museums in their leisure time, and the global ‘virtual’ community of the Internet.

Proposals are invited for the following five themes:

• Public engagement with academic research
• University museums and the internet community
• The role of the university museum in community development (outreach,
  tourism, economic development, attracting diverse audiences etc)
• The role of the university museum in formal and informal learning
  (i.e. schools, families)
• Marketing to the university audience as leisure users (i.e. attracting
  academics and students visiting outside formal teaching and research
  programmes)

People are encouraged to send in proposals for workshop sessions and panels rather than conventional papers. More info here. Deadline for papers is 31 March 2008. 

(See also earlier post about museums between the global and the local here) 

Apropos our perpetual interest in human remains (see earlier posts here and here) — Tiffany Jenkins is a writer and researcher (in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kent, Canterbury) who is exploring the cultural meanings of human remains in museums in her blog TiffanyJenkins — an interesting mix of medical history, archeology, art and museum thinking.

Today’s good news for this humble blog is that we’ve been nominated as one of the top-five in the category “Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog of 2007” — a contest organised by MedGadget: internet journal of emerging medical technologies.

Our four competitors in this category (there are seven parallel categories altogether) are the following awesome blogs: Ves Dimov’s (Cleveland) Clinical Cases and Categories, medical librarian David Rothman’s davidrothman.net, John D. Halamka’s (Harvard Medical School) Life as a Healthcare CIO, and Bertalan Meskó’s (Debrecen, Hungary) ScienceRoll.

These are formidable competitors indeed. The nominating committe says they were selecting from among “literally dozens of candidates in each and every category”, so I think we have to be grateful for being chosen together with these very fine medical blogs.

That said — we’re in it to win! So if you think Biomedicine on Display is the best blog in the “medical technologies/informatics” category, then don’t hesitate to give us your click here!!

(Admitted — “medical technologies/informatics” is probably not the best description of Biomedicine on Display. However, there is no category for medical history, medical science studies, medical communication studies etc., so I guess we were nominated in this category for lack of better choices.)