July 2008

The journal Medical Humanities — one of the journals in the BMJ Group portfolio, started in the year 2000 as a twice-yearly special edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) — is on the outlook for new manuscripts.

The incoming editor Deborah Franklin (who also has her own blog), says that the journal has the ambition to (continue to) be

a leading international journal that reflects the whole field of medical humanities, with high quality articles relevant to humanities and arts scholars, social scientists and policy-makers, medical educators, health care professionals, and patients

and so she is looking for original research papers — both theoretical and empirical — written by historians, anthropologists, literature scholars, philosophers, film studies specialists, and economists etc. (she seem to have forgotten reflective doctors and biomedical scientists which used to be the most frequent contributors to the field in ‘the old days’). In other words, Medical Humanities is broadening its disciplinary profile.

The explicit editorial policy is that papers should be readable by

any well informed individual, in particular by both health care professionals without specific expertise in the humanities, arts or social sciences and by scholars in the humanities, arts or social sciences with no practical health care experience

which may give some problems in the future when humanities journals will increasingly be divided into A, B and C etc. levels of excellence. Will a journal aimed at “any well informed individual” survive in this hardening journal policy climate? I cannot find Medical Humanities on the ERIH initial lists, but the 2007 impact factor of its mother journal (JME) is 1.103.

Anyway, if you wish to submit a manuscript, go to http://submit-mh.bmj.com, and if you have any questions, write to mh@bmjgroup.com.

I’ve learned about several kinds of DNA — non-coding DNA, junk DNA, satellite DNA, selfish DNA, triple-stranded DNA and so forth — but I’ve never heard about sleep DNA before. Until today:

Clue: I’ve been surfing around to find a new mattress for my aching back (bad REM sleep = bad blog posts) and found this ad by Ergosleep for a new system for measuring your body posture when you lie down.

It’s all about personalized bed adjustment. The French version spells the connection out even better (‘Your sleep DNA code is unique. You too’). It’s nonsense, of course, but it sort of sounds reliable and scientific, doesn’t it?

So what’s next? Sit DNA? Look DNA (buzzy neologism for the refractive error of your lens, i.e., the numbers your optometrist writes down for you when you need to order a new pair of glasses or contact lenses)? Or walk DNA? (shoe size).

For a decade, University Museums in Scotland (UMIS) have organized biennial conferences dealing with themes like cultural entitlement and museums (2006), the significance of collections (2004), the alleged ‘death of museums’ (2000), etc. (see all programmes here).

This year’s conference in Aberdeen (20-21 November 2008) will focus on ‘The Contentious Museum’ because, say the organisers, “museums have become increasingly contentious places”.

I couldn’t agree more. Museums are situated in a tumultous contemporary world with all sorts of new, potentially disruptive social, economic, religious and cultural conflict patterns, and many of these serious conflicts are pervasively permeating the museum world and the curatorial profession.

But these are apparently not the kind of contentious issues that the organizers think about. They rather want to engage with slavery, repatriation of objects, the treatment of human remains and so forth; they want to discuss “how responding to such challenges can enable museums to depart from tradition and embrace different ways of thinking, working and developing new audiences”. Thus the first conference day will focus on the display and curation of human remains and the legacy of empire and slavery (2007 was the bicentenary of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade); on the second day Galton and eugenics will be among the topics (see the program here)

I’m not questioning the importance of discussing different opinions about the place of human remains, repatriation, slavery and eugenics in museums. But not only are these throroughly discussed issues, museums today are also confronted with even more challenging social and cultural problems. A conference theme like ‘The Contentious Museum’ would be better served to focus on some of these too.

For example, the large-scale processes of globalisation and marketisation have divided many museums into warring camps. There are ‘old-fashioned’ collection curators who behave as if museums were still national, research-based institutions for the preservation and solemn display of the cultural heritage for the educated classes and knowledge-hungry students. And there are ‘progressive’ managers and communication specialists who listen to the siren calls of the global ‘experience economy’ and try to turn museums into tourist traps to boost visitor statistics.

Another example is Science Museum’s counterpart to the 2006 Danish satricial Muhammad drawing incident, only in reverse. The museum decided to cancel a public meeting with James D. Watson last autumn because it was afraid that his racist remarks in The Sunday Times a few days earlier would alienate its audience (see earlier post here). Everyone agreed that Watson was a fool, but the decision to cancel the meeting was highly contested, also within the museum itself. Like the Danish Muhammad case, the Watson affair raised timely questions about free speech vs. cultural responsibility.

True, one or two talks in Aberdeen seem to bring up major contemporary contested issues. For example Clara Arokiasamy will speak about “Racial inequalities, multiculturalism, cultural diversity in Britain today: Are museums safe places for such discourses?” (see her and other abstracts here). But otherwise, there is not much in the program that indicates that this 6th biennial UMIS-conference will be remembered as a particularly controversial meeting.

I very much like pipettes as mundane lab artefacts. And I’m wild with Eppendorf (see earlier posts here and here) because they produce these little ephemeral biomedical objects (like microcentrifuge tubes) which are museologically much more interesting than the fancy and first-time-ever stuff that is usually displayed in science, tech and medical museums.

I’m also fascinated with biomedical music videos (like Illumina’s breakdancing lab bench objects) because these reveal that selling PCRs and microwells isn’t much different from selling kitchenware and H&M garment. And with biomedicine on YouTube because it says something about how the biomedical and biotech world is rapidly becoming attuned to the participatory web.

So what could be more exciting for a biomedical museologist than this Eppendorf sales video on Youtube on the theme ‘I love pipetting — how about you?’:

[biomed]J0s0Y3-BCaw[/biomed]

 

(see it in the right context, and better resolution, on Eppendorf’s website). Lyrics here.

It’s all about selling this new automated pipetting system called EpMotion (image from their catalogue):

* * * * * * * * (thanks to Bioephemera, yesterday, for the tip) 

Now at least two companies (ScientificMatch and GenePartner) are providing dating services (down to $199 per single at GenePartner) based on the pretty solid scientific finding (Claus Wedekind and Dustin Penn, Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation, vol 15, 2000) that women are more attracted to men who express less similar HLA genes. Sensing and classifying the expression of the HLA genes is something we do subconsciously (animalwise).

Biotech enthusiasts MedGadget, TechCrunch and Bertalan Meskó (ScienceRoll) are excited about the new prospects. Genetically based love at first sniff!

Absolutely fine with my experience. But wait a minute: what does ScientificMatch (“the science of love”) actually say?

• Chances are increased that you’ll love the natural body fragrance of your matches.
• You have a greater chance of a more satisfying sex life.
• Women tend to enjoy a higher rate of orgasms with their partners.
• Women have a much lower chance of cheating in their exclusive relationships.
• Couples tend to have higher rates of fertility.
• All other things being equal, couples have a greater chance of having healthier children with more robust immune systems.(my emphases)

Tendencies, chances? Well the last sentence says it all. “All other things being equal, couples have a greater chance …”. But things aren’t equal. And that’s what we call culture, stupid!

A profile is (says OED) “a short biographical sketch or character study, esp. of a public figure.” But the National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in Science site is more than a series of profiles—it’s also a potentially useful and searchable online collection of documents and iconographic material relating to “several prominent twentieth-century American biomedical scientists.”

Unfortunately, the site isn’t easy to find through NLM’s main site. It takes some navigational and operative mouse skills to discover it. Better use a search engine. The fact that it comes up first among around 70,000 hits (today) on Google — right before Wes Kim’s celebrated short video about the fictive time-lapse photographer Dr. Albert Chung — is a good measure of its popularity and a rare example of how a history of science site can triumph over YouTube.

Profiles in Science first launched in 1998 and now contains short biographical narratives and digitized documents from nineteen biomedical scientists plus a handful of important U.S. medical doctors and health officials. Parts of the online collection are physically available for inspection at the NLM; in other cases, the repositories are placed elsewhere (e.g., the Linus Pauling papers are in the archives of the Oregon State University Libraries.

There are some good reasons for the site’s popularity. Donald S. Frederickson or Martin Rodbell may not be that well known to the general public or historians of science, but Barbara McClintock and Linus Pauling of course are, and Joshua Lederberg and Marshall Nirenberg are still household names among biomedical scientists.

Furthermore, once you have found it, the site is reasonably easy to navigate and search. It is also regularly updated. Since last summer, five new scientist profiles have been added. Each person’s profile contains a short biography and a sometimes fairly detailed description of his or her professional work. This material — competently written by a group of NLM staff members, and as far as I can judge, authoritative and trustworthy — is definitely the best part of the site. To this should be added the digitized documents (PDF files of published papers, manuscripts, diaries, letters, photographs, audiotapes, video clips, for example) all nicely reproduced; the visual side is particularly strong and reflects NLM’s high standards.

But there are downsides.  Read More

“Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins” is the catchy title of an article in Genome Biology two months ago (vol. 9, issue 5, 2008; see online version here). The paper has received some attention in the blogosphere—not least because Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is one of the 23 co-authors of the paper.

Celebrity aside, both the project as such and the “million minds” metaphor is fascinating. WikiProteins is the first project (so far in beta) by the new semantic (concept) web initiative WikiProfessional-life sciences. It’s a database which automatically searches for information about proteins from a variety of other databases, e.g., UniProt/Swiss-Prot, and for associated concepts in articles from PubMed, and then makes the digested information available to the public (in practice = scientists) for further curating, editing and annotation.

In other words, instead of waiting for potential contributors to start from scratch, the WikiProtein-people are initiating the wiki fun by filling the database with a lot of information, so that the protein experts (“the million minds”) out there have something to work with and improve. As they say in the abstract: “We call on a ‘million minds’ to annotate a ‘million concepts’ and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery”.

Most pundits are impressed, but there has also been some criticism. On Nature’s Nascent-blog, bioinformatician Euan Adie has expressed his irritation with the hype: “There’s a very high crap to content ratio”.

This alleged hype aspect is what makes the metaphorical dimension of “Calling on a million minds” so interesting. One thing is that the title quite explicitly draws on the positive vibes of the wiki and web 2.0-movements. But aren’t there also parallells to the new forms of political process that we have been witnessing in recent years, for example in the last and the current US presidential elections? Like when Barack Obama calls on a million activists for taking part in the campaign and for fund-raising. (And hasn’t Obama too been accused of high crap to content ratio?)

So what’s the next catchy title in a systemic biology article? What about “Yes We Can: A Million Scientists Demand The Right to Curate Data for the Human Metabolome Project” (for HMP, see here).

(More comments on Scienceroll, bbgm, ars technica, The Tree of Life, Spreading Science, David Rothman, and Cellnews)

The Museum Boerhaave in Leiden is organising a conference on ‘Lessons in anatomy made easy: Anatomical models in scientific and cultural context’, 6-7 November 2008.

Anatomical models nowadays are made of plastic and so common that simple ones are sold in the department stores everywhere. The origins of these models are to be seen in the permanent exhibitions of many science museums. […] Museum Boerhaave invites historians of science, art historians and conservators with an interest in anatomical models, whether made from wax, plaster, papier-mâché or glass, to attend this conference.

The immediate occasion for the meeting is that the Museum Boerhaave has completed the restoration of their collection of papier-mâché anatomical models made by Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, allegedly one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The invitation speaks mainly about comparisons with other early kinds of anatomical models, like wax models. But I guess they would also welcome papers on more contemporary kinds of commercial anatomical models for comparative purposes. For further info, see http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/anatomy/overview.html.

(right: a 24 inch long Auzoux papier-maché model of the tongue, throat, larynx and windpipe: from Alex Peck Medical Antiques website) 

(via Simon Chaplin, MUSHM-link) 

What’s a ‘liquid image’ (or ‘the liquidity of the image’ for that sake)? The answer may be given at the Second International Conference on Image Science in the Göttweig Monastery near Vienna, 16-18 October.

The conference — which is organized by the Department für Bildwissenschaften at Donau Universität Krems (with the witty German subtitle Wider den ‘Analpha-BILD-ismus’) — will discuss the classification and historiography of the recent worlds of images in art, science and popular culture; and there is something in it for museums too:

Never before the world of images has changed so fast and the way images are produced transformed so drastically like in the latest presence: Second Life, Micromovies, Flickr, Virtual Reality, You Tube, Visual Music, Scientific Visualisation, Google Earth etc. are keywords standing for a multitude of new possibilities for individual producing, projecting and distributing of visual material […] Which artistic inspirations new worlds of images have to face? What influence does the medium have on the iconic character of the image? What chances and challenges do museums and image dealers face with the “liquidity” of the image?

Probably some of the keynote speakers — Felice Frankel (Harvard, MIT), Barbara Stafford (Chicago) and Peter Weibel (ZKM) — or other announced speakers will explain what the ‘liquidity’ of the image means and how this is relevant for science, medical and technology museums. Much more info here: http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dis/goettweig2008.

Apropos Fleur’s comment on the critical function of art — Royal College of Art student Revital Cohen‘s project ‘Life Support’ problematizes the possible future use of animals as medical devices:

Assistance animals – from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats – unlike computerised machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices? This project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement. The use of transgenic farm animals, or retired working dogs, as life support ‘devices’ for renal and respiratory patients offers an alternative to inhumane medical therapies. Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?

(from Cohen’s project description which also has a larger photo)

(thanks to Medgadget for the tip — in addition we make money not art has an excellent comment on Cohen’s project)