September 2008

In yesterday’s issue of Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) bioscientists Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith have an interesting article titled “Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy”.

The authors notice that scientific institutions have been pretty slow to adopt the blog medium, in spite of the fact that both institutions and bloggers have a common interest in advancing public engagement with science. They suggest that:

By combining the credibility of institutions — trusted gate-keepers for scientific truth — with the immediacy and networking infrastructure of blogs, we believe that these shared goals can be better served with benefits to both partners.

More specifically, they propose “a roadmap” for turning blogs into educational tools for institutions (mainly universities). They present examples of collaborations that can serve as a models for others to emulate, and they offer suggestions for improving upon blog platforms to make them more acceptable to institutional hosts.

In many respects, this is all very commendable. The PloS-article describes and evaluates a number of interesting institutional blog initiatives, like Rudd Sound Bites (www.ruddsoundbites.typepad.com), the ChemTools blog (chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog, the Berkeley Lab Energy and Environmental Research Blog (bleer.lbl.gov), and the Oxford Internet Institute (www.oii.ox.ac.uk), and so forth. Very useful stuff, which many academics (and not only scientists) could learn a lot from.

One important critical point though. The authors seem oblivious of a crucial aspect of the relationship between individual science bloggers and institutions engaged in science communicating, namely the power dynamics involved. True, they are aware of the fact that the science blogosphere is a bottom-up driven network. But they don’t expand this observation into an analysis of the conflict patterns involved.

For a thorough understanding of how blogs and institutions relate to each other in a science communication network, however, one has to take such potential and actual conflict patterns into account. After all, institutional actors have quite different set of political and economic agendas than singular science actors.

This was in fact one of the themes we discussed in the ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0′ session at the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference in June (see paper here).

Generally speaking, I’m afraid the growing literature on science blogging reflects a widespread naïve view of the medium. Like the authors of the PLoS-article, most commentators on blogging as a genre of science communication are pushing for the medium with their critical mindset on standby, even disabled. In other words, there is too much technological optimism, and too little critical analysis involved in the current discourse on science blogging.

As several historians of the contemporary life sciences have pointed out, much of biological thinking is metaphorical. Not least in genomics. The race for the human genome in the 1990s and much of subsequent postgenomics has been guided by a series of metaphors that draw on linguistics, management science, and information and communication science.

Accordingly, computer science analogues have flourished. The genome is said to contain the ‘code’ or ‘blueprint’ for development, the ribosomes ‘read’ the instructions, and ‘information’ is carried on to proteins through ‘transcription’ and ‘translation’ (see, for example, Susanne Knudsen’s analysis of the ‘code’ metaphor in ‘Communicating novel and conventional scientific metaphors: a study of the development of the metaphor of genetic code’ (Publ. Commun. Sci., vol 14, pp. 373-92, 2005).

But linguistic and computer analogies are not very helpful when it comes to the proteome with its estimated half million or so specific protein-protein interactions (the ‘interactome‘). What kinds of metaphors are available if one wants to capture this rich and complex protein universe?

This is not just an academic question, but also a practical one: metaphors are indispensible tools for science communicators. So reflective answers to this question would be very useful for science and medicine museums that wish to present protein science and proteomics in their displays — as we are planning to do in a small extramural exhibition next year.

Browsing the literature gives a few tentative hints. Proteins are usually spoken about in quite mundane metaphorical terms, a far cry from the informational control center terminology that guided the rise of genomics. Thus the only major historical overview in book form so far, written by now retired protein researchers Charles Tanford and Jacqueline Reynolds (Oxford UP, 2001), is aptly titled Nature’s Robots.

Others — for example this University of Washington site — liken proteins to the ‘work-horses’ of the life processes. The two images reproduced in this post also suggest metaphors that gesture towards a mechanical, workman-filled world. The small image above illustrates a proposed ‘cogwheel model’ for signal transduction across membranes, involving a transmembrane protein receptor in the form of a four-helical coil. The model was on the cover of Cell (8 September, 2006), explained as “a gear box with four cogwheels” (credit: Martin Voetsch, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology).

The second image is also a ‘cogwheel model’, in this case of a protein complex in yeast cytoplasm that contributes to mRNA decay (credit: European Molecular Biology Laboratory; from The Scientist 22, issue 9, p. 55, 2008)

There are other interesting metaphors around. University of Texas oncologist Gus Pappas has likened the proteome to ‘a play’s cast’, a list of the ‘Dramatis Personae’ of the cell (see ‘A new literary metaphor for the genome or proteome’, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, vol. 33 (1), p. 15, 2006).

Maybe one could try further along these lines. Not in terms of literary or theatrical metaphors though, but in terms of politics. For example, imagine the cell as a city like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where a small elite caste of nucleic acids stand against a diverse multitude of life-producing worker-proteins — a proteomic metaphor that reflects some of the basic aspects of capitalism.

Although I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades writing biographies and reflecting on biography as a genre, I’ve always been very fond of auto-biographies, especially those of academics and professionals.

The reason for this fondness is probably that autobiographies stimulate my fantasies about how my life trajectory could have been different. By engaging in an inner dialogue between the autobiographer’s and my own voices, it’s not only possible to come a little closer to the other’s mind and practice, but maybe one can even learn a little more about one’s own decisions, many mistakes and occasional successes.

It doesn’t really matter if the story is accurate or not. After all, autobiography is closer to fictional writing than biography, which in turn is closer to faction (history). For that reason autobiography is a better genre than biography for the kind of ‘souci de soi’ (care of self)-practices, which Pierre Hadot, and later Michel Foucault, have explored (in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault and The History of Sexuality, respectively).

I use to read all kinds of academic and professional self-writing with great pleasure. But for job-related reasons I keep a special eye on medical memoirs and autobiographies.

Frankly, more often than not, this feels more like a duty than a pleasure. Because medical self-writing is largely dominated by physicians and medical researchers who sometimes seem to believe that their lives are important just because they happened to construct a useful apparatus, or described a rare syndrome, or made an important physiological discovery.

True, such elite narratives can be potent sources for later medical history writing. But they are not necessarily recipes for interesting memoirs or autobiographies. The historical importance of a life’s work is often reversely proportional to the richness of the life lived. Moreover, the literary quality of many of these medical doctors’ autobioi varies enormously, most of them gathering around the lower end of my aesthetic sensibility meter. Most are quite tedious, few stick to my memory.

However, the lives of people from other medical professions — nurses, midwifes, public health workers, medical technicians and so forth, that is, people who have not been Very Important People but who sometimes just happen to have lived enigmatic and engaging lives — not seldomly make for more interesting reads.

Unfortunately, these other medical professionals rarely get the brilliant idea to go about writing their autobiography. Not Very Important People in the medical professions apparently do not believe they have something interesting to tell. So each time I come across one of these medical staff autobioi I get pretty excited.

As for example the other day, when my Google Reader announced a blogpost by Norwegian medical videographer Øystein Horgmo titled ‘How did it come to this?’. It is touching because he focuses on how his girlfriend’s little sister died of leukemia a few years ago and how this experience propelled him to into combining his former, pretty disparate, professional trainings in nursing and video filming to become a medical videographer (and in my opinion a very reflexive one).

Horgmo’s essay is pretty short and not stylistically sophisticated. But it is nevertheless a fine example of how autobiographical writing by medical professionals can fulfil the function of ‘care of self’. As Horgmo himself writes towards the end: ‘That’s my story. I’ve found the sense of meaning I was searching for’.

Our colleagues in Leeds (i.e., the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds and the Thackray Medical Museum) are re-advertising a studentship for a project on nineteenth-century midwifery instruments. The successful candidate will be part of a group working on 19th-century topics connected with museums and material culture.

Applicants must be either UK residents (full studentship) or EU nationals (fees only). Relevant backgrounds include history of science, technology and/or medicine, museum studies and history. The studentship supports three years’ full-time work, but can be taken up on either a full-time or a part-time basis (over five years).

The closing date for applications is Friday 31 October 2008, and then interviews will take place in late November. Prospective candidates are encouraged to contact Adrian Wilson (a.f.wilson@leeds.ac.uk) or Graeme Gooday (g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk).

(image of early 19C obstetric forceps from Medical Museion collections)

Last week’s great news for us here at Medical Museion was that our International Advisory Board — which held its first meeting in late May (see earlier post here) — has completed its report to the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

The report says, among other things, that “the results of the museum activities were evaluated as being highly qualified and promising for future work”. The board members further pointed out that Medical Museion has “been able to create a highly profiled research environment” and they “praised and expressed their respect for MM’s internationally oriented research focus” (quoted from the faculty’s press release).

The Board also emphasised how important the museological research program is for the further development of the visions for Medical Museion. We couldn’t agree more — and are already looking forward to the next Advisory Board meeting, scheduled for June 2009.

Our good colleague Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has made an interesting observation about trends in science communication in the Times Literary Supplement (‘No strings’, March 28, pp.28-29).

Reflecting on a number of newly published books on cosmology, Jim points out that the role of the individual science writer seems to have been enhanced. Science communicators nowadays (compared to when Jim was a student, or what?) have a stronger personal presence in their writing, as though they “have decided that their readers need to see them as human beings”. It’s no longer sufficient to rely on writing technique and style, he notices — “personal reference, opinion and anecdote are now the favoured tools”.

Jim doesn’t sound too enthusiastic about this trend, although he seems to realise that it’s here to stay: “If history is autobiography, it seems that popular cosmology is going the same way”.

Despite his somewhat dismissive attitude to this personal stuff, Jim is right. Science writing is indeed becoming more author-centred (and in my humble view this is definitely to the better). What’s surprising is rather that — compared to other genres of writing — the arrival of the conspicuous first-person narrator and his/her whereabouts in science writing is such a late phenomenon (I’m not sure that it such a new thing, but let’s leave that for another post).

In other words, science communication has been one of the last bastions of impersonal writing. In journalism, in contrast, the self-reflexive and visible author has been around for decades. And in academia it all began in the 1970s and 1908s with anthropologists who wrote about the relation between themselves and their subjects. Today, the media abound with scholars who excel in self-presentation — just look how celebrity historian Simon Schama managed to fill the screen in his BBC series A History of Britain (2001), reducing the past to a mere background and extension of his own ego. Speak about history as autobiography!

However, the presence of the author in science communication isn’t restricted to the professional popularizers. ‘Real’ scientists too have become much more relaxed when it comes to flashing their egos in newspaper and magazine interviews. Many science magazines (like my favourite The Scientist) carry personal interviews with scientists. Websites and (especially) blogs are media that are tailor-made for scientists who are eager to present their science with a personal touch (see here for an earlier post on scientific self-presentation practice on the web). The genre of scientific autobiography too is having a revival with the publication of celebrity scientists’ memoirs, like James D. Watson’s (see here), Craig Venter’s (see here) and so forth.

The only kind of science communicators who seem to resist the self-presentational trend is apparently science museum curators. I still haven’t seen Jim expressing his ego through the Museum of the History of Science. Or perhaps I’m just blind — as Camilla pointed out earlier this year, cultural history exhibition curators employ rather subtle ways for sneaking themselves into their shows.

Eager to train myself for the role of a future biocitizen, I’ve looked in vain for a guide to bars, cafés and restaurants with medical motifs. I mean, if Jessica hadn’t put this pic online, I wouldn’t have known that there is a Pharmacy Bar in Washington, DC, would I?

Owned by a Latvian pharmacist’s grandson, it has table tops decorated with pills, mirrored medicine cabinets, display cases with potions and images of medicinal containers along the walls (says the Washington Post City Guide reviewer; more reviews here).

As prospective biocitizens of the world we cannot rely on Jessica and other locals to provide us with worthy tourist info. Wouldn’t a world guide to similar bars and restaurants around the world (including Singapore’s The Clinic, see earlier post here) be a worthy project for Intute or the Wellcome Trust? Should be combined with Google Maps of course.

… check out these pics from the installation of the brand new 32 tons heavy 7 Tesla experimental whole-body MRI at the Charité Hospital in Berlin (via Medgadget). Note the caption to the third image: the only thing the blogpost-writer knows about the guy inside the magnet is that he didn’t wear his nipple rings that particular day 🙂

These super-machines support the ‘contemporary-medical-museum doctrine’, which I presented to a conference group on contemporary medical museums in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden some years ago (and which some of my colleagues thought was baloney). On the one hand significant medical objects are becoming smaller and smaller (nanomedicine), on the other hand some instruments are becoming bigger and bigger (like these scanners). In contrast, human-sized medical artefacts are becoming less and less signifiant for what’s going on in the medical system.

This tendency — which is analogous to the situation in particle physics where bigger and bigger accelerators are needed to provide insights into progressively more tiny scientific objects — makes medical museum acquisitioning and collection management increasingly difficult. Today medical museum storage rooms are filled with human sized artefacts. But the storage rooms of the future will probably be more like a combination of those they have in museums of transportation (with really big objects like airplanes) and those they have in biobanks (liquid nitrogen freezers to keep molecular and cellular samples).

In other words the major future problem for medical museums is a peculiar combination of lack of space and lack of visibility.

Having an affection for scientific biography/autobiography, I was thinking of how I could possibly engage with the conference ‘Academic Autobiography, Intellectual History, and Cultural Memory in the 20th Century’ to be held 26-28 March, 2009 at Universidad de Navarra in Spain.

The aim of the meeting is to engage with current discussions among historians, literary critics, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. about how intellectual history and cultural memory may be developed, articulated, and promoted through autobiography. In other words, the organizers emphasise themes like

• the academic as author/historian
• academic life writing as history or cultural discourse
• academic autobiography as intellectual history
• life writing and the definitions of academic disciplines
• the intersection between private and public lives in academic autobiographies
• academic autobiography as a literary or historical genre
• the ways in which the notion of literary or historical discourse may be rethought in the context of this form of writing
• the ways academic autobiographies challenge our notions of historiography or literary analysis.

The limitaton to the 20th century is fine. But what about the organizers’ understanding of what counts as ‘academic autobiography’? Humanities and social science scholars like historian Eric Hobsbawm, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cultural critic Edward Said and others are mentioned, but scientists are apparenty not thought of as ‘academics’ in this context.

Yet the genre of scientific autobiography has a long and interesting history (also in the 20th century), which could be drawn upon for qualifying the discussion. Just think about how James D. Watson’s first autobiography, The Double Helix (1968) has changed contemporary perceptions of the life sciences! Its cultural impact led to it being ranked among the top ten titles on Modern Library’s 1998 list of best 20th century non-fiction books together with classics like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. (Watson’s second autobiography, Avoid Boring People [2007; review here] hasn’t made it to any list yet, though).

How would studies of scientific autobiography add to the conference theme? In many ways scientific autobiography is not much different from literary or political autobiography. Except in one crucial way, namely that the author’s understanding of self in terms of science may influence his/her understanding of what it means to write an autobiography.

Biotech maverick Craig Venter recently employed this autobiographical trope in A Life Decoded (review here). He claimed that he saw his life narrative as the result of a genome that writes reflexively about itself. It wasn’t very convincingly done, and at first I dismissed the idea as terribly naïve. But thinking about it again, I believe he points to an interesting space for future self-writing.

As the postgenomic worldview — and especially the results of molecular neuroscience — is spreading in our culture (at least the secular part of it; religiously based cultures are probably immune), more and more people will probably understand their selves as complex biological systems, as intricate protein-protein interaction and metabolic machines. To think about oneself as a bundle of biomolecular reactions may, I suggest, become a pervasive existential motif in future autobiographical narratives. Michel Houellebecq has already played with similar ideas in The Possibility of an Island (see here).

I don’t think it’s as far-fetched as it immediately sounds. Freudian understandings of the self became an immensely influential trope in biographical and autobiographical writing in the first half of the 20th century. The explanatory power of postgenomic, molecular neuroscience may become equally influentual for the understanding of self in autobiographical writing. Venter’s attempt wasn’t convincing, but other and better attempts will hopefully follow.

Anyway, I probably won’t have time to send something in — they want a 500-word abstract before 15 October. More info about the conference here.

Back in 2006 we wrote enthusiastically about the first issue of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments — the aim of which is to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. A “YouTube for test tubes”, as it was then called.

Since then JoVE has published more than 200 videos of laboratory procedures. Now (says Nature, 4 Sept, p 13), the content of JoVE will be indexed in the MEDLINE base and thus available through the PubMed search engine. An interesting policy move from the side of the National Library of Medicine, because it means that the video format is now being endorsed on a par with text articles as an acknowledged form of publication (cf. how NLM last year began to endorse blogs as publications, see earlier post here).

JoVE is a potentially great source for exhibitions on contemporary biomedicine, either for direct use, or indirectly, as an inspiration for producing new videos for public outreach of laboratory practices. The videos demonstrate how the laboratory has its roots in manual labour, and are a reminder about how thoroughly materially grounded biomedical practices are.

These and similar video repositories are a great complement to ethnographic description of laboratory practice and may contribute further to the rejuvenation of studies of the laboratory as a knowledge production space that Dominique Vinck and others are currently involved in (see, for example the special issue on laboratory studies in Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, vol. 1 (n° 2), 2007).