Our own Camilla Mordhorst has been interviewed in the last issue of Riksutställningar’s newsletter (in Swedish). Most exhibitions in cultural history are amazingly traditional, she claims. The Wellcome Collection in London is one of the few which have developed new, exciting narrative techniques, and so has the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg. But otherwise most museums seem to be afraid of experimenting too much. Camilla suggests that museums shall “give visitors a brainstorm instead of a linear time-flow”, a kind of ”additive narration” she calls it. She also points to the problem with invisible curators; facts and artefacts are often presented in a way so that visitors cannot see how they were chosen: “When you cut out the sender you inhibit the language of the exhibition”. Finally, as a curator you don’t have to be subjective, but neither should you pretend to be neutral: “Like a good article, an exhibition has to be argumentative and seductive: it shall be carried forward by statements, either simple or complex”.
During the medical garbage collecting day in late May, we brought in a number of wonderful and interesting medical artefacts to our collections, including this plastic mannequin from the Department of Odontology (it’s Camilla to the left).
Now Vanessa tells us that Steve Erenburg (a.k.a. radio-guy), a New York based artefact dealer, has this dental mannequin 
called Dentman — an aluminum head sitting on a cast iron lab stand — for sale for $750!
Those $750 would have financed the whole medical garbage collection day!
Which gives me an idea. The Ministry of Science in this country wants its universities to engage more in private enterprise. So maybe we should begin to think in terms of collecting medical items for sale!
Actually, as a university museum under the Ministry of Science, Medical Musieon is not formally regulated by the Danish museum law (which is a Ministry of Culture thing). So we could easily begin a two-tiered acquisition strategy. Some artefacts could be collected for lofty heritage reasons, others for the medical antiquities market.
Maybe it’s time to start a Medical Museion Medical Antiquities shop as a PPP (public-private parnership) on the premises here in Bredgade?
The other side of the story is that private dealers in medical antiquities constitute a huge unexplored source of artefacts for medical history museums. The growth of an internet-based medical-historical artefact market is a new situation for our kind of museums. Are medical history museums moving towards a situation like that of art museums, which have always lived in the shadow of private dealers, collectors and galleries? For better or for worse, blogs like Vanessa’s certainly contribute to this tendency.
The Imagine Science Film Festival will be held 16-25 October in New York. The objective of the festival is to showcase films (especially fiction films) that “effectively incorporate science into a compelling narrative while maintaining credible scientific groundings”. The public will join scientists in learning and imagining science through visual storytelling. Films with bio/medical content include ‘A Biometric Tale‘ (2003), ‘In Vivid Detail‘ (2007; about prosopagnosia, i.e., inability to remember faces), and ‘A Fruit Fly in New York‘ (2007). See more here.
Science dancing goes back at least to the classic “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level” performed at Stanford in 1971. And as the organizers of the 2009 Science Dance Contest say, the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science, “perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting”!
This data-poor but body-rich contest is open to anyone at the postgraduate level in any scientific field and in science-related fields like bioethics, history of science or medicine, etc. — in other words this is a great opportunity for all historians of contemporary biomedicine — and the procedure is quite simple:
- make a video of your own science dance.
- post it on YouTube; and don’t forget to include any relevant information.
- mail the url of your video to: gonzo@aaas.org together with your name, current affiliation and status, the title of your Ph.D., the university where it is earned, and completion date, not later than 16 November.
An independent panel of judges appointed by AAAS/Gonzo Labs will then select a total of four winners from the following categories:
- graduate student: best among those currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program
- post-doc: best among those who have a Ph.D. but not tenure at a university
- professor: best among those with Ph.D. and tenure at a university
- popular choice: the video with the highest YouTube viewcount by the deadline
Note that this is a dance contest, not a video contest, so the judges will focus on the quality of the dance rather than any fancy editing you do. The winning dances will be those that most creatively convey the scientific essence of their respective Ph.D. theses.
The winners will be honored guests at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago in February — and are supposed to work with choreographers and dancers to perform live at the meeting.
A couple of weeks ago we asked for a guide to restaurants and bars with medical motifs.
Øystein Horgmo has kindly sent us an article in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet about the new theme restaurant Hospitalis in Riga, Latvia, which is owned by medical doctors and has a pronounced medical motif.
Says my new favourite guide to Latvian culture, ‘Fucking Latvia: alternative guide to Latvia’:
It is a must-see place if you like gore things. The restaurant looks like a medicine cabinet, while you are treated as a patient and taken good care by the long-legged waitresses in nurses uniforms. The food is served in flasks and operating-room’s dishes and isn’t that cheap (7 and more lats per meal), but this is a bizarre experience that is worth breaking the bank. Besides, the place is owned by local doctors, but unfortunately, the president of Latvia, who is also a doctor, declined his appearance at the opening once he realized how weird this place actually is.
In other words, more raw and bizarre than the utterly sophisticated The Clinic in Singapore. Isn’t there one in Berlin too??
‘An unbelievably romantic prize with beautiful colours’ [‘ett otroligt romantiskt pris med vackra färger’] — that’s how an inorganic chemist at the University of Gothenburg characterizes today’s news about the Nobel prize in chemistry.
I’m not sure I understand what he means by ‘romantic’. I would rather call it a ‘medical’ prize in disguise, like most chemical Nobel prizes these days. Because the green fluoresent protein (GFP) and other GFP-like proteins in a variety of fluorescent colours are widely used in basic and clinical medical research.
(glial cells expressing GFP among red neurons: credit: RICCARDO CASSIANI-INGONI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)
And the colours are beautiful indeed. They’ve been a standard illustration theme on bioscience journal covers for years now.
The press release and the excellent scientific background information material contains all that needs to be said about the importance of GFP and GFP-ish proteins at the moment (historians of contemporary biomedical sciences will undoubtedly add more later).
Just a couple of more images. First the playful signature of the Tsien lab webpage painted with different GFP and GFP-like proteins.
And then the so far best publicly known GFP art work — Eduardo Kac’s ‘GFP Bunny’ (2000). Not great art perhaps, but a creative use of one of the most displayable chemical Nobel prizes in many years.
A recent announcement for a lecture by Tim Hunt, joint winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain tomorrow, Thursday 9 October, reminded me of the problems with using scientists as sources for biographical stories.
Tim Hunt will be talking about the inspirations behind his life in science. Says the announcement:
It was in his weekly science lesson at the Dragon School near Oxford that Tim grew to find biology an easy subject, and from then on he felt he never really had to make any more career decisions. When he was 14, Tim moved to another school where science played a much larger role in the curriculum. He loved Chemistry in particular, and the class were allowed considerable freedom, on more than one occasion started fires from distilling volatile flammable solvents.
Well, this may be true. Or it may not. It’s difficult to say, because autobiographical stories are notoriously problematic as sources of what ‘really’ happened, for example what was ‘really’ the inspirations behind someone’s life in science. Having written the biography of another (then still living) medical Nobel laureate (Niels K. Jerne) I know all to well how shaky autobiographical reports turn out to be when you are able to compare them with the written record. By and large, autobiography is better understood as a fictional genre.
That said, autobiographical stories can be great fun and good entertainment. And like great novels, they can be used as ‘mirrors’ for us to compare ourselves in. For that purpose it doesn’t really matter if they are true or not.
So from that point of view the lecture at the Royal Institution could be interesting. In London tomorrow at 7pm — find it here.
In July we reported how ten editors of some of the leading international journals for history and philosophy of science and social studies of science had issued a joint declaration against the current attempts, initiated by the European Science Foundation, to establish a European rating system for humanities journals (ERIH).
Now, two and a half months later, almost all editors of international journals in this area of the humanities have joined the declaration:
- Hanne Andersen (Centaurus)
- Roger Ariew & Moti Feingold (Perspectives on Science)
- A. K. Bag (Indian Journal of History of Science)
- June Barrow-Green & Benno van Dalen (Historia mathematica)
- Keith Benson (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences)
- Marco Beretta (Nuncius)
- Michel Blay (Revue d’Histoire des Sciences)
- Cornelius Borck (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
- Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Science, Technology and Human Values)
- Massimo Bucciantini & Michele Camerota (Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies)
- Jed Buchwald and Jeremy Gray (Archive for History of Exacft Sciences)
- Vincenzo Cappelletti & Guido Cimino (Physis)
- Roger Cline (International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology)
- Stephen Clucas & Stephen Gaukroger (Intellectual History Review)
- Hal Cook & Anne Hardy (Medical History)
- Leo Corry, Alexandre Matraux & Jörgen Renn (Science in Context)
- D.Diecks & J.Uffink (Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics)
- Brian Dolan & Bill Luckin (Social History of Medicine)
- Hilmar Duerbeck & Wayne Orchiston (Journal of Astronomical History & Heritage)
- Moritz Epple, Mikael Hård, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Volker Roelcke (NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin)
- Steven French (Metascience)
- Willem Hackmann (Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society)
- Bosse Holmqvist (Lychnos)
- Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology)
- Mary Fissell & Randall Packard (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
- Robert Fox (Notes & Records of the Royal Society)
- Jim Good (History of the Human Sciences)
- Michael Hoskin (Journal for the History of Astronomy)
- Ian Inkster (History of Technology)
- Marina Frasca Spada (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)
- Nick Jardine (Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
- Trevor Levere (Annals of Science)
- Bernard Lightman (Isis)
- Christoph Lathy (Early Science and Medicine)
- Michael Lynch (Social Studies of Science)
- Stephen McCluskey & Clive Ruggles (Archaeostronomy: the Journal of Astronomy in Culture)
- Peter Morris (Ambix)
- E. Charles Nelson (Archives of Natural History)
- Ian Nicholson (Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences)
- Iwan Rhys Morus (History of Science)
- John Rigden & Roger H Stuewer (Physics in Perspective)
- Simon Schaffer (British Journal for the History of Science)
- Paul Unschuld (Sudhoffs Archiv)
- Peter Weingart (Minerva)
- Stefan Zamecki (Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki)
In other words, almost all journal editors in one of the central and established fields of the humanities clearly distance themselves from the ongoing European bureaucratic scientometric project.
Next year is 50 years since C. P. Snow delivered his famous lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, suggesting that as cultured citizens we need to know as much about the second law of thermodynamics as the plays of Shakespeare.
To celebrate this event, and to raise the question whether Snow’s notion has any relevance today, Science Museum and Tate Modern are organizing a two-day event on the theme ‘Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question’:
In a world of increasing disciplinary specialisation in which there has been exponential growth of sub-disciplines in both science and the humanities, it will also ask whether the distinctions between and indeed within the two cultures might have become further entrenched. The most fundamental question this celebration of 50 years since Snow’s lecture will ask, though, is how the terms of the debate may have changed.
There will be an academic conference at Science Museum on 23 January and a more public meeting at Tate Modern the day after. The Science Museum conference will consider questions such as:
- How have new technologies such as the internet and new resources like Wikipedia reconfigured our sense of disciplinary boundaries, hierarchies of knowledge and the places where cultural capital is held?
- Has the new dominance within general culture of ideas drawn from the ‘life sciences’ — molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry, ecology, epidemiology — and their unpredictable pressings upon fundamental questions of how and why humans and other organisms should find themselves and their relationships defined in particular ways, led to an ever more complex and porous boundary between science and the humanities?
- How are Snow’s notions of disciplinary and national cultures to be rethought through the paradigms and politics of globalisation?
Good questions, especially the second one. I guess you could say that parts of medicine has always been a meeting ground between science and the humanities.
If someone would like to present, then send a 200-word abstract by 1 November to Laura Salisbury, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk
Dagens mest interessante medicinhistoriske nyhed er ikke at Françoise Barré-Sinoussi og Luc Montagnier er blevet tildelt halvdelen af årets Nobelpris i fysiologi eller medicin for “their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus”. Den interessante nyhed er, at Robert Gallo ikke fik den samtidigt, og at han ikke en gang er nævnt i pressemeddelelsen (kun i et teknisk appendiks).
Sådan her bagefter er både forskere og historikere nok enige i at den franske gruppe gjorde den egentlige opdagelse af det virus som senere blev kaldt HIV. Og eftersom Nobel’s testamente lægger vægten på “opdagelse”, så skulle det ikke lede til flere spørgsmål. På den anden side spillede Gallo og hans gruppe ved NIH en meget væsentlig rolle både før og efter opdagelsen, især når det gjaldt om at fastslå HIV’s kausale betydning for udviklingen af AIDS. Så det er forståeligt at Gallo siger at det var “a disappointment” at ikke få tage del af prisen.
Det handler meget om hvad man mener med “opdagelse”, og hvilken opdagelse man taler om. Nobelforsamlingen ved Karolinska Institutet kunne have valgt at belønne arbejdet med at nå frem til, at HIV er årsagen til AIDS, snarere end opdagelsen af selve viruset — og da ville man ikke have kunnet forbigå Gallo (men så havde Harald zur Hausen ikke kunnet få prisen for “his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer”, i hvert fald ikke i år, fordi prisen ikke kan gives til mere end tre personer).
(Oversat fra mit blogindlæg på Biomedicine on Display tidligere i dag. Se også den danske professor Lars Fugger’s kritik i Politiken: http://politiken.dk/videnskab/article578527.ece )