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Monthly Archives

February 2009

Drugs and chronic illness

By Biomedicine in museums

Pharmaceutical drugs — especially late 20th century drugs — is a pretty challenging topic for medical museums because of the limited variety of material artefacts available for display.

Vials, capsules, tablets, bottles, cartons and prescriptions look much the same; nor are they among the most evocative kinds of artefacts. Curators have to work hard to compensate for the lack of ‘innate’ presence effects in most objects related to pharmaceutical drugs.

It’s not impossible, of course. Images can do the trick, and so can the pills themselves, if arranged in an innovative way. The ‘Cradle to Grave’ installation in British Museum’s Wellcome Gallery was a revelation when it was first shown in 2003 because it blew new life into these otherwise so non-evocative objects by relating them to the audience’s existential imagination.

In other words, much can be achieved by mobilizing imaginative concepts and ideas. The workshop on ‘Drugs, Standards, and Chronic Illness’ to be held in Manchester, 27-28 November 2009, could be a source of inspiration for how to conceptualize an exhibition on drugs. Says the CFP:

Non-communicable illnesses such as … cancer and cardiovascular disease and the role that the development and marketing of treatments for chronic illness have played in the broader history of standardization in medicine will be the central theme of this workshop. The histories of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other non-communicable illnesses have much in common, but there are important differences between them that are worth exploring. Many of the blockbuster drugs of the last 50 years have been developed for the treatment of cardiovascular disorders. In the course of this development, some illnesses have been transformed from acute to chronic (e.g. malignant hypertension) and it has become acceptable to treat physiological parameters that do not cause symptoms but are statistically associated with illness later in life (e.g. mild hypertension or hypercholesterolaemia). In contrast, and with few exceptions, cancer drugs have often been used to treat what might otherwise be considered as orphan diseases and have rarely been as commercially profitable as cardiovascular drugs. Nevertheless, cancer has been central to the development of many of the practices, such as testing, clinical research, and standardization, which are increasingly applied to other fields of medicine, above all the multi-centre randomised clinical trial.

The meeting will be organized around four main analytical points:

  • the management of risk and efficacy
  • the structure of biomedical research: laboratories, clinics, protocols
  • market conceptualisation, market realities, sales and uses
  • regulatory frameworks and regulatory practices

Possible themes include: comparisons, e.g. between different illnesses or across different national contexts; issues surrounding notions of the chronic and the acute or the relationship between risk and disease; spaces of drug administration, from inpatient to outpatient departments; institutional developments; the meaning of ‘chemotherapy’ in different contexts; regulatory institutions, policies and practices; the consumption of medicines, the role of patients and patient organizations, and questions of gender; the establishment of standards, etc.

Send less than 500 words abstracts to Carsten Timmermann (carsten.timmermann@manchester.ac.uk) and Viviane Quirke (vquirke@brookes.ac.uk) before 3 April 2009, More info here.

Exhibition on the history of protein research — call for artefacts

By Biomedicine in museums

We are currently preparing a small exhibit on the culture and history of proteins and protein research, which is planned to open Friday 4 september in connection with the official opening of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research.

The aim of the exhibition — which shall be placed in the main hall of the Faculty of Health Sciences’s Panum building on U Copenhagen North Campus (right at the entrance to the new eco-friendly and health-promoting canteen) — is to give a historical and cultural perspective on the current focus on proteins in biomedicine and biotechnology.

We want to create an object-rich exhbition, and therefore we would like to get in contact with laboratory and clinical scientists on the Øresund area who may provide us with objects, images and documents (for loan or as gifts) from the last 50 years, which can illustrate research on or clinical use of proteins: measuring instruments, separation equipment, images from laboratory environments, posters, and so forth.

We are especially interested in everyday laboratory and clinical objects, like paper electrophoresis strips, gels, blotting membranes, immunoprecipition plates — in other words, things which laboratory workers usually throw out, but which give a good feeling of how protein research is done in practice. Call or write me (see address here).

To stimulate your imagination with a (more than 50 years old) thing — here are two iconic artefacts in the history of protein research: two vial bottles of raw insulin from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo from around 1935. Insulin was the first purified protein with a well-defined therapeutic purpose and it was also the first protein to be sequenced (in 1955 by Frederick Sanger; Nobel Prize in 1958).

(the vials are from Novo Nordisk‘s collection of historical objects)

Hjælp til udstilling om proteinforskningens historie

By Biomedicine in museums

Medicinsk Museion arbejder i øjeblikket på en udstilling om proteinforskningens kultur og historie for at stimulere interessen blandt studerende, ansatte og gæster i Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultets hovedbygning (Panumbygningen) på Blegdamsvej.

Udstillingen skal placeres i vandrehallen i nærheden af det nye kantineområde. Den vil åbne fredag den 4. september i forbindelse med den officielle indvielse af Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research og lukker medio december.

Udstillingsgruppen efterlyser genstande, billeder og dokumenter fra de sidste 50 år, der kan give et billede af forskellige typer af forskning som involverer proteiner. Det kan dreje sig om måleapparatur, separationsudstyr, fotos, eksperimentelle opstillinger, posters, etc.  Vi vil ikke mindst have fat i hverdagsting som elektroforesepapir, kolonner, geler, osv. dvs. ting og sager som man nemt kommer til at smide ud, men som giver et fint billede af, hvordan arbejdet er foregået i praksis. Vi kan tage tingene til låns eller som gave.

Kontakt mig på tlf. 2875 3801 eller min mail.

For at stimulere indsamlingsfantasien, her er et glas med råinsulin fra medicinalfirmaet Novo, ca. 1935. Det er ikonisk genstand i proteinudforskningens historie — insulin var det første renfremstillede protein med klar terapeutisk funktion og det første protein der fik bestemt sin primærstruktur (af Frederick Sanger i 1955; Nobelpris 1958).

(glaset indgår i Novo Nordisk A/S samlinger af historiske genstande)

A crush on pipettes

By Biomedicine in museums

No biomedical lab could function without pipettes — the ‘containment of precision-measured transfer of liquids between containers’, as I use to think of them.

Everyone who has a crush on pipettes (and I tell you, there are many of us, as you can see in this Eppendorf video) will just love the new blog Labtutorials in biology.

Created by Bálint Bálint (a junior lecturer at the University of Debrecen), this blog is meant to become a teaching aid for basic biochemical and molecular biology lab practices. The first post was on water, the second is about (YES!) pipettes. All sorts of them. Scroll down the post, and more and more different kinds of pipettes, in still images and videos, appear.

Bálint’s next post will be about serological pipettes. Stay seriously tuned!

(Thanks to Berci for the tip)

Hvad er et kunstobjekt?

By Biomedicine in museums

Den 28 februar åbner et af mine svenske favoritmuseer, Kalmar Konstmuseum (se tidligere post her), udstillingen “Spridd isolerad konst” som er lavet som en kommentar til et af kunstverdens centrale problemstillinger: Hvad er et kunstobjekt?  Ikke helt uinteressant, når man tager i betragtning at de fleste af vores historiske museumsgenstande er (eller kan betragtes som) kunst- eller kunstindustrielle genstande:

“Utställningen tar sin utgångspunkt i hur ett antal konstnärer och formgivare förhåller sig till (konst-)objektet. Betyder ett (konst-)objekt något i sig? Kan ett objekt i sig bära med sig ett minne, eller en historisk eller politisk implikation? Eller är objektets betydelse något som bara kan existera i en kontext? Eller handlar objekt bara om en yta och att de därför är utbytbara? Själva bruket av objektet förenas i de motsatta uppfattningarna att å ena sidan fungera som något reellt, verkligt och autentisk, i synnerhet i en värld där många känner allt större osäkerhet. Det fysiska objektet blir därmed något att hålla sig fast vid. Å andra sidan ser många individer objektet som något utbytbart där det enda som betyder något är ytan. Det handlar om hur en sak framstår, inte vad det är. Ett synsätt som merparten av varumärkestänkandet går ut på idag. Den fysiska varan med dess bruksvärde är underordnad dess representation på status och personlig identitet. Utställningen kompletteras och inflikas med ett antal sidoperspektiv kring begrepp som massa, relationen konst och design, ytans betydelse, rekonstruktion av kulturella artefakter, lyxprodukter och objektets värde m fl.”

I udstillingen deltager 35 kunstnere og designers (og en professor i erhvervsøkonomi 🙂  Udstillingen er åben indtil 3. maj. Den perfekte søndagsudflugt — der går tog direkte fra Kbh til Kalmar, som i det hele taget en smuk by med bl.a. et oldgammelt slot. Se mere om udstillingen på www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se.

Shortness

By Biomedicine in museums

The quest for bringing new and unexplored areas of human life and practice under the conceptual reign of the arts and humanities is endless. For example, the “very short conference” organized by Tate Modern (?) on 20 June — on the theme of shortness:

This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations. Topics that Shortness aims to cover include: aphorisms, txt msgs, short attention spans, nanophilology, music samples, ephemeral relationships, short narratives, punch lines, orgasms and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

Sounds like the perfect conference (it will only last a few hours). The organizers invite submissions for presentations or performances of up to 7 minutes to take place during the “very long dinner” after the conference.

The complete list of medical historical or museological topics which I can think of in this context is extremely short but impressive, for example:

  • a short history of short-term memory
  • dielectric relaxation of short molecules — a science studies perspective
  • episodic museum displays of shortening telomers in ageing rats.

Period.

Send a max 200 word abstract (why so long?) + a max 100 short bio to short.at.tate@googlemail.com before 20 March. More here.

The announcement is from here — it’s not on Tate Modern’s website yet, so it may be a hoax — let’s wait and see 🙂

History of medicine on video — training session and workshop

By Biomedicine in museums

Historians of medicine are grudgingly beginning to acknowledge the changing media habits in the population — that is, why read a book or a journal article when you can see a streaming video on the web instead?

To prepare the scholarly community for the new media age, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is organizing a workshop on ‘History of Medicine in Motion’, Tuesday 26 May 2009:

The internet is rapidly transforming the boundaries of what is considered serious scholarly material, and allowing for a broader dissemination of findings than has hitherto been possible in history. The increased video saturation among new generation of students has been both a cause for alarm and excitement among academics as they note the decreased attention span of students for print literature on the one hand, and the potential for making their materials more immediately accessible on the other.

Grad students and university staff are invited to submit 3-5 minute video clips and podcasts on any subject within the history of medicine. The workshop will be led by Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard), Hal Cook (UCL) and Asher Tlalim (National Film and Television School). For those who don’t know how to make movies there will also be a one-day training session on 6 March, where participants will learn to use iMovie, Keynote and Garageband.

Excellent inititative. My only caveat: it’s not just ‘new generations of students’ who are changing their media habits; many old hawks like me are also saturated with new media.

Om Colin Rennies glasskulptur

By Biomedicine in museums

I forlængelse af tidligere poster om Design4Science og Colin Rennies glasskulptur;

Colin’s værk tager udgangspunkt i den seneste højopløsningmodel af ATP-syntase, publiceret i en artikel i tidskriftet Science i 1999 (D. Stock, A.G  Leslie og J.E. Walker, “Molecular architecture of the rotary motor in ATP synthase”, Science, vol. 286, ss. 1700-1705). Strukturdata er deponeret i RCSB Protein Data Bank (id nr. 1qo1). Sådan her ser modellen ud i jmol‘s browser:

Og her er Colin Rennies skulptur i glas:

Sådan her skriver Colin på vores engelsksprogede blog, Biomedicine on Display om baggrunden til skulpturen:

“I used this as the most resolved model with the right amount of detail. The stator and the unsolved parts of the molecule are not represented. This model was chosen for its complexity over the earlier fourier maps. It has been translated through various applications and finally rebuilt as a series of NURBS spheres one per atom that intersected with the planes, a Boolean difference operation has then been used to generate holes in the virtual sheets, these have been averaged, and turned into something resembling a stencil, then each sheet imported into the waterjet machine and nested for cutting, so I have had to alter the format of the information quite considerably so as to make this idea work, but have attempted as much as possible to keep the science as accurate as I could, by minimizing disturbance of positions of the atoms used however approximately half of the atoms are not represented”.

Colins værk skal selvfølgelig ikke opfattes som en alternativ videnskabelig model. Han arbejder som glaskunstner, ikke som forsker (selv om han bygger på forskernes arbejde og resultater):

“I do not intend the work to be a model of the molecule. it is not intended to be an aid to understanding the structure of ATPase. More a sculpture responding to some of the conceptual and philosophical questions surrounding humanities search for understanding and our need to see and to construct models of the phenomena we are investigating”.

Størrelsen er ikke uvigtig:

“The monumentality of the scale of the work is important also. it is deliberately one meter cubed, as this is the central measurement, close to human scale and fairly close to the mean of the between subatomic and cosmic and a reference for most spacial measurement. A meter cubed is also a sculptural scale, one that effects the viewer physically and occupies a volume that a human can relate directly to”.

Og valgt af glass som materiale var selvfølgelig afgørende:

“The glass does not represent anything explicitly, it it a vehicle for the image and the material properties are chosen to cloud the view in both the limited transparency of the standard normal iron float glass and the reflections generated in between the sheets. The gaps between the glass deliberately introduce these reflections to add a haze or a halo around the object. It is intended to be difficult to see detail internally, it is not about detail it is more about complexity, about what is and what is not fathomable by human thought. Semantically I wanted the image to appear ghostly, as if it was hardly there, a trace, something mysterious a metaphor for vision, and understanding”.

For en længere diskussion her på bloggen om molekylemodeller, design og kunst, se her.

Rete — mailing list for the history of scientific instruments

By Biomedicine in museums

For some reason I have until recently been unaware of rete, a mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments. The archives (from June 2003 onwards) are available online. The list owner (the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford) will not accept messages for commercial purposes like announcing instruments for sale, etc., but otherwise all messages for academic and museum purposes are welcome. To join, send a blank message to rete-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.

(thanks to Gustav for the tip)