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Monthly Archives

February 2009

What's so sympathetic about sympathy?

By Biomedicine in museums

Just saw the announcement for the conference ‘Sympathies and Antipathies: Altruism and Emotional Response Across the Disciplines’ (to be held at CRASSH, Cambridge, UK, 29-30 May), which will

chart this territory in which earlier models of fellow-feeling, compassion, and commiseration are taken up in modern science, fiction, film, and social policy; and to explore how these models are re-worked in conjunction with new constructs like empathy, altruism, and humanitarianism.

(more here). What is it about this topic (and Briton Riviere’s image above) that gives rise to so much sympathy? It’s contagious.

Assembling a glass sculpture of ATP-synthase by Colin Rennie

By Biomedicine in museums

One of the great attractions here at Medical Museion right now is Colin Rennie‘s glass sculpture of ATP-synthase.

We have placed it in the basement area to the left of the main entrance — we didn’t dare put it on the ground floor because we were afraid the 18th century wooden floor construction would collapse under the 900 780 kilograms of assembled glass plates. It’s lit by a single spotlight which gives the small and dark room a crypt-like ambience, and increases the presence of the sculpture. An object of secular awe.

Below Colin is polishing one of the 30 glass plates measuring 1×1 meter. You can see how the structure of the sculpture is made out of nothing, i.e., holes in the glass plates made by a water jet stream cutter:

 

And below Colin and Jim Patton are putting the sculpture together, one plate on top of the other:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, Colin presents the work to our student guides (docents):

 

Til den søde tand

By Biomedicine in museums

Forleden kom der en pakke med posten. Fuld med alle mulige slags dejlige søde ting — fra lakridskonfekt til sukkerovertrukne mandler og lækre småkager. Yummy.

Hvem mon sender et kilo slik og kager til mig? En studerende som vil have højere karakter? En taknemmelig museumsgæst? En jobansøger?

Ingen af delene. I bunden af pakken lå der et kort og koncist brev: ”Vi takker mange gange for din hjælp med bedømmelse af faglige artikler til Tandlægebladet i 2008″. Underskrevet af redaktøren.

Det var sødt af dem! Og man skal ikke grine af gaver (for så bliver man måske slettet fra gavelisten næste år). Alligevel bredte der sig en højlydt latter i frokoststuen, da jeg viste pakkens indhold frem — sammen med brevet.

Måske var der nogen på det firma, der havde fået til opgave at sende gaver rundt til bladets bidragsydere, som ikke havde forstået, at det var Tandlægeforeningen, der var afsenderen? Eller måske er gaven et subtilt udtryk for, at det tandlægelige sundhedsbudskab har undergået en forandring i de seneste årtier: at sunde tænder ikke primært handler om hvor meget slik du spiser, men at du bruger tandbørste og tandtråd regelmæssigt.

Sweet gift basket for my teeth

By Biomedicine in museums

The other day a package arrived in my office with a variety of sweets — from licorice candy to suger coated almonds. Yummy.

Who would send me a two pound sweet gift basket? In the bottom of the package was a short letter (in Danish): “Many thanks for your help in reviewing scientific articles … [“Vi takker mange gange for din hjælp med bedømmelse af faglige artikler …”].

Signed by the editor of Tandlægebladet, the journal of the Danish Dental Association. That’s sweet of them!

Is it a case of subtle self-irony? A mistake? Or maybe it just reflects a change in overall dental health policy over the last decades: the notion that what keeps your teeth healthy is not avoiding candy, but cleaning your teeth and using dental floss regularly.

A cure for the common cold?

By Biomedicine in museums

Over and over again I’ve praised Derek Lowe’s blog ‘In the Pipeline’ (see for example here). Derek delivers almost daily insights into the world of drug research, from chemical lab work routines to Big Pharma management and economics.

Yesterday’s post (‘A cure for the common cold …’) is a fine comment on the problematic quality of pharma communication on the mass media. I quote in extenso (hoping that Derek doesn’t sue me for infringing his copyright :-):

If you want a good example of the way that the popular media handle a drug discovery story, take a look at all the headlines this morning on the news of the sequencing of the common-cold rhinoviruses.

There are a couple of “Cure For the Common Cold Unlikely” ones, but most of the others seem to regard this as a big step forward. “Cure May Be Found”, “Getting Closer” , “May Lead to Cure”, “Could Help to Cure” – that’s the sort of thing. The problem is, how many viral diseases can we cure? I mean, really cure with drugs after a person’s been infected, wipe out and make go away? Right. Do I hear a zero? Viral diseases can be very difficult to get a handle on, because there aren’t many moving parts in there. If none of them are amenable to small-molecule drug approaches, people like me are pretty well out of the game.

The best chance you have with a viral infection is with a vaccine. But what this genomics work is telling us, actually, is that a vaccine is going to be rather hard to come by. This paper sequenced ninety-nine different rhinovirus strains, and if there are that many, there are surely that many more. Or there will be, after the next cold season – just wait. These things are mutating all the time – which is, of course, why we get colds year after year. The team working on this project was able to bin the viral genomes into fifteen different classes, but what are we going to do, develop fifteen different (and simultaneous) vaccines? Against a scurrying, hopping, moving target like this one?

No, this is very interesting work, and it’ll tell us a lot about how viruses do their nasty viral business out in the real world. But I wouldn’t start throwing around the “C” word. All that can do is disappoint people, I’m afraid.

Biomedical memoirs

By Biomedicine in museums

Although I don’t like Twitter, I must admit that it is an interesting ego-document genre. A written trace of daily life — a publicly available diary, easily written, easily forgotten.

Which made me think about the memoir genre, which is more difficult to write and less easily forgotten. Gore Vidal defined memoir as a story of “how one remembers one’s own life” in contrast to autobiography, which is “history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked” (from his own memoir, Palimpsest, 1995).

Memoirs loomed large in 19th and early 20th century libraries and book stores. Then they almost disappeared. But now, after decades of oblivion, the memoir is an increasingly popular genre again. There are all kinds of memoirs, of course, but this blog has its gaze steadfastly fixated on one and only — the biomedical memoir.

In which formats are biomedical memoirs published today? Not much in book form, I guess. Maybe they come out as chapters (or part of chapters) in Festschrifts (is this peculiar genre still alive?). And what about memoirs on the web? Are there any memoir blogs? And then there are oral memoirs, of course. What about powerpoint memoirs? And interviews for radio and television?

What are these and similar narratives (and narrative fragments) telling us about the experience of doing science today? How are memoirs used by historians of the biomedical sciences? Does the memoir genre have a critical potential? And how does the biomedical memoir differ from biomedical autobiography and other kinds of biomedical ego-documents?

The use of museum objects in teaching

By Biomedicine in museums

We are right now teaching a course in medical science and technology studies here at Medical Museion and we are using medical historical museum objects. It’s the first time we do so, and we’ve talked about that it would be great to expand this — and to learn more about how others have used artefacts in similar teaching situations.

The opportunity to learn more came sooner than I thought. Helen Chatterjee and her colleagues at UCL Museums & Collections are organising a day of talks on 2 April to discuss how museum objects can be used to engage students more deeply with their subjects. The aim to promote the use of museum objects as a pedagogy that can be used in a huge range of disciplines and improve the student experience, and will cover:

  • using objects to address threshold concepts
  • troublesome knowledge and problem-based learning
  • using object-based learning in teaching transferable skills and course content by focusing discussions around collections
  • brief case-studies from teaching staff already using museum collections in imaginative ways
  • how newcomers to object-based learning can go about incorporating these tools into their own curricula.

Further information at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/obl/. To reserve a free place, write to Lauren Sadler (l.sadler@ucl.ac.uk ) before 23 March.

Biotech is red, blue, white and green — now also in black — what about magenta?

By Biomedicine in museums

Pundits discuss biotech applications in terms of different colours. Red biotech is a metonym for biotechnology for medical purposes. White (or grey) biotech is for industrial application (like Novozýmes). Blue stands for aquatic uses, and the green variety is for agriculture and envionmental uses.

But what’s black biotech? Could be an Afro-American thing, like Anthony Mackie’s black biotech executive in Spike Lee’s She Hate Me. Could also be a black market of biotech stuff for terrorist uses.

Richard Gallagher, editor of The Scientist, suggests another use of the term: He speaks about black biotech as applications for replacing oil (the black gold), for example in the form of in situ refineries and power plants.

The colour spectrum hasn’t been used up yet. What about yellow, brown and purple biotech? Maybe magenta for life enhancement, in contrast to the Red Cross coloured medical one?

Biomedical memory

By Biomedicine in museums

Biomedical memory is notoriously short. It resides mainly in daily anecdotes and small stories provided by the older members of the laboratory/clinic. You acquire snippets of the past in the coffee breaks or in the bar after working hours, through the introductory chapters of standard textbooks and anthologies, or by reading the memoirs of biomedical celebrities (like Craig Venter). You collect fragments that slowly coalesce in your mind as a more or less vague narrative about the past.

The chances are high that most biomedical scientists are creating rather similar versions of a fairly standardized historical narrative. The ‘truth’ about the historical past is a strong social construct (much more social than scientific constructs, in spite of what many science studies people suggest).

How can you intervene in such standard historical narratives? You can go to the library stacks to check out volumes of printed and bound journal issues (the kind of paper thing that isn’t available on-line yet). You can search for non-updated webpages from the last ten years that are still available as ghost sediment layers of the past. Also, the attics and basement rooms of laboratory buildings may contain material artefacts that still, somehow, remind laboratory workers of the ‘fact’ that there was once a biomedical past. And you can interview older colleagues — preferably the less succesful of them, those who don’t have a standard story to defend. Lab technicians often also know things that academics either don’t see or don’t want to talk about. 

If you are very eager to excavate alternative biomedical memories you can also try one of the archival and museum institutions around the world that collect and keep documents (images, laboratory notebooks) and material objects from the history of biomedicine. There aren’t many of them, and it will cost you a substantial amount of money to travel to get access to their holdings. But you will be rewarded.

Remember that not everything about the past is accessible. Much will remain silent for ever. There are most probably subjugated perspectives which are difficult to get hold of and marginalized positions which are never told in textbook introductions, but may pop up in casual conversations (rarely in systematic interviews when interviewees tends to be on guard). Sometimes the gaps and absences are more interesting than that which is superficially present in the interview, on the printed page or in the archive. If you find such an absence you may be on the right track. Keep digging. Good luck.

Nanoscale science under investigation: a new issue of Spontaneous Generations

By Biomedicine in museums

A new issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science is out — with, among other things, a thematic section about science at the nanoscale edited by Isaac Record. For example, Joachim Schummer points out that science can be popularized by its ethics (engineering ethics is often propaganda for emerging technology); Joe Pitt explores the rhetorical and heuristic role of metaphor in nanotechnology (e.g., the information system and the machine metaphors); and Natasha Myers discusses how the metaphoricity of life is shifting from computer programme to machine metaphors. Other interesting contributions to the nano-theme inlude Otávio Bueno’s paper on the visual evidence at the
nanoscale and Eric Winsberg’s piece on nanoscale models and simulations. SponGe is an open access (peer-reviewed) journal and all papers are downloadable here. Enjoy!