February 2009

I’ve always been skeptical of claims to revolutions in science and technology. Thomas Kuhn actually made a great disservice to historical awareness among scientists and to science communication with his 1962 bestseller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Every now and then a new finding is described as a ‘revolution’ in science, technology or medicine — despite the fact that it it almost always more of the same, rather than revolutionary.

Therefore I don’t like the title of the two-part video ‘Medical Revolution’ — about personalized medicine — which was awarded with two gold medals at the New York Festivals’ International Film & Video Awards 2008.

‘Medical Revolution — From Molecule to Medicine’ schematically shows how pharmaceutical companies develop new medicines and addresses questions like why it takes so long time to develop a new drug. See it here.

‘Medical Revolution — The Future’ is about body scans, DNA arrays and personalized medicine. See it here.

It was selected as ‘World’s best work 2007’ in two categories, viz., ‘Health/Medical Issues’ and ‘Health Care Professional Education’. It’s very professional and smooth, but too overly pedagogical for my taste. Why are these videos accompanied by a voice that sounds like he/she is teaching us how to drive a car or operate an automatic bread toaster? I mean, if they REALLY mean ‘revolution’ seriously, I would expect a somewhat more excited speaker — a shrill voice, even an hysterical laughter, whatever — but not this clinical didactic monotony. The voice betrays the claim for revolution.

… for bloggers these days is “Should I twitter?”, wrote a medblog colleague (R. W. Donnell) recently and gave some good reasons for not doing it: How many people really want to tap into your stream of action and thinking? And since there’s barely enough time to blog, why then add something else to the plate? I’m fairly convinced now, after four years of blogging, that this particular medium actually enhances my intellectual capacity. But I’d like to hear some experiences of how twittering might do the same trick.

In today’s online issue of Computerworld, Mike Elgan makes a convincing argument for the break-through of the e-book. What will propel the so far failing e-book into a strong market position, he believes, is Amazon’s awaited release of the Kindle platform on mobiles. Elgan’s six arguments, especially that of the deepening recession and the mobile habits of youngsters, are compelling. “By this time next year, e-books will be totally mainstream”, Elgan concludes. So when will we see the first academic medical history e-book on iPhone? My bet is February 2012.

Ever experienced being too overworked to come up with new and exciting ideas? Feeling you have nothing new to say? Three days of posting-silence is a symptom of the fact that our little group here at Medical Museion is in a pretty hectic ‘phase’ right now:

• We opened Design4Science less than two weeks ago after ten days of intense preparation work — it’s beautiful, but it took its toll.
• Some of us are teaching a 2,5 ects course in Medical Science and Technology Studies for students in the medical engineering programme (a joint programme between the Danish Technical University and University of Copenhagen).
• Several of us are very busy planning for the next exhibition — Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine — which will open on 11 June. More about this later …
• We are also preparing an exhibition on the history and culture of protein research for the official opening of the new Center for Protein Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences in early September. More about this later …
• We are also finalizing a glossy prospectus about the future renovation and expansion of Medical Museion that shall be sent to a selected number of foundations shortly. More about this later …
• Some of us are also preparing the second phase of a grant application about visualization practices in contemporary health sciences; and one of us is preparing an application to the Research Council for Culture and Communication. More about this later …
• Most of us are involved in writing chapters for our planned anthology about biomedical curatorship — a very good British publisher has expressed great interest and we have to prepare the final manuscript. More about this later …
• We are writing project descriptions for a couple of new phd-scholarships within the frame of the University of Copenhagen Center for Healthy Ageing programme. More about this later …
• We are beginning to discuss how to make our research, teaching, cultural heritage and public outreach efforts work more smoothly together, for example by a more narrow intellectual focus. More about this later …
• And then there are all the daily things — like writing research papers; trying to postpone deadlines; responding to urgent calls from people who want us to take a look at their old medical stuff before they throw it out; balancing the budget; promoting the museum to the Danish media; planning for the 2010 exhibitions; etc., etc. More about all these things later …

It’s probably all these ‘More about this later…’-things that drain the brain and press whatever new thoughts that temporarily enter your consciousness back into oblivion. That’s at least how I feel right now. Since I haven’t seen much from my co-bloggers’ keyboards recently, they probably feel the same.

I guess what I wanted to say is: Forget about everything you’ve heard about a university museum being a boring place to be! It’s definitely not — it’s an exhaustion machine.

One of my longheld convictions is that the individual life trajectory is both one of the most neglected and most exciting aspects of biomedicine, not least when it comes to collecting and displaying biomedicine in museum exhibitions. Documents, images and objects from individual scientists, doctors, engineers and patients is a rich resource for museum curators — the individual and personal perspective in exhibitions adds a dimension of engagement similar to how biographical writing engages readers in a way that other forms of historical writing don’t.  

Therefore I was quite curious when I read about The Digital Lives Research Conference that will be held at the British Library, London, next week (9-11 February). The aim of the meeting is to bring archivists and curators together with scientists, historians, writers and IT specialists to discuss the challenge of organising and preserving personal digital archives. It will focus on the latest approaches to curating digital objects and archives, on the development of such archives from the point of view of the creators and researchers — writers, scientists and historians — and give an overview of current life-online and digital archives. The organisers are asking how libraries and archives can help people whose lives are becoming increasingly digital to secure, preserve and organise their personal archives of digital photographs, documents, correspondence and multimedia, and, second how to establish relationships with providers of online services and social systems technologies. Read more on www.bl.uk/digital-lives/confreg.html (btw. the conference is free).

I wonder how museums and individual material collections fit into this and similar initiatives? There is obviously more to individual lives than digitalizable photos, documents, correspondence and multimedia. Material things have always loomed large in most people’s lives, but as lives are becoming increasingly digital-based, the non-digitalizable material residue becomes, I believe, increasingly precious. How can museums help secure, preserve and organise such personal material collections? How can such collections be organised and preserved through social technologies? What is the museum 2.0 counterpart to digital lives?

Seems like museum 2.0 has already come of age. Because the Smithsonian Institution has just hosted a two-day conference titled “Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age”.

A stellar group of keynote speakers and experts from the web and digital worlds met with a group of Smithsonian staff on 23-24 January to take a closer look at the museum´complex’s current level of engagement in new media — with the aim to “identify how to move the Smithsonian forward toward a ‘Smithsonian 2.0′”.

Read more here. Lots of interesting comments from staff and outsiders on their blog. There’s also a readable journalistic report in the Washington Post of 26 January. And best of all, the four keynotes can be viewed as webcasts.

It looks like most of what they call museum 2.0 is good old 1.0, however, that is, how to put the collections on the web, on Flickr Commons, etc. Real 2.0 — for example, seriously engaging the public in collecting and exhibition making — is still largely a vision for a distant future.

It also makes me wonder if museum 2.0 is just New Museology in digital clothes? Or is there something ‘post-new museological’ going on here? I’m just asking …     

According to yesterday’s press reports, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has complained about Obama’s new informal dress code which he finds disrespectful of the office (“a locker room experience”).

I’ve read somewhere that military historians operate with a rule-of-thumb about who is a historical winner and who is a loser, viz., that the fanciest brass predicts a loser. Whereas informal military dress code signals a winner (any military historians out there who can confirm this?). The reason is quite obvious, of course: spending time and energy on fancy uniforms tends to reflect a lack of attention to the real job.

Which reminds me of an experience that I probably share with many others but haven’t heard anyone express explicitly, namely, that there seems to be some kind of correspondence with the formality of scholarly/scientific environments and their level of quality.

For example, in my experience, the more formal a meeting setting is — with introductory talks by university dignitaries, receptions in the city hall, accomodation in five star hotels, programs full of academic titles, etc. — the less interesting the meeting usually is. Not because of the formality of the meeting as such, of course, but because the level of formality often is a symptom of a lack of interest in the basic intellectual problems at hand.

Could it be that the more formal a scholary area is, the less successful it is bound to be? So if you are looking for a vibrating intellectual field, look out for not-so-fancy websites and meeting announcements in courier font, for blog discussions and on-line journals, and for meetings which definitely don’t have a city hall reception on the programme. Socities that present an array of prestigious price winners during the annual conference dinner are probably on their way towards stagnation too.