March 2009

An initiative to learn from: In connection with Jeff Hughes’ (CHSTM, Manchester) talk at the Whipple Museum in Cambridge next week about the early culture of the Cavendish laboratory and its tradition of singing scientific songs, music scientist Torben Rees is getting together a choir to perform some of these songs. Scholarly and art performance mutually support each others.

Maybe we could arrange a combined scholarly and art event in our medical theatre? Is there any archival material that records how pathologists were singing sarcastic medical songs during autopsy? Do the pathologists in CSI-series discretely hum rap texts about maimed bodies? There are many possibilities. Where’s the nearest medical choir?

One of the potentially most interesting workshop titles I’ve seen announced so far this year is ‘Biodigital lives: making, consuming and archiving the lives of technoscience’.

The meeting — convened by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex) and Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster) and hosted by the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), the Centre for Material Digital Culture and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex on 14 July — will “examine issues and questions about digital and biodigital life, lives and identities framed by biosciences, contemporary media and biopolitical cultures”:

From the lives of scientists to the technologisation of life, ‘Biodigital lives’ will analyse biotechnological and bioinformatic forms and practices of identifying, archiving and storying the living. It will discuss diverse forms of new/digital mediation and informatics as they pertain to the lives of people, plants, animals, microbes, viruses and ecosystems entangled in global media, biopolitical institutions and bioeconomies.

Topics might include:

• How digital/life history and genetic genealogies intersect
• Biomediation and biotechnological media in reading and writing lives
• Biodigital memory, narration and identity (e.g. memory and archive, genetics and life story, digital life practices)
• Genomic databases and biobanks as biographical resources
• Techniques of writing, reading, editing and publishing the lives of species and populations
• Life archives and life histories of humans and non-humans
• Synthetic biology and bioinformatic communities from the perspective of biological literacy, design and participation
• Genomes as digital/media artefacts – new media/biotech convergences and commercial genealogies
• Genetics and genomics as/in life narratives and popular culture
• Aesthetic encounters in biodigital life in sci-art, film, games, software, art etc
• Genealogies and critical potentials of bioart/digital media art intersections

The workshop will be arranged around short presentations and will favour discussion and broad participation. 300 words abstracts + short bios to Kate O’Riordan (k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk) by 20 April 2009. Final confirmation and draft programme by 11 May.

Science Museum have just aired their new history of medicine website, Brought to Life. Intended for students and educators, it shows some 2,500 newly-made images of objects from the museum’s history of medicine collection together with historical interpretations, interactives and thematic introductions. The plan is to let it grow to 4000 images over the next year.

Hopefully we’ll be back with a review soonish. Have someone else tried it yet? 

(thanks to Robert Bud for the tip)

We’ve just finished the application (in Danish) for a major grant to develop and expand Medical Museion:

See it in greater resolution here:

Unfortunately, the foundations we are sending it to, don’t have the software to disentangle the Wordle-cloud, so we will have to send them a more conventional text version.

We will be back with further info when (or rather if) the application is succesful.

The history of pharmaceutical and biotech history is pretty difficult to get an overview of. Some daring visualizations would be most helpful.

Here’s a promising approach: mktlgcs has created this visualization of FDA pharma application approvals 2000-2008 — an excellent way to get an overview of the activities of the global pharmaceutical industry (all major manufacturers want an FDA approval to operate on the US market):

The interactive original — in which you can put the cursor on a circle/dot to get the application frequence number — can be found here on IBM’s visualization website Many Eyes.

The big circles (Merck, GlaxoSmithCline, Wyeth, Novartis etc.) are the big players, but there are hundreds of small ones in between (FDA also approves medical devices, but it doesn’t look like the medical device industry is included into this data set.)

There is plenty of room for further work along these lines. It would be great to add a dynamic feature to this kind of visualization, for example, make the circles expand and diminish over time, somewhat like Hans Rosling is doing with his dazzling dynamic epidemiological statistics. This would also be a nice way to display the dramatic merger&acquisitions pattern in the pharma industry and the rise of many new small pharma/biotech actors over time.

(thanks to Attila for the tip about mktlgcs)