The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh is announcing a job as heritage manager. The succesful incumbent shall lead a team of professional staff and will be responsible for the operation and development of the College’s museums and library including collections, exhibitions, archives, members’ services and the College’s historic buildings. Closing date is 2 October. More info here.
Three months ago, Nature Biotechnology (27: 514-18, 2009) published a commentary titled ‘Science Communication reconsidered’, a topic we are of course very interested in here at MedMus.
I believe the commentary is still worth a comment, because it was written by 24 (sic!) more or less well known ‘experts’ in science communication, including Matt (“framing science”) Nisbett.
The co-authored commentary — which is based on a workshop on the changing nature of science communication “focusing specifically on biotech, biomedicine and genetics” held in Washington D.C. earlier this year — describes the state of science communication in general and in the printed news media in particular, and then ends with some recommendations for how to make the situation better.
The recommendations are peculiar for at least two reasons:
First, I’m surprised that none of the 24 authors seem to have noticed the importance of science, technology and medical museums for today’s science communication arena. True, many STM museums still have their focus on science, technology and medicine of the past, but more and more museums both in Europa and North America are increasingly identifying themselves as venues for science communication.
This total lack of mention of museums is all the more surprising because the 24 authors have a pronounced trust in government-sponsored science communication. In fact, they are wedded to a mixture of old mass media, newspaper journalism and a mid-20th century understanding of government-induced democracy.
The authors believe that the alleged threat to science journalism posed by corporate science media is thus best met by increasing funding of university- and government-supported science journalism.
Accordingly they don’t have much trust in science blogging. It’s mentioned in passing, but otherwise they believe blogging is “unlikely to become an effective solution” to what they perceive as a crisis in science communication.
Well, apparently the 24 authors are not entirely up-to-date with today’s media situation. Not only has grassroot blogging (both blogs by scientists and blogs by non-scientists about science) proved to be enormously vigorous. It is also much more likely to provide a democratic balance to corporate science newsrooms.
Why this nostalgic cry for an old-style public media and gvmt-sponsored science communication policy? Part of the explanation may lie in the professional backgrounds of the 24 authors. Despite their focus on ‘biotech, biomedicine and genetics’, surprisingly many of them are affiliated with schools, departments and centres of public and community health.
My general impression is that scholars of public health tend to be more bound to have faith in goverment-sponsored health campaigns and less bound to trust bottom-up citizen health initiatives. Also that the basic rationale for much public and community health is a tendency to support government solutions for health policy issues.
If so, this co-authored plaidoyer for enhancing science communication is just classical public health communication policy writ large. I doubt a group of writers from departments of medical engineering would come up with similar recommendations for science communication. And Medgadget would probably find the commentary outrageous.
A couple of weeks ago I proposed a significant-medical-objects game — a sort of crowdsourcing/museum 2.0 procedure for the acquisition of objects for medical museums.
Turns out there is a website called, yes, Significant Objects, which has a host of exciting writers attached. The site’s objective is different from my little game. It’s based on the books Buying In (2008) and Taking Things Seriously (2007), in which Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn examined the ways in which we invest inanimate objects with significance.
With the Significant Objects site they have set up an curating experiment in which the ‘significance’ of objects bought in thrift stores and similar places are ‘artificially cooked up under controlled conditions’.
Sort of great idea — but in my mind real stories about real objects is more more interesting than ‘artificially cooked-up’ stories. Fiction is terribly overrated.
Some of you may remember Jim Edmonson’s talk here in Copenhagen three years ago about the plans for a new exhibition at the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, on the history of contraception.
Jim/Dittrick eventually secured funding for it. So tomorrow the new exhibit — ‘Virtue, Vice, and Contraband: A History of Contraception in America’ — opens, at last. Examining 200 years of the history of contraception in the US, it depicts the social and cultural climate that influenced birth control decisions.
The major strength of the exhibition is the vast collection of contraception devices, like the cervical caps above and many others, donated to Case in 2005 by Percy Skuy. Over the course of forty years, Mr. Skuy had amassed the world’s largest collections of such devices.
Judged from the pics I’ve seen, the exhibit design seems pretty traditional. But that is more than compensated for by the richness of the material and the historical and political importance of displaying such artefacts. Hopefully, Case will not become nervous if the anti-abortionist religious right begins to make noises. It would be absurd, but so much in US university politics today is absurd, like Yale University Press’ recent decision to censor a book about the Danish Muhammed drawings.
By the way, here are some devices for vaginal douching (courtesy Jim Edmonson and Laura Travis):
2009 is the 100th anniversary of the notion of pH, proposed by the Danish chemist S.P.L. Sørensen.
Shortly after having been appointed head of the Chemical Department at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1901, Sørensen started an extensive research programme on amino acids and proteins. One of his projects was the kinetics of enzyme dissociation; among other things, he found out that the degree of dissociation is dependent not only on temperature but also on hydrogen ion activity.
Summing up his enzyme investigations in 1909, Sørensen proposed the first logarithmic scale for hydrogen ion activity (pH) which is still in use: 0 is very acidic, 14 is very basic, and 7 is neutral (distilled water). The letter ‘H’ obviously stands for ‘Hydrogen’, but historians are still discussing what Sørensen meant by the letter ‘p’. Does it stand for ‘power’, ‘potential’, ‘Potenz’, etc., or is it just a arbitrary chosen letter?
Whatever, it was probably less arbitrary than this logo created by the Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark.
Sørensen also developed a practical colourimetric method for determining pH. Using buffer systems covering the whole pH scale, he was able to produce reference solutions of known pH, and by applying a series of organic substances that shift colour depending on acidity, the pH of an unknown solution could be determined. Generations of students have used colour indicators for acid-base titration in school and in their university courses. Indicators on paper strips for rapid pH measurement are ubiquitous.
Today, pH is determined by a probe (a thin-walled glass bulb), which produces a small voltage that can be measured electronically. The first commercially successful electronic pH meter based on potentiometric principles was constructed in 1934 by the American chemist Arnold Beckman, who later founded Beckman Instruments (now Beckman Coulter). A few years later the Copenhagen company Radiometer put an electronic pH meter on the market.
(adopted from Medical Museion’s latest exhibition, ‘Primary Substances’)
(image from the Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark)
Again — we’re swamped with spam (the Akismet filter seems to have acquired swine flu).
I didn’t lift a single eyebrow over spam advertising for penis enlargement , viagra, diet pills, twelwe different kinds of poker games, handjobs, blowjobs and an acai berry juice now and then. It was just irritating, not revulsive.
But I must admit that I cannot really take this recent wave of spam — we’re inundated by advertisements for websites that invite to sexual torture, medieval torture, cock and ball torture, bondage torture, female sexual torture, testicle torture, extreme pussy torture, etc. etc.
Give me a break, please! What kind of world is this? First Abu Ghraib, then this.
Her er min tale ved åbningen af ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the history of protein research’, fredag den 4. september:
Da Gert Almind kontaktede os for ca. et år siden og spurgte, om Medicinsk Museion ville lave en udstilling i anledning af indvielsen af Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (CPR), så var min umiddelbare impuls – ”yes!”
Dels fordi jeg syntes, at det var en rigtig god anledning til at lave en udstilling. Proteincentret er en elefant, medens Medicinsk Museion en lille mus – og vi ville gerne have lidt trækhjælp. Dels også fordi det ville være en god måde for vores museum at komme ind i fakultets hjerte og lave en udstilling, som tusindvis af studerende og ansatte på Panum ville kunne se uden at behøve at cykle ned til Bredgade.
Men fremfor alt så tænkte jeg ”yes!” fordi jeg har et helt særligt had-kærlighedsforhold til proteiner. For mange år siden, inden jeg blev humanist, havde jeg prøvet kræfter med proteinforskning. I begyndelsen af 1970’erne havde jeg et phd-stipendium på Biokemisk Institut på Karolinska Instituttet i Stockholm – hos Birger Blombäck, som havde en stor bevilling fra NIH til at forske i hvordan fibrinogen knytter sig til enzymet trombin.
Det var Blombäck, som lærte mig hvad forskning handler om. Jeg fik selv lov til at hente spandevis af blod og stå i timevis i kolde kølerum og fremstille fibrinogen ved at fraktionere serum i salt og alkohol. Jeg måtte pakke mine egne gelfiltreringskolonner og lave mine egne tyndlagskromatografiplader. Jeg var nødt til at skrive min første korte artikel til FEBS-Letters om sådan cirka ni gange inden manden var tilfreds. Og han så yderst misbilligende på mig, hvis jeg dristede mig til at forlade laboratoriet inden kl. 8 om aftenen. Selv kom han kl. 7 hver morgen og gik kl. 22.
Så Birger Blombäck var et formidabelt forbillede for en ambitiøs ung mand at leve op til. Og derfor gik der heller ikke længe, inden jeg indså, at jeg ville studere videnskabsteori og idéhistorie i stedet for at skrive tre artikler med ham som medforfatter. Jeg ville være eneforfatter til mine forskningsresultater!
Ønsket om at arbejde som en ensom ulv – som jeg deler med stort set alle filosoffer og historikere jeg kender – gjorde altså at jeg forlod den aktive biomedicinske forskerkarriere næsten inden, den var begyndt. Ad mange omveje ledte den mig til mit nuværende job som chef for Medicinsk Museion. Og jeg havde faktisk ikke tænkt særligt meget på proteiner igennem de sidste 35 år da Gert Almind ringede og spurgte, om vi ville lave en udstilling på temaet. Mit år med proteinerne på Karolinska dukkede straks frem af glemslens tåger. Og da var det ikke de mange aftentimer med genstridige apparater, jeg kom i tanke om, men fascinationen: fx hvordan det føltes at være i stand til at identificere yderligere en aminosyre i sekvensen i en fibrinopeptid og komme yderligere et skridt nærmere strukturen i den konstante region på enzymbindingssitet. Så ”yes!” – selvfølgelig ville vi lave en udstilling.
Gert Almind og jeg var enige om at udstillingen ikke skulle handle om proteomics eller massespektrometri eller noget andet af alt det der high-tech, high-throughput, som Michael Sundström og hans kolleger arbejder med på CPR, men om proteiner og proteinforskning i et længere historisk perspektiv. CPR skulle sættes i en bredere sammenhæng. Proteincentret står på skuldrene af mange generationer af forskere. Det var denne lange historiske tradition der skulle frem i lyset!
Nu har Novo Nordisk Fonden jo den gode vane, at når man vel er kommet overens om de almene rammer for et projekt, så blander fonden sig ikke i det efterfølgende arbejde. Heller ikke i dette tilfælde. Udstillingen er i og for sig en bestillingsopgave, men bortset fra at den skulle handle om proteinforskning historisk set, så har Medicinsk Museion haft frie hænder.
Inden jeg går videre til at fortælle om, hvad disse hænder har lavet, så vil jeg først præsentere udstillingsgruppen.
Det er jo sådan, at enhver udstilling bygger på et samarbejde mellem to professioner – kuratorer og arkitekter/formgivere. Kuratorerne står for tematisering, research, valg af genstande og billeder, tekstskrivning, osv. Arkitekter og formgivere forsøger så at omsætte kuratorernes tanker, skitser og tekster til det tredimensionelle rum og et mere æstetisk udtryk.
Der er alment kendt blandt udstillingsfolk, at det er en meget vigtig forudsætning for en god udstilling, at kuratorer og arkitekter/formgivere kan arbejde sammen. Helst så tæt som muligt i en proces, hvor man gensidigt giver og tager. Hvis kuratorerne får lov at bestemme for meget, så risikerer udstillingen at blive en stor tre-dimensionel bog. Omvendt, hvis arkitekterne og formgiverne får for meget indflydelse, risikerer man, at formen tager overhånden og at hele bliver tom æstetik. Udstillingsmediet er en fascinerende koreografisk øvelse – begge parter må lytte til hinanden og have respekt for hinanden.
Jeg synes, at vi har haft et meget godt samarbejde. Mikael Thorsted, der har været arkitekt på udstillingen, har, som Ulla Wewer nævnte lige før, designet de glasmontre, som Kirsten og Freddy Johansens Fond har doneret til Fakultetet. Mikael har også haft hovedansvaret for opsætningen af udstillingen, dvs. den måde genstandsmaterialet er arrangeret i montrene, for lyssætningen, osv., og han har også koordineret det praktiske arbejde med grafiker og håndværkere. Uden Mikael og hans team (Johnny Madsen, Jonas Paludan og Nikolaj Møbius) var det hele slet ikke blivet til noget.
Vi har også haft meget stor glæde af samarbejdet med vores grafiker, Lars Møller Nielsen, som har lagt designlinien, inkl. farvesætningen, for hele udstillingen og transformeret vores tekst- og billedmateriale til noget som man forhåbentlig har lyst til at se på. Jeg har hørt at museumskuratorer kan tage et kursus som hedder ”Min grafiker forstår mig ikke!” – det kursus behøvede vi heldigvis ikke.
Og så til kuratorteamet. Det har foruden mig selv bestået af Jens Bukrinski fra Novo Nordisk; han er forhenværende proteinforsker med en særlig interesse i røntgenkristallografi, hvilket I snart vil få at se, om ikke andet så på den laser-installation han har kreeret til titelplanchen. Laura Maria Schütze har hjulpet med at holde styr på de mange genstande og billeder. Og endelig har forskningsassistent Adam Bencard gået igennem proteinlitteraturen for at se, hvilke metaforer proteinforskere anvender – i kontrast til de metaforer der bliver brugt indenfor genomics.
Og endelig vores konservatorteam. Medicinsk Museions akademiske konservator Ion Meyer, konservator Nanna Gerdes og konservatorpraktikant Siri Wahlstrøm har arbejdet hårdt med at rengøre – og i nogle tilfælde restaurere – de mange indlånte ting. Det er som at se Askungen forvandles til en prinsesse – især de store subtilisinmolekylemodeller fra Carlsberglaboratoriet var en konservatormæssig udfordring.
Og hvad er det så for en udstilling, vi har lavet? Lad mig først nævne, at der findes to grundlæggende måder at lave udstillinger på. Den ene arbejder udfra en idé, et tema, en problemstilling – og så dykker man ned i museumssamlingerne og håber på, at man kan finde genstande og billeder som illustrerer den tematik. Modsat kan man browse rundt i samlinger og gemmer for at se, hvad der i det hele taget findes af genstande og billeder – og så lader man udstillingstemaet bero på hvad der faktisk findes tilgængeligt.
De to måder at arbejde på svarer til de to idealtypiske arbejdsmetoder i biomedicinsk forskning – på den ene side den hypotetisk-deduktive forskningsmetodik, som indebærer, at man begynder med teorien og derefter afprøver en hypotese på forsøgsdata, og på den anden side det, man kalder empirisme, dvs. at indsamle data og se, om man kan kan finde noget mønster i dem.
I virkeligheden kombinerer forskere jo de to arbejdsmetoder; nogle gange begynder man med teorier og hypoteser, medens andre gange får datamaterialet lov til at tale for sig selv. Detsamme gør folk, som laver udstillinger. I dette tilfælde begyndte vi med et meget alment tema – proteiner i historien – men så kom vi ligesom ikke længere, for bortset fra nogle få ting og sager i Medicinsk Museions egne magasiner, så fandtes der ikke noget om proteinforskning i de danske museers samlinger. Så derfor tog vi kontakt til flere udenlandske museer og med en række forskningslaboratorier og firmaer, og vi sendte også et opråb ud til kollegaerne her på Panum for at finde ud af, om de havde noget liggende i deres gemmer.
Og så begyndte materialet at dukke op.
Det viste sig for eksempel at Uppsala Medicinhistoriska Museum har en helt fantastisk samlig af apparater fra den svenske proteinforsknings guldalder i 1930’erne og 1940’erne, da mænd som The Svedberg, Arne Tiselius og Hugo Theorell opfandt metoder til elektroforetisk separation af proteiner.
Det viste sig, at Carlsberglaboratoriet ikke, som der ellers gik rygter om, havde smidt alt ud som var mere end ti år gammelt, men at de faktisk stadigvæk havde S.P.L. Sørensens oprindelige pH-indikatorer stående på en hylde. Og i det gamle bibliotek på loftet fandt vi den første håndbyggede model af subtilisin – det proteoloytiske enzym, som ad omveje ledte til succen bag Novozymes.
Og sidst men ikke mindst, blev vi kontaktet af flere forskere på Panum og på Rigshospitalet, som havde ting og sager liggende, som måske kunne anvendes.
Listen over museer, laboratorier, virksomheder og privatpersoner, som har bidraget med genstande (’artefakter’ som man siger i museumsverdenen) er for lang til at blive læst op her (I kan se den på en væg i udstillingen). Den er et vidnesbyrd om hvilke potentielle muligheder der er for at lave udstillinger om biomedicinens nutidshistorie. Vi har bare skrabet lidt i overfladen, og jeg er helt overbevist om, at vi kan få fingrene i meget mere spændende historisk materiale hvis (eller snarere når) vi laver en udviddet version af udstillingen.
Det her vidunderlige historiske materiale ledte os efterhånden til et mere specifik tema for udstillingen. Den tematik, som afspejles i titlen – ’Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’ – var faktisk noget vi fandt på ret sent forløbet. Nøgleordet her er ’treasures’ (skatte). Vi bruger det i to betydninger. Dels i betydningen historiske skatte. Flere af genstandene i udstillingen er taget direkte ud af det 20. århundredes biomedicinske skatkammer, fx Arne Tiselius elektroforeseapparat, som ledte til Nobelprisen i 1948 og strukturmodellen af hemoglobin fra 1959, som var et led i den forskning, der gav Max Perutz prisen i 1962. Dvs. skatte i betydningen ikoniske objekter, som afspejler højdepunkterne i den biomedicinske kulturarv – på samme måde som Arne Jacobsens stole og lamper er ikoner for modernismen.
Men ordet ’skat’ har også en anden betydning. Ligesom andre mennesker samler forskere livet igennem på ting og sager, som betyder meget for dem personligt. En proteinmodel, en polyakrylamidgel, en hjemmelavet immunelektroforeseapparat, en notesbog med forsøgsresultater, whatever – sager som på en eller anden måde er emotionelt ladede for forskaren, som bærer på mindet om den dengang man var en ung lovende forsker. Ting, som vækker reminiscenser, ligesom den berømte Madeleine-kage, som vækkede Marcel Prousts hukommelse og fantasier i På sporet af den tabte tid.
De fleste af skattene i denne anden betydning findes ikke på museer nogen steder i verden endnu. De står stadig i kældere eller på hylderne i laboratoriet eller på skrivebordet. Vi fik som sagt kontakt med en række forskere her på Panum og Rigshospitalet og andre steder i landet, som har haft den slags personlige skatte liggende – og som både blev glade og lidt forundrede over, at vil ville låne dem og bruge dem i en museumsudstilling.
Og dette blev så temaet for udstillingen. Vi indså, at resterne af proteinforskningen (og den biomedicinske forskning i det hele taget) fra de sidste årtier findes bevaret i to slags skatkamre. På den ene side er nogle museer, ligesom Medicinsk Museion, begyndt at indsamle og bevare biomedicinens materielle og visuelle kultur, fordi vi mener, at den er en vigtig del af den fælles kulturarv. På den anden side har vi at gøre med genstande og billeder, som er en uadskillelig del af forskernes personlige, individuelle identitet og som på en måde er dybt private.
Vi ser med andre ord udstillingen som en påmindelse om forholdet mellem kultur og eksistens. Vi retter opmærksomheden mod proteinforskningen som en del af den fælles kulturarv; men samtidig vil vi også skabe indsigt i hvordan materielle genstande og billeder er med til at skabe forskeridentitet. Ved at tale om skatte i begge disse to betydninger håber vi at kunne vise, hvordan de to sider af tilværelsen – den kulturelle og den eksistentielle – hænger sammen.
Og til sidst – jeg tænkte på det, som Ulla Wewer sagde om intern forskningskommunikation og om at skabe en fælles fakultetsidentitet. For et par dage siden gik jeg forbi Birthe Høghs kontor (Birthe er lige blevet prodekan for forskning her på SUND), og hun fortalte, at hun lige havde været nede forbi montrene, og så var Tue Schwartz kommet gående forbi og de var gået rundt og havde set på tingene sammen. Pludselig havde Tue opdaget modellen af APP (avian pancreatic polypeptide), som vi har i montren om proteinstruktur. ”Det er jo mit molekyle!”, sagde han (fortalte Birthe mig). ”Nej”, sagde jeg til Birthe, ”Tue må have taget fejl, den har jeg jo lånt af Flemming Jørgensen og Jette Kastrup på Farma, det er jo deres molekyle”. ”Hmm”, sagde Birthe og satte sig ved skærmen, åbnede PubMed, søgte på Schwartz og APP – og fandt to forskningsartikler fra begyndelsen af 90’erne, hvoraf den ene havde både Flemming og Tue som medforfattere.
Den lille episode er for mig en illustration af, hvordan materielle genstande er emotionellt ladede – de vækker minder, de vækker engagement, og det er den slags engagement i forskningen, som er det lim, der holder en forskningskultur sammen. Derfor spiller museerne og deres samlinger og udstillinger en væsentlig rolle – ikke bare for at kommunikere den biomedicinske forsknings resultater videre til offentligheden, men også for at styrke den fælles biomedicinske kultur.
(oversat fra svensk af Anna Sommer)
The Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies is organising an interesting conference in Copenhagen on 6-7 November. Under the title “Event Culture: The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art”, the conference will discuss the changing role of the art museum and the role of contemporary art within the art museum during the past decades — particularly how museums as institutions for preserving and producing knowledge “for eternity” have increasingly become “arenas for experience and events of the moment”:
The shared tendency between museums and contemporary art towards staging and performing ephemeral events and experiences changes the fundamental functions of the museum within a broader cultural context and might indeed change the very role of art in society as well.
I believe this is an interesting and timely topic for science, technology and medical museums as well; especially the three ways in which the conference is supposed to handle this topic is very relevant for the STM-museum world:
First, the organisers point out that “the idea of preservation was central to the founding of museum institutions” but that preservation seems less important today:
Rather, the focus has shifted towards another core aspect of the museum institution, namely that of public accessibility and audiences. This indicates a shift from substance and solidity towards activity and performance; the representation of history, which can be considered an important motive for preservation, has gradually become less outspoken, while representation of contemporaneousness in various guises simultaneously has grown in significance. This raises many questions, among them the questions of what knowledge the museum institution produces and which public demands it facilitates.
They also maintain that these changes “manifest themselves in a tendency towards privileging the temporary exhibition over the permanent collection”:
The permanent collection regarded as the sum of the preservation efforts of the museum institution seems largely to have become a burden rather than an asset, whereas the temporary exhibition is viewed as the medium that holds the potential of drawing a large number of audiences. This tendency is followed by a growing number of freelance curators that work independently of institutions and consequently outside of museums with permanent collections. The expertise of the curator has changed from classical art historical knowledge and skills to knowledge of ‘the state of the art’ of the art scene and that of ‘story telling’ or generating narratives. This raises questions of the role of the curator both in and outside museums today, and of the qualifications, competences, skills and responsibilities of the curator.
Finally, they suggest that these changes “are evident in the privileging of the thematic exhibition format over the chronological exhibition format, and the group show over the solo show”:
Classical art historical exhibition formats such as the monographic exhibition and the survey show are superseded by exhibitions that concentrate on thematic groupings of art works, often disregarding principles of chronology, history, style and medium in favour of staging connections or ‘dialogues’ of a thematic or formal nature between artworks. The raison d’être of the exhibition seems in general to be moving from that of generating knowledge to that of creating events and sensations, stressing the theatrical and spectacular qualities of artworks. The innovations in the field of exhibition aesthetics raise questions of what kinds of context that are being provided and what kinds of knowledge that are being produced in museum exhibitions, and how the audience is supposed to, and indeed given the option to, engage in this production.
All these three topics are extremely relevant for the way we think about the changing practices and roles of STM history museums as well. Not that the tendencies haven’t been discussed before, but this conference addresses them head-on and in one comprehensive setting.
Deadline for registration: 22 October. See further http://eventculture.ikk.ku.dk
The theme of this year’s Golden Days festival in Copenhagen is ‘Body Performance: corsets, champions and cialis’. Medical Museion takes active part with the Split+Splice-exhibition and Phillip Warnell’s ENDO-ECTO-performance on Sunday.
As a prelude to the festival, the Copenhagen local TV-channel Lorry aired a short feature about three current body-exhibitions in Copenhagen, including Split+Splice. See here how the guest curator of the exhibition, Martha Fleming, explains some of the basic ideas behind the show (3 mins 15 secs into the programme).
I was supposed to give a presentation at the one-day meeting ‘Stories Between Art and Science’ in Oporto, Portugal, next week but had to decline because I’m on paternal leave with my youngest daughter in September and October.
Anyway, the programme has just been distributed and it looks tantalising. Speakers include:
* Michael Punt: Provisional Connection
* Monique Sicard: Between Painters and Scientists/The Paradox of the Concomitant Emergence of Pictorial Abstraction and Photographic Realism
* Shirley Wheeler: Tracing the Invisible
* Maria Esteva: Endless Possibilities: Digital Collections as Crossroads between the Humanities and the Sciences
* Len Massey: Drawing the Invisible
* Jane S. Richardson: Drawing 3D Protein Structures
* Laura Salisbury: A Neurological Modernism: Language, Materiality and the Twentieth-Century Word
* David A. Kirby: Big Screen Science: Scientists’ Backstage Role in the Production of Hollywood Films
* David Frankel: Visuality/Sound and the Economy
* Deanna Petherbridge: George Stubbs’ Comparative Anatomical Exposition (1795-1806) and its Relationship to Theories of Degeneration of the Primordial Species
* Daniela Coimbra: Psychology, Music and Performance
* Vincent Barras: Report on an Art-Science Doctoral Program: Neurosciences, Psychopathology and Arts, XX-XXIth C.
I would have loved to hear and discuss at least half of these papers. For obvious reasons, I would have been very interested to hear Shirley Wheeler’s talk, because she curated the ‘Design4Science’ exhibition that we displayed here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen last spring.
But I would particularly have loved to hear Jane Richardson talk about her work on 3D protein structure drawings — Richardson famously developed the now ubiquitous ribbon diagram (a.k.a. Richardson diagram) of protein secondary and tertiary structure models in the 1980s.
This representation of the enzyme subtilisin Carlsberg (Protein Data Bank nr 1c3l) that we are currently displaying in the ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’-exhibition is a nice example of a ribbon diagram:
The amino acid sequence is sequentially coloured — from dark blue at the N-terminal end through light blue, green, yellow, orange, and finally red at the C-terminal end. The spiral patterns represent α-helices. The arrows represent parallel β-sheet-forming β-strands in the core of the protein. The thin tubes represent the loops in the structure. The transparent outer layer represents the van der Waals surface, which encloses the molecular volume of the whole protein. (from ‘Protein Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research).
Today’s ribbon diagrams are based on graphical display programmes like PyMOL. But when Jane Richardson first developed these diagrams around 1980 she did it in hand-drawing. It would have been great to hear her personal story of the ribbon diagram and the development of this mode of representation, from hand-drawing to computerised design.