October 2010

In 2000, a group of university museum people around Europe founded UNIVERSEUM as a loose network for the preservation of the European academic heritage.

So far it’s had an informal structure, which has been part of the charm of the organisation. But at the 2010 annual meeting in Uppsala last June, it was decided to organise it more formally with statutes, membership, fees etc — and the following aims:

• It aims at academic heritage in the broad sense – not only university museums and collections, but also monuments, buildings, archives, and libraries.
• Its geographical scope is European academic heritage (although anyone from outside Europe can become a UNIVERSEUM member).
• In terms of recognition, it targets the European political and academic community, particularly the European University Association (EUA), the Coimbra Group, other European university organisations, the European Union, the Council of Europe, etc.

Anyone (individual or institution) with an interest on European academic heritage can now become a member. See the statutes here.

The interim executive committee — Thomas Bremer, University of Halle-Wittenberg; Marta Lourenço, University of Lisbon;
Laetitia Maison, University of Bordeaux, France; Sébastien Soubiran, University of Strasbourg; Klaus Staubermann, National Museums Scotland; Sofia Talas, University of Padua; Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg — invites to the next UNIVERSEUM Network Meeting to be held at the University of Padova, 26-29 May, 2011. A call for papers will be announced soonish. More info from Sébastien Soubiran, University of Strasbourg,
sebastien.soubiran@unistra.fr.

Most medical museums live in the safe past. Exhibitions rooms are filled with beautiful 19th and 20th century medical instruments and scary pathological body parts in formaldehyde. The present and the future body and its instruments are hardly visible in medical museums.

How, for example, shall medical museums handle the fusion of bodies and instruments made possible by bio-engineering and human enhancement:

Living bacteria with artificial DNA, supercomputers designed to function like a real human brain or robots showing human-like emotions. Biology is increasingly engineered in much the same way as technology, while technology is becoming more and more life-like. These two engineering trends intensify current debates about the desirability and acceptability of genetic engineering and human enhancement. They also raise novel issues, like who’s in control of machines with a life of their own?

Quoted from an invitation to a meeting titled ‘Making Perfect Life’ (about the social and political consequences of these two bio-engineering trends) in the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday 10 November. Speakers include stem cell scientist Stephen Minger, neurosurgeon Veerle Visser-VandeWalle, Artifical Intelligence expert Brigitte Krenn, philosophers Mark Bedau, Roger Strand and Jutta Weber, sociologist Andrew Webster and others.

See here for final programme and registration (before November 2nd). Conference attendance is free.

Jesper‘s bog, Det hvide snit: Psykokirurgi og dansk psykiatri 1922-1983 (Syddansk Universitetsforlag) udkommer i morgen. Der er noget forskellige forhåndsomtale af bogen i dag her og her. Der var også en artikel i Information i går.

Sekretæren for Dansk Medicinsk-Historisk Selskab, Søren Bak-Jensen, påminder om at fristen for indsendelse af opgaver til Studenterprisen 2010 er 31. december.

Prisen er på kr. 10.000 og kan uddeles til alle typer studenteropgaver, undtagen specialer, der beskæftiger sig med et medicinhistorisk emne og som er blevet bedømt i 2010.
 
Derfor, hvis du har været vejleder på eller kender til en god medicinhistorisk opgave fra i år, så er det en rigtig god idé at gøre opmærksom på muligheden for at deltage i konkurrencen.
 
Flere oplysninger om hvordan indsendelse af opgaver foregår findes her. Eller spørg Søren på stbj@hotmail.com.

Luke Jerram has just finished a new glass sculpture of a Plasmodium falciparum merozoite just after it has entered a red blood cell.

The artwork is to be auctioned in New York to raise money for the charity Malaria No More.

See the sculpture in Jerram’s microbiology artworks collection and a YouTube clip of the newly completed sculpture.

(From the Luke Jerram Newsletter, October 2010)

If you are interested in medical science studies, you might consider visiting Medical Museion on Thursday 28 October at 2PM.  Tiago Moreira (School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University) will speak about “Ageing in Technological Democracies”:

Social gerontology has until recently been mainly concerned with the structural and cultural contexts through which age identities and practices are organised. This has been enriched by current debates about the extent to which these identities are constrains on individuals or represent ‘reflexive opportunities’ of re-invention, and by the increased recognition that knowledge and representations of ageing play a central role in these social and political processes. In this paper, I explore the growing importance of processes of collective negotiation about the aims, methods and results of research on ageing. Drawing from a documentary analysis of an on-going public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the National Health Service and the role of ‘quality of life’ measurements within it, I examine how patient organisation, charities, clinicians, health economists and policy makers confront different understandings of the ageing process in their quest to assess the value of therapies for Alzheimer’s Disease. I argue that these differences can be explained by relating them to divergent perspectives on the relationship between the experience of ageing, ageing research and the politics of health and social care. I conclude by suggesting ways through which a ‘technological democracy’ could include groups and concerns that have remained at the margins of the knowledge making process in contemporary societies.

Tiago is trained as a sociologist and has written extensively about “the complex worlds that are enacted in contemporary biomedicine, with particular attention to the role of technology in the orders of medical work, the use of health technology at home, the collective production of health care standards and the politics of clinical trials”.

Arranged by Center for Healthy Aging, Theme 5: Communication and Innovation (in which Medical Museion takes part with a postdoc project and two PhD-projects). Further info from Lene Otto (lotto@hum.ku.dk) or myself (ths@sund.ku.dk).

De som er interesserede i videnskabsstudier inden for aldringsforskningsområdet kan blive inspireret ved at komme i Medicinsk Museions anatomiske teater, torsdag den 28. oktober kl. 14. Her vil Tiago Moreira (School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University) tale om “Ageing in Technological Democracies”. Bagefter diskussion og til sidst et glas livsforlængende rødvin.

Abstract:

Social gerontology has until recently been mainly concerned with the structural and cultural contexts through which age identities and practices are organised. This has been enriched by current debates about the extent to which these identities are constrains on individuals or represent ‘reflexive opportunities’ of re-invention, and by the increased recognition that knowledge and representations of ageing play a central role in these social and political processes. In this paper, I explore the growing importance of processes of collective negotiation about the aims, methods and results of research on ageing. Drawing from a documentary analysis of an on-going public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the National Health Service and the role of ‘quality of life’ measurements within it, I examine how patient organisation, charities, clinicians, health economists and policy makers confront different understandings of the ageing process in their quest to assess the value of therapies for Alzheimer’s Disease. I argue that these differences can be explained by relating them to divergent perspectives on the relationship between the experience of ageing, ageing research and the politics of health and social care. I conclude by suggesting ways through which a ‘technological democracy’ could include groups and concerns that have remained at the margins of the knowledge making process in contemporary societies.

Tiago er sociolog og har skrevet en række artikler om “the complex worlds that are enacted in contemporary biomedicine, with particular attention to the role of technology in the orders of medical work, the use of health technology at home, the collective production of health care standards and the politics of clinical trials”. Arrangeret af Center for Healthy Aging, Tema 5: Formidling og innovation: Sundhedsfremme og brugerinddragelse. Yderligere oplysninger fra Lene Otto (lotto@hum.ku.dk) eller Thomas Söderqvist (ths@sund.ku.dk).

If you happen to pass through Copenhagen in the weekend, don’t miss the opportunity to visit Medical Museion on Friday night. We’re open 6-12pm during the Copenhagen Culture Night, with the following highlights:

1) From wooden leg to robotic arm:
Together with the Amputation Group of the Danish Handicap Society we are focusing on amputation and prosthetics. At the entrance level of the museum we are displaying selected artefacts from our historical prosthetics collection together with hight tech artificial arms and legs. Throughout the evening an expert in contemporary prosthetics will talk about his daily work of making prosthetic arms and legs to Danish soldiers. We’ve also invited users prosthetic limbs to show what they can actually do with such things. Finally, our head of collections, Ion Meyer, will talk about the history of amputation.

2) Check your lung capacity!
2010 is the ‘Year of the Lung’ here in Denmark. Accordingly, the Danish Lung Society focuses on one óf the most devastating public health problems — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Lots of people have disfunctional lung capacity without really knowing. A group of medical doctors and nurses will make a COPD-test in one of the rooms on the first floor — and also give advice about further investigation, if necessary.

3) Medical Museion’s Investigation Room opens
Postdoc Lucy Lyons inaugurates our Investigaton Room, in which you can learn to see by means of drawing. You are invited to investigate selected artefacts from our collections with a pencil. We don’t care if you “can draw” or not; it’s about using the pencil to investigate physical objects.

I’ve totally forgotten to mention the fact that Danny Birchall, web editor at the Wellcome Collection in London, has written a very valuable and eminently readable personal resumé of the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month.

Thanks for the good work, Danny!

If I were in Durham (UK) on the 15th of October, I would definitely take the opportunity to hear Andreas Musolff (UEA) speak about “Selfish genes, nasty parasites and helpful stem cells – metaphors in the public perception of genetic research” in the Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease’s seminar series. Here’s the abstract:

The paper analyses the role of metaphor and simile in representations of evolution and genetics in British and German popular science and media publications. It focuses on anthro- and sociomorphic imagery used to interpret concepts such as “gene”, “parasite”, and “stem cell”. Such metaphors are often presented as being imbued with scientific authority; furthermore, they are used in public debates about science policy (e.g. on research funding, regulation, ethics). However, these non-expert uses are often influenced by conceptual and discourse traditions that have little to do with scientific definitions or even their mainstream popularized versions but rely on pre-modern and non-scientific source input. In conclusion, we ask which problems this influence of metaphors on the popularized image of genetic research presents for expert/non-expert communication and public debate on research policy.

Could be useful to attend to learn about ways to analyse metaphors in present postgenomic science and how to make sense of them in an exhibition context.

The talk starts at 12 noon at the Wolfson Research Institute’s seminar Room F009 (Queen’s Campus), and there is a lunch buffet.
(from the Mersenne list)