October 2010

I always feel somewhat uneasy in mood when I’m together with medical scientists. They’re so serious. They see science as a contest for excellence and authority, rather than as a playground for grownup kids.

I came to think about this when I read today’s news that the 2010 Nobel prize winner in physics, Andre Geim, “once published a scientific paper that was co-authored by his pet hamster, Tisha”.

I can’t really imagine a medical scientist writing a paper together with his pet minipig.

Why is this? Nature (playful people are drawn to physics rather than medicine)? Or nurture (6 years of disciplined medical studies wipes out all the childish minds; or kills the wholesome childish impulses)?

We’ve just set up the installation ‘An Ageing World’ in the main lobby of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen.

The installation has been made to mark the IARU-conference on Ageing, Longevity and Health that takes place 5-7 October, organised by the Center for Healthy Ageing.

The simple idea was to make a commentary on the rapidly changing demographic of the human population:

Protruding from a round earth disc, soaring a couple of feet above the floor, are age structure diagrams (histograms) from seven countries around the world (Denmark, China, Japan, United States, Bolivia, Malawi and Papua New Guinea) for the years of 1950, 2000 and 2050. The histogram protrusions are illuminated from below by means of fiber optics in contrast to the dark-blue earth disc.

Age structure diagrams, especially in poor countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas, traditionally take the form of pyramids (lots of kids and decreasing number of adults as the population grows older). But in the rich countries of the world the pyramids are already now turning into pillars, and in 2050 they will become mushroom shaped. In short, this is a major demographic challenge, which has enormous consequences for global health systems.

Bente and I got the idea to the installation from the way she, Camilla Mordhorst and architech Anne Schnettler used physical age structure diagrams in the Oldetopia exhibition here at Medical Museion a couple of years ago — this idea in turn had grown out of discussions we had with Susanne Bauer and Sybilla Nikolow over how statistics was displayed in the old Deutsche Hygiene Museum in the 1930s.

We then discussed different design solutions with exhibition designer Mikael Thorsted and graphic designer Lars Møller Nielsen (Studio 8), and eventually agreed on the light disc with a pixel-ish world map — with East Asia in the center, and with Europe and the US on the rim — and with the protrusing illuminated histograms. The disc was produced by Exponent Stougaard A/S, using a new printing method

Here are images from the installation of the disc in the main lobby of the Panum building last Thursday:

After four hours all 21 ‘pyramids’ were glowing and ‘An Ageing World’ was completed.

Throughout the day, students and staff stopped by, gathering in small groups and discussing the diagrams.

What started as an icon for the IARU conference, thus turned out — quite unexpectedly — to be a informal engagement site for understanding global demography.

Back in 2006, I, for one, was unreservedly enthusiastic (here) about XVIVO‘s animated ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’. Originally made for use in undergraduate life science teaching at Harvard, it became immensely popular on the internet. It was magic — as  Jim Endersby said , it was like “Terminator 2 meets a biology textbook”.

Since then we have eagerly waited for Terminator 3. And now the sequel has arrived — a four and a half minute animation, titled ‘Powering the Cell: Mitochondria’, showing the production of ATP.

But I cannot recall the original enthusiasm I felt about ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’. The magic has evaporated. This is just another didactic animation movie.

Today, the wonderfully informative mailing list of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (which refuses to turn into blog format) reminded me about the fact that in some parts of the world the humanities are still subjects of love and devotion.

Latin aficionados at the HPS department have a “a fun little reading group”, called Latin Therapy, which is dedicated to “deciphering Latin texts about the history of science, history of medicine, and anything else that takes our fancy”:

It’s a relaxed group, and all are welcome to attend – no matter what level of Latin you may have. To encourage new members of all abilities to come along for the first session of term, we’ll be starting with some gentle warm-up texts before moving on
to some more challenging botanical poetry…

“Challenging botanical poetry in Latin”. Oh, University of Copenhagen, where art Thou?

Added 5 Oct: The similarly informal Greek Therapy group doesn’t (judged from today’s message on the mailing list) seem to have as much fun as their Latin compatriots. Why? My experience is that Greek is much more fun than Latin.

Last night, the curatorial team behind the exhibition Split+Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine received the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits 2010 for ”outstanding museum work”.

The award was announced at the banquet of the annual meeting of The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), which is ending today in Tacoma, Wa.

‘The Dibner’ has been awarded since 1987. Earlier recipients include exhibitions from the National Museum of American History and National Air and Space Museum (Smithsonian, Washington DC), Powerhouse Museum (Sidney), Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester), and Museum of London.

This is the first time the Dibner Award has been given to an exhibition produced by a museum in the Nordic countries — and also the first time it has been given to an exhibition focusing on medical technology.

As readers of this blog may remember, Split+Splice is one of the results of the combined research and curatorial project “Danish Biomedicine: 1955-2005: Integrating Medical Museology and the Historiography of Contemporary Biomedicine” here at Medical Museion. The project was financed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation for three years, 2005-2008, but the board of the foundation liked the preliminary results so much that they awarded us yet another year to bring the research results out to a larger public in the form of a public exhibition.

The four postdocs in the project — Jan Eric Olsén, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Søren Bak-Jensen, and Susanne Bauer — were prolonged for another year (with Søren as administrative exhibition leader), and to give a strong aesthetic and design edge to the exhibition, we hired the Canadian artist and designer Martha Fleming as creative leader.

After more than six months of conceptual development, the team was joined by museum architect Mikael Thorsted and graphic designer Lars Møller Nielsen, both at Studio 8, who did a great job. One of the best design results, in my mind, was the measuring instrument installation above and this ‘container wall’ (for more images, see here and here).

This is how Martha described the exhibition:

Split+Splice … is about the inter-relations between the culture of biomedicine and the enormous complexities of 21st century living. The exhibition explores these complexities through the material culture, objects and instruments used by biomedical practitioners in research and in clinical activities.

Much as biomedicine itself, Split+Splice is an innovative hybridisation of complex practices. It is not exactly science communication; it will not teach you comprehensively about the field of biomedicine. It is not exactly old-fashioned history of science; it will not show you a triumphalist progression of miraculous discovery. It is not exactly an art exhibition; it will not leave you with a sense that you have seen inside a solo mind.

(read more here).

And here’s the curatorial team’s acknowledgement of the award:

Split + Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine was created by a dedicated, interdisciplinary and international team:

Curators: Søren Bak-Jensen (administrative project leader), Susanne Bauer, Martha Fleming (creative project leader), Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan Eric Olsén, Jonas Paludan (curatorial assistant);

Designers: Mikael Thorsted (exhibition designer), Lars Møller Nielsen (graphic designer);

Medical Museion Staff: Ion Meyer (collections and conservation manager), Nicole Rehné (conservator), Bente Vinge Pedersen (outreach).

In developing the exhibit we pursued two major goals, which were to show that
· aesthetics can be an analytical tool as well as a communication tool and
· epistemological inquiry can guide what an exhibition ends up looking like.

In pursuing these goals, we are also grateful for the assistance we received from a host of professional colleagues who work in the worlds of museums, academe, biomed, fine arts and elsewhere.

Split + Splice was the first major research-based exhibition project at Medical Museion.  We wish to thank the Novo Nordisk Foundation which sponsored the exhibition through the integrated research and curatorial project “Danish Biomedicine: 1955-2005: Integrating Medical Museology and the Historiography of Contemporary Biomedicine,” for which Professor Thomas Söderqvist was the Principal Investigator.

Last autumn I wrote about Donald Blaufox’s online collection of historical medical artefacts (MoHMA):

Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage.

Dr. Blaufox has now reviewed the site, record by record, improved the texts and replaced and added a lot of images. A labour of love.

One of my British colleagues just mailed me:

I feel, sadly, that over here museological thought is constrained by narrow social and pedagogical objectives.

Couldn’t agree more. Didactics is a death kiss to museums!