Biomedicine in museums

6229 scientists have so far joined the boycot against Elsevier — see the boycot page here. They will not publish in any Elsevier journal, or will not referee articles for them, or will not do any editorial work.

It all started with mathematician Timothy Gowers open letter against Elsevier’s exorbitant prices, unreasonable subscription policy, and stubborn support for the Research Works Act.

It’s not just about one publisher that abuses the proprietary scientific journal system. Elsevier is the tip of the iceberg. Many scientists think the current century-old system of scientific publishing has reached its limits. What will replace it? Open access journals? A new kind of social media kind of platform? We don’t know — the future of scientific publishing is an exciting field for futuristic speculations.

(added 17 feb: see also Neil Stewart’s post on the LSAe Impact blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/15/after-elsevier-boycott-green-open-access/

PS: An hour after I wrote this the number of signatures has increased to 6246.

(image by Michael Eisen)

A couple of days ago, historian of science Rebekah Higgitt (curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and author of a very good book about 19C Newton-biographers), myself and some other historians of science had a Twitter discussion about whether there is progress in science, and, if so, what we might mean by it.

Now, Rebekah has taken the effort to collect the tweets and has posted them on her teleskopos history of science blog. The discussion speaks for itself, and I don’t want to dilute it by carrying it over here (but don’t hesitate to join it in teleskopos’ comment section).

What about medicine? Are there any arguments against the claim that medical science and medical technology makes progress?

Careful readers of this blog may remember we opened an Investigation Room here at Medical Museion in connection with the Copenhagen Culture Night in October 2010.

The room originated on the initiative of postdoc Lucy Lyons as a public venue for her project on drawing as a method to communicate experience with museum objects:

Medical Museion’s Investigation Room opens
Postdoc Lucy Lyons inaugurates our Investigation 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.

The room was used on several occasions — both for sessions with the general public and in connection with a course in Medical Science and Technology Studies in early 2011, where Lucy taught students in the Medical Engineering BSc programme to sharpen their abilities to observe historical medical devices by means of drawing.

Now we’re planning to develop the Investigation Room further. The idea is to create a permanent space in the museum building, where students and the general public are allowed to view, handle and discuss physical museum objects as a way

• to strenghten their ability to experience the immediate materiality of things through all senses, including vision, hearing, touch, smell etc..
• to reflect about the use of material objects in the historiography of medicine and science communication.

In other words, we see the room also as a continuation of the succesful Sensuous Object workshop organised by Lucy last September.

But there are also some new research and curatorial projects who want to use the room for somewhat different purposes. For example, Jan Eric Olsén and our new PhD-student Emma Peterson are planning to use this or an adjacent room as a ‘Touch Room’, where they can investigate ideas about touch within the frame of their new Vision & Touch project.

PhD-student Anette Stenslund may be interested in using it for experiments with the experience of smell in museums settings. And curator Niels Christian Vilstrup-Møller and I are thinking about how we could use a room of this kind as a way of displaying some of the museum’s new acquisitions, especially from metabolic research. A kind of combined acquisition room and open storage.

And of course, we are thinking about how to use the room for the new event series ‘Body | Medicine | Object: Close encounters of the material kind’.

The plans for the new Investigation Room (or Object Lab, or Sensuous Workshop, or whatever we may call it) will be intensified during the spring. Tomorrow, we will discuss Jan Eric and Emma’s ideas for a ‘Touch Room’ and then we will bring other ideas from visiting curators.

There are lots of interesting initiatives around the world to learn from. A rather similar project is about to be launced at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, where Steven Lubar and his colleagues are working on a combination of open storage, study center and seminar room, called CultureLab. They see the lab as a opportunity to display part of the museum’s collections but also to provide hands-on learning opportunities to students (see a couple of posts on Steven Lubar’s blog here, here, and here).

Another project we might learn from is the object handling and touch research project led by Helen Chatterjee at University College London (see H. Chatterjee, ed., Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling) — although we don’t have well-being as our primary aim, there may nevertheless be some interesting overlapping issues involved.

As I wrote the other day, Medical Museion hosts the Graduate Programme of Medical Science and Technology Studies here at the University of Copenhagen.

Now we are proud to announce a graduate course titled ‘At the Margins of Life and Death’, to be held 21-23 August 2012.

The aim of the course — which is organised by associate professor Mette Nordahl Svendsen and professor Lene Koch from the Section of Health Services Research here in Copenhagen — is to present “notions, materialities and regulations of life and death in the laboratory, in the clinic, and among patients and users of medical science and technology”.

Looking at “how borders between life and death are established in socio-material practices”, the course “takes up issues of suffering, dignity and the quality of life related to medical science and technology”, and will be structured around three themes: beginnings of life, extensions of life, and endings of life:

“The life in question may be the cell, the embryo, the newborn, the comatose, the old, the demented, the research animal. Analytically and methodologically the course draws on sociological, historical, and anthropological approaches to practices of life and death”.

The course is aimed at doctoral students from public health and the social sciences and gives 5,2 ects credits. The course format is lectures in the mornings, student presentations and discussions in the afternoons.

Invited lecturers include professor Sharon Kaufman, Dept of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, UCSF and professor Lynn Morgan, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts.

It costs 4,680 DKK for students who are immatriculated at the Copemhagen Graduate School of Health Sciences. Register before 15 May 2012 via http://phdkursus.sund.ku.dk/frontPlanner/DetailKursus.aspx?id=95753

On acceptance participants will be asked to submit a paper of five pages by the 1st of August. Papers should describe how the PhD project takes up the theme of life and death. During the course each participant will have 20 minutes to present his/her paper, which will be followed by comments from resource persons as well as a general discussion. Admission for Ph.D. students will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Applications from external participants will be considered after the closing date. The application must be sent via the web-application.

More information from Mette Nordahl Svendsen.

(featured image by bitzcelt)

I’ve been invited by the philosophy of science group in Gothenburg to give a talk to their Theory of Science seminar group on Friday, 3 February — titled ”Mundane Design vs. Fine Sci-Art: Two Realms of Aesthetic Practice in Science Communication”.

Here’s the abstract:

Sci-art has become an increasingly important dimension of science communication through printed media, museums, science centers and the web. Ranging from beautiful images on scientific journal covers to tissue-engineered wet-art installations, sci-art has become a recognised subgenre of the contemporary fine arts; it has entered art schools and caught the interest of gallery owners and art reviewers. It has also drawn the attention of major funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust, as a means for strengthening public engagement with science. However, the popularity of fine sci-art risks eclipsing another, and perhaps even more important, realm of aesthetic practice in science and science communication, viz., mundane design (everyday aesthetics). In this presentation, I shall reclaim everyday aesthetics and the sensory qualities of research as a central aspect of science and, as a consequence, of science communication.

Among other things, I’m going to show and discuss some of the videos that Astrid has shot for the ‘Everyday aesthetics of biomedicine’ project, like this one:

The seminar will be in room T340, Olof Wijksgatan 6 (Gamla Hovrätten) in Gothenburg (Sweden), 3 February, 1-3 pm.

One of my favourite science bloggers, biochemistry professor Larry Moran (Sandwalk), comments in passing on the TED talks — the global institution which the sci-tech-design-online segment of the creative class loves to attend and watch:

There’s a certain mysticism about TED talks that I deplore. In order to be a successful TED talker you need to be articulate and clever. You need to be engaging and just a little bit radical—though not too radical. That’s just about all it takes to get an enthusiastic standing ovation from the people who comes to listen to these 18 talks. What you’re actually saying doesn’t really count for anything as this example plainly shows.

The mantra of TED talks is “Ideas Worth Spreading” but if you think about it there aren’t very many important new ideas that can be explained in 18 minutes. On the other hand, if you want to spread ideas that your audience already agrees with then TED talks are just the thing for you.

Right! I always wondered why I like to watch TED talks. I’ve never really felt I learned anything from them that I didn’t somehow knew before. So what it’s about is the nice and fuzzy feeling of being in agreement with a good-looking, charismatic, reasonably famous, and relaxed speaker (TED talk speakers are always extremely relaxed).

Maybe it’s the same feeling evangelical Christians have when they go listening to their favourite charismatic preacher on Sundays?

We are proud to invite to the first seminar in our new MUSE seminar series:

Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg

From Material Culture to Material Heritage:
History of Contemporary Science Beyond the Linguistic Turn

Auditorium, Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K
Thursday 26 January, 3-4.40 pm

Abstract:

Getting our hands dirty in the messy worlds of the laboratory and the storage room, and to entangle with the commemorative practices of scientists and technicians when it comes to contemporary material heritage does not belong to the common experiences of historians of science. Studying contemporary laboratories and their materiality has so far been the domain of sociologists and ethnographers. Despite the recent ‘material turn’ in cultural studies, engagement with the material world often remains a linguistic exercise, extending at the utmost to an excursion to the sanitised and academically encultured world of the museum exhibit.

For historians of science, I argue, engaging with the ‘unfinished’ material world of contemporary science poses many opportunities. By taking the material seriously beyond the linguistic turn and exploring local university departments and their recent histories through their material heritage, we can observe everyday science and confront scientists and technicians’ cultures with those of historians’. By engaging with recent material heritage, we can make an important contribution to enhancing the awareness about this heritage, its implications for history writing, as well as its documentation and preservation.

Alle som er interesserede af forskningskommunikation (på eller uden for museer) er meget velkommen til Medicinsk Museions nye MUSE-seminarrække.

Seminarrækken er en del af Medicinsk Museions projekt om “science communication”, som stiler mod at udvikle nye forskningsbaserede og eksperimentelle metoder for forskningskommunikation såvel som at udvikle teoretiske tilgange inden for feltet, specielt i lyset af den moderne biomedicins historie.

Vi inviterer forskere som arbejder med materialitet, forskningskommunikation, science and technology studies, videnskabsteori, museologi og relaterede områder.

Hvis du er interesseret i at deltage i seminarerne — eller måske endda selv præsentere noget — kontakt Karin Tybjerg (karin.tybjerg@sund.ku.dk) eller Adam Bencard (adab@sund.ku.dk).

Nemlig! (fremhævelserne af keywords er fra Easynews webovervågningsservice)

(Politiken, 18. januar, side 2, papirudgaven — fra Easynews webovervågning via ODM)

Two of our staff members — Nina Bjerglund, who’s working on social media for public health communication (read her posts here) and Daniel Noesgaard, who has created our web universe — are now on their way to Raleigh, North Carolina, to take part in the ScienceOnline 2012 conference.

I’m going to have the #scio12 hashtag window on Twitter open 24/7 — there’s already (the day before the conference) a lot of interesting activity on it. In addition, Danny will be tweeting from @dnnyboy and Nina from @bjerglund.

They’ll be back on Monday, so we expect to focus next Tuesday’s internal staff meeting on the latest news about how to communicate science through blogs, Google+, Twitter, Diaspora, Academia, LinkedIn, Facebook, you name it.