Biomedicine in museums

Our otherwise sensitive antennae seem to be prette insensitive right now — or why else did we miss the deadline for the interdisciplinary conference ‘Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice’ at the University of Washington, Seattle, 15-16 May?

Here’s the brief for the meeting — organized by The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington:

Museums are institutions steeped in tradition but surrounded by constant change. “Transforming Museums” seeks to find ways that professionals can meet these changes deliberately and thoughtfully instead of being swept along their currents. Building on the overwhelming success of last year’s “Rethinking Museums” conference, we now turn to the task of “Transforming Museums.”

And then they invite museum professionals, students, and university faculty to submit paper abstracts or workshop proposals on things like:

How do we transform museums?
Who is leading these transformations?
What recent and current work shares this aim?
How do we define transformation?
Why are these transformations taking place?
Are there discernible patterns in this change?

Great program! A must for one or two from Medical Museion who could have presented our ideas for changing the medical museum concept. But we missed the deadline — which was last Friday, January 4.

Anyway, we can always visit their website. And polish the antennae for next year’s advertisement. 

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions — here’s another way of integrating the two genres:

In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY).

Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York Department of Sanitation”, the class worked closely with the DSNY to collect and curate material that could be used for a future museum of sanitation.

The DSNY archive was restricted to “a series of mouldy cardboard boxes” and the artefacts were scattered all around, so the students collected archival material, interviewed managers and workers, and did ethnographic fieldwork into “the contemporary landscape of garbage in the city”. In short, they engaged in a kind of “social activism” – “to not only teach the public more about the job, about waste management and the cultural landscape of trash, but to publicly integrate the DSNY into the fabric of the city in a representational as well as practical way”.

Integral to the process was the class blog (authorized access only, unfortunately) — used to post continuous commentary on their own work, to devise key word lists for the archive, and to share media clips and articles on the subject. It was also used “to discuss issues of copyright and fair use, and to talk about the limitations of the different fields in the archive on how we were framing and presenting our newly created digital objects”.

“In this way”, says Heidy Geismar, “both blog and archive were tools in the imagination of what a museum both is and could be”.

The grand finale of the course was a small one-room exhibition which opened on December 12 in the DSNY’s Derelict Vehicles Office. They used artefacts “to recreate an old-school style locker rooms”, they put their archive on display, and they permeated the place with a soundscape “evoking the gathering of trash in the city”. For press coverage of the exhibition, see here.

Small exhibition, yes. But Heidy Geismar’s enthusiastic report is contagious — and a wonderful example of how teaching, blogging, and collective exhibition work can be integrated.

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings.

For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well?

It’s also amazing to see how the collaborative touch screens which Tom Cruise sci-fictionally handled in Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) has become a feature in a pharma advertising company promotional video! (They sort of exist IRL too.)

Otherwise I must admit that I’m a bit sceptical about bringing too much holography and touch screen visions into museum planning. There’s a risk that the high tech stuff will kill the raison d’etre of museums which is, after all, the good old material artefacts. True, these can be augmented by the gadgets — but one has to strike a careful balance here.

What does Charlotte and the digital museum colleagues at Museer og digitalisering think about this?

Forget about subcellular and molecular animation movies being done for research purposes or as didactic tools. The real driving force in the future will be pharma advertising.

Take a look at this demo reel from iMed Studios — a spin-off company from Engineering Animation Inc., now part of the Saatchi & Saatchi family — that “develops scientifically accurate, visually impactful, leading edge multimedia for clients in the medical and pharmaceutical industries”.

The demo has just won the prestigious 2007 RX Club Award (Vanessa at Street Anatomy explains that the RX Club Awards are “the Oscars of pharmaceutical product advertising and promotion”). In other words, the inner-life-of-the-cell kind of movies will probably become an important part of future pharma advertising. That’s where the money is, so that’s where the animation technology goes.

In Wikio‘s last blog ranking Biomedicine on Display has reached rank #73 in the health blog category. Could be worse, I guess. My favourite daily-must-read blog, Medgadget is, not surprisingly, ranked as #1. But who cares about ranking anyway 🙂

I’ve been thinking further about what a loose intellectual movement around human enhancement and converging technologies may look like. Did some search and came across the Betterhumans website which seems to be one of the major on-line gathering places for the transhumanist crowd. One of the most prolific contributors to the discussion forum, Anne C., an electrical engineeer in California, expresses a rather common sentiment in one of the threads:

I don’t think that these sorts of things — discussion of life extension, cryonics, human enhancement, biological research, nanotechnology, etc. — are very popular topics in the population at large. Sadly, most people seem enamored with “reality TV” and celebrity gossip much more so than things that actually have the potential to improve their lives and make them a heck of a lot more interesting.

She also addresses the question why there are so many male geeks and so few female nerds involved:

There are probably more men interested in transhumanism simply because the “movement” is so internet-based and I think guys grow up being more encouraged to use computers.

However, she does have

a few internet-friends who are female and intrigued by life extension. I don’t know how significant this is, but I and these other females who have such interests tend very strongly to be diagnosed with “autistic spectrum” conditions. [my link added]

This is anecdotal evidence, and I don’t think one should characterise the converging technologies/human enhancement movement as a bunch of autists. That said, there is much more on Anne C.:s blog Existence is Wonderful: a goldmine for the historian of contemporary ideas.

For whatever it’s worth, the lasting impression of my two-hour search is that the quest for longevity seems to be an important motivational factor behind the human enhancement / transhumanist movement. (This is actually one of the things we could have made much more out of in our new exhibition Oldetopia; also here).

Displaying the molecular anatomy of subcellular structures

I thought animations of subcellular anatomy, for example, ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’, were largely didactic tools, and that more serious animations for scientific purposes were restricted to the molecular level (e.g., protein animations).

But that was before I saw this awesome animated model of the molecular architecture of the nuclear pore in a paper in Nature (29 Nov).

The nuclear pore is a regulating port for transporting molecules in and out of the cell nucleus. Like all subcellular structures it has been the objects of thousands of studies which have generated enormous amount of biochemical and morphological data. What the authors of this article did was to piece all these kinds of data (others’ and their own) together using computational methods. There are millions of ways in which the 456 identified proteins of the nuclear pore might fit together, but there is only one optimal solution. In the same way as a puzzle is solved by checking if the pieces fit together one by one with respect to colour, form, over all picture etc., the authors used state-of-the art computational integration methods to puzzle the proteins of the nuclear pore together. The animated model is the result.

(from Frank Alber, Svetlana Dokudovskaya, Liesbeth M. Veenhoff, Wenzhu Zhang, Julia Kipper, Damien Devos, Adisetyantari Suprapto, Orit Karni-Schmidt, Rosemary Williams, Brian T. Chait, Andrej Sali & Michael P. Rout, The molecular architecture of the nuclear pore complex,
Nature 450, 695-701, 2007).

Speaking about the formation of biocitizenship: Non-fiction writers Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg (who have written about the science behind James Bond) have now published The Science of Stephen King (Wiley 2007).

The preview from Amazon doesn’t raise expectations of a particularly scholarly experience, but it could nevertheless be fun reading for King-fans during the upcoming holidays. And maybe there are some nuggets in it for those of us who are interested in the formation of public engagement with medicine? Several of Stephen King‘s books and movies deal with more or less probable social and cultural (and deadly, of course) effects of biomedicine and biotech. For example, The Stand was about a deadly plague that vicious scientists let out of the secret lab, with dire consequences; the movie Golden Years took its point of departure in ageing research and regenerative medicine.

Gresh and Weinberg’s Bond-book was mainly about the physics, of course, because Ian Fleming created the Bond character in the 1950s and 1960s when atom bombs and lasers were the favourite fictional mass killing instruments; in the last 30 years mystery books and action films have moved to bugs, alien life forms, pharmaceuticals and vicious recombinant DNA specialists. The formation of biocitizenship is a diverse and multichanneled practice.

Just as I was leaving home for the last day in the office before the break, this pic came in from Vanessa @ Street Anatomy: a petri dish midwinter holiday season (now I got it right!) decoration — the black is said to be a yeast commonly found near bathroom sinks:

(thanks to Niall Hamilton, via Street Anatomy). Everyone else here at Biomedicine on Display is taking a break too — there may come some occasional postings, so don’t keep us out of sight entirely, though.

I’ve just read a call for papers to a workshop in Brussels, 6-7 May 2008, organised by the research project ‘Knowledge Politics and New Converging Technologies: A Social Science Perspective’. The aim of the project –which is funded under EU’s 6th Framework RTD Programme for three years, from April 2006 to March 2009, and is run by a consortium co-ordinated by Nico Stehr at the newly established Zeppelin University — is to study the knowledge production and anticipated social consequences emerging from the nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) field.

The call for workshop papers is interesting, because it raises an issue relevant for understanding the major changes in research and university regulatory frameworks that are taking place these days. Governments all over Europe have gradually restricted academic freedom and imposed new forms of research governance (Denmark is, by the way, one of the most afflicted countries in this respect; see this Danish blog).

There is of course no simple explanation to this historical change in the university system. However, the call for papers suggests that one explanatory factor could in fact be the rise of the NBIC-field:

Knowledge politics delineates the field of activities designed and implemented for the purpose of monitoring, regulating or even controlling the production and application of new knowledge gained through science and technology. Such activities are not new but have gained importance in the course of the 1990s with the rise of biotechnology and life sciences more generally. In view of its promise to enhance human performance through even greater interventions in the body, mind, and environment, converging technologies promises to become another virulent field of knowledge politics. Knowledge politics with respect to converging technologies is evidently one of those fields that is difficult to engage in – even as a researcher – without becoming enthralled in normative argumentation. The argument in favour of knowledge politics is that contemporary (and future) knowledge is intrinsically different from knowledge of earlier times because it will enable us to manipulate not only the human and built environment but also ourselves and fellow human beings. Therefore, new knowledge entails a potential for physical and social engineering that can be neither dismissed nor relayed to ad-hoc regulatory procedures, but rather calls for the development of new processes and tools. (my emphasis)

What Nico Stehr and his colleagues actually say is that emerging NBIC-technologies for human enhancement call for a closer monitoring, regulation and control of the production and application of new knowledge. In other words, the anticipated consequences of nano- and biotechnology is one important driving force behind the new policies for more controllable and managed universities!

I hardly need to say that this perspective also has implications for the way we understand the future role of STM (science, technology and medical) museums. I will have to think about this — will be back a.s.a.p. In the meanwhile comments would be appreciated.

Read more about the workshop here.