Biomedicine in museums

What is going to happen with Nature Precedings? The public launch of the “beta” version last summer was met with a lot of positive expectations. Science bloggers have praised it as an initiative to democratize science and as a contribution to the broader open access movement.

But so far the result seems disappointing: only some 500 papers have been submitted, few comments are posted. After the first round of enthusiasm, the hype has faded away. Is it entering the phase of ‘disillusionment’ in the typical hype cycle? (see earlier post about biomed and biotech hype cycles here).

I haven’t seen any serious evaluations of the initiative yet. Will the owners close it down? Or will they let Nature Precedings continue to give it a chance to stabilize (hopefully) at a future ‘plateau of productivity’ á la Gartner.

The most non-sensical biotech spam ad I’ve received in my inbox this fall:

October 2, 1836 Charles Darwin returned to England aboard the HMS Beagle. He carried with him the information that would lead to his Theory of Natural Selection. The Theory of Evolution was born.

October 1, 2007Bar Harbor BioTechnology, Inc. launched The PerfectCircle™. The next step in Real-Time PCR.

(with reference to www.bhbio.com/landing/evolution)

So, what has Darwin’s return with the Beagle got to do with launching a new real-time PCR procedure? None, as far as I can see  — but maybe that’s the kind of nonsense that will make me remember Bar Harbor Biotechnology, Inc. for ever.

In my humble opinion, transhumanism is one of the most interesting intellectual movements today. It attracts some philosophers; quite a few high-ranking people from the fields of nanotech, biotech, information tech and cognitive science; and some accomplished artists and writers as well, like Michel Houellebecq. It has also drawn some severe criticisms, for example from Francis Fukuyama (in Our Posthuman Future, 2002).

Yet it is a publicly rather neglected intellectual movement. True, the social, political, ethical etc. consequences of some specific aspects of its technoscientific base — the so called ‘converging technologies‘ (i.e., nano-bio-info-cogno, or nbic for short) — have given rise both to scholarly research and to some public debate. But alas the movement as such and its credo has not been under much public scrutiny.

Unfortunately, because if one understands some of the ambitions and hopes that makes individual transhumanists tick — and thereby make them behave collectively as loosely defined anticipatory intellectual movement — one will probably also understand some of the drives behind the contemporary convergence of nano-, bio- and information technologies — and as a consequence some of the phenomena of today’s university and knowledge politics.

After all, what happens in laboratories today is not just a question about publish-or-perish or about venture capital investment — there is most probably also individual and collective cultural visions behind. And, for better or for worse, transhumanism is a good candidate for such a collective cultural vision. 

One of the key historical documents that throws some light upon the movement and its constitutive technologies is the proceedings (Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, 2002) of a strategic workshop organised in December 2001 by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce on the potential impact of the nbic-field “on improving human capabilities at the microscopic, individual, group and societal levels” (pdf-file here).

I think transhumanism could be a great conceptual frame for a critical museum exhibition on future medical technologies and human enhancement. Such an exhibition won’t be easy to make. The constitutive topics of nano-bio-info-cogno are technically difficult to make sense of. Much of their material base in invisible and intangible. And much the visual material only exists in the brains of the members of the movement. Like many anticipatory intellectual movements it exists primarily in the form of dreams — and in words.

Yet, the movement is very real, and the technoscientific base (nbic) is very real too. So it would be a rewarding exhibition for an STM museum to take up on its program. 

No, it’s not the final surgical cut I’m thinking of. But Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which came in the International Cut (same year) and Director’s Cut (ten years later), and now eventually the Final Cut (which Scott says is really the final one).

The theatre version was out two months ago — today is DVD version release day. Digital Bits has a detailed review of all the changes in this Absolutely Final Cut. Forget about the upcoming gloomy midwinter holiday and rejoice at the thought of the 5-disc Ultimate Director’s Edition which is said to be full of extra bonus material.

And why do I write about this DVD-event-of-the-year here on Biomedicine on Display? Well, simply because Ridley Scott was the first director whose imagination put the future of biotech, biomedicine, information technology, robotics and human enhancement (in other words converging technologies) right on the screen. His critical comment on what has later become known as transhumanism (note) hasn’t been surpassed since.

Wish we could stage an exhibition on human enhancement with crucial scenes from Blade Runner (e.g., where Roy meets his Maker) playing all over the background — it will probably cost us a fortune, though.

(Note: Some commentators (like George Dvorsky) naïvely believe that Scott simply endorses transhumanism — but Blade Runner is of course much more sophisticated than that.) 

Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd — who are currently co-directing a two-year research project on ‘Rethinking Disability Representation’ in the Dept of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester — are soliciting some 20 “original, provocative, timely and scholarly papers” to

explore issues surrounding the cultural representation of disabled people and, more particularly, the inclusion (as well as the marked absence) of disability-related narratives in museum and gallery displays.

Here’s their synopsis to the edited volume they are planning together with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University), titled ‘Re-Presenting Disability: Museums and the Politics of Display’:

Read More

Our collection and display activities are again and again putting the issue of aesthetics on the medical museum agenda. How do we handle the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of medical objects in curatorial practices?

I came to think of this question again when I read yet another laudatory review of Sansernes Hospital [Hospital of the Senses] by renowned Danish architect journal editor Kim Dirckinck-Holmfeld and professor Lars Heslet, former head of the intensive care unit at the Danish National Hospital (Rigshospitalet), published by the Danish Architectural Press a few weeks ago.

The basic claim of this lavishly illustrated coffee-table format book is that it is high time to throw out the predominant brutalist functionalist architecture that has dominated hospital environments of the last 40-50 years. It should be substituted, the authors suggest, with a new kind of aesthetically more pleasing design concept. One that can contribute to the well-being of both patients and employees.

And it’s not just a dream: Over the last ten years Lars Heslet has raised millions of Danish crowns from private foundations to put artwork in the wards of the intensive care unit at The National Hospital and to change the clinical soundscape with the help of music and the sounds of nature.

‘Riget’ (world famous through Lars von Trier’s movie The Kingdom) is perhaps not the worst hospital I’ve seen in the brutalist category. Even so, the authors have a strong case and they are thereby joining a growing international movement against functionalist hospital architecture. This is a frequently discussed topic on the web (for example here) and is a political issue even in some developing countries: “In the last decade healthcare architecture has undergone a dramatic shift from crisis intervention to healthcare maintenance, by rejecting the sterile look of medical edifices and creating a more humane, warm ambience for the patient,” writes a Mumbai-based commentator in the Indian Healthcare Mangagement newspaper in 2000.

Common sense speaks in favour of the authors’ proposal (there even seems to exist some clinical studies that support the claim that aesthetically pleasing hospital design has positive therapeutic effects). So I’m all in favour, of course.

That said, however, the campaign for aesthetically pleasing hospital settings raises the interesting issue of what one might understand by the ‘aesthetic dimension’ in a hospital context. Most of what I have read on the topic is about changing the physical spaces of the hospital (wards, hallways, cafeterias etc.) by adding aesthetically pleasing artistic elements. That is, the ‘aesthetic dimension’ is usually thought of in terms of extra-clinical architectural elements and artworks (paintings, soothing music etc.), but doesn’t really enter the core of clinical practice itself.

Again, I’m not against nicer hospital buildings, tranquil hospital gardens and beautiful artworks. After all, I’d prefer lying in my hospital bed contemplating a ceiling that looks like that by Michaelangelo in the Sistine Chapel rather than staring on a dirty ventilation system. But this widely spread understanding of hospital aesthetics — as a change in the hospital environment — distracts from a more inclusive view of aesthetics as a pervasive dimension of all clinical structures, objects and practices.

By restricting our interest to the aesthetic power of hospital spaces, for example by means of new architectural structures and pleasing artworks, one risks missing the fact that all everyday clinical objects and practices –the ultrasound apparatus, the defibrillator, the syringes and tubes, the bed, the linen, the bodies and gestures of the doctors and nurses, and so on — have intrinsic aesthetic powers.

All these things have aesthetic appearances that relate to our senses — not just the visual, of course, but all the senses: the taste of prescription drugs, the smell from the coffee wagon, the sounds of monitors and beepers, the tactile experience of the bed cover, the cold sensation of the exploration jelly, the choreography of consultant as he/she enters the ward, the gory feeling of having a palpating finger inside one of your body openings, and so forth.

In other words, every detail of the clinic provides a firework of aesthetic impressions — even without a single piece of art on the walls. True, the sensuous qualities of the hospital can be vastly improved by focusing on the aesthetics of the environment — on architectural extras, paintings and glass mosaics — but one shouldn’t forget that the most overwhelming aesthetic dimension of the hospital lies in the nitty-gritty details of everyday clinical objects and practices.

So, to get back to the issue of handling the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of medical objects in curatorial practices, I believe that a heightened awareness, among curators, of the ubiquitous aesthetic dimension of everyday clinical objects and practices will have consequences for the way these objects are turned into museum objects after they have been cassated from hospitals.

Why? Because 1) acquiring, curating and registrating an always-already aesthetic object is a very different museological practice than 2) acquiring, curating and registrating an alleged ‘non-aesthetic’ object and later attributing aesthetic qualities to it, for example when it is put on display.

If (as I suggest) all clinical objects and practices are aesthetically permeated, they will remain so throughout all steps in the curatorial process, and not only when (or if) the exhibition curator decides to ascribe aesthetic qualities to them.

Academics write, want to write, have to write. Sometimes we cannot, and often we have excuses for not doing it. Therefore there are plenty of guidebooks about how to write and how to write frequently. Honestly, I just love these kinds of books. Like people who like cooking cannot resist the temptation of buying yet another cookbook, like gardeners who stock-pile books about gardening, or like DIY-folks who collect a library of DIY-manuals.

The latest book in my writing self-help pile will be psychologist Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot (published by the Am. Psychol. Assoc., 2007) which has been recommended by quite a few reviewers, including the group behind the blog Academic Productivity (see review of Silvia’s book in this post).

(thanks to Gustav for bringing the link to Academic Productivity. Brothers in arms we are …)

Speaking about good academic writing habits — Zenhabits has an excellent post titled “How to Actually Execute Your To-Do List: or, Why Writing It Down Doesn’t Actually Get It Done”. Lots of good tips for all of us who let our writing be disturbed by emails, phone calls — and blog RSS feeds!

Today The Scientist is presenting the winners of the first Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards. They started with 60 nominations (out of tens or hundreds of thousands of lab web sites on the net), then a select group of judges short-listed ten top sites — and now the winners have been chosen.

The result is intriguing! Most of the judges preferred an overcrowded and difficult-to-navigate marine biology website with tons of different features (moving images, cartoons, touristic animal photos, etc.). The editors of The Scientist chose a somewhat more sophisticated perception biology site — and the readers voted for this one:

NyborgLab Online it says — but otherwise not much indicates that this is the site of a serious lab that focuses on “the function of the HTLV-1-encoded Tax protein and its role in transcriptional activation and leukemic transformation” and has a decent publication record. Could as well have been an ad for Levi’s, or Nyborg’s new album (or movie).

What’s intriguing about the readers’ choice of ‘Best of the Web’ is that it epitomizes two growing tendencies in the biomedical and biotech world.

One tendency is the focus on the individual principal investigator (PI). For several years, department websites have been subdivided into the lab websites of their individual PIs (i.e., the senior researchers above the postdoc level who run a lab with a grant from a major funding body). And such labs are almost always named after the PI’s (last) name: Johnson’s lab, Chandrasekhar’s lab, Xing’s lab etc.

This use of last names for lab web sites is an indication, I believe, of the strong individualistic character of biomedical and biotechnological research (at least in the university sector; pharma och biotech company labs is a different matter). And the NyborgLab web site underscores the point by displaying professor Jennifer Nyborg prominently as cover scientist — in a relaxed jeans jacket, her slightly blurred fingers indicating dynamic leadership.

The other tendency is that these flashy web sites is an indication of a rapidly increasing need for marketing and branding in the biomedical and biotech world. It is not enough to present content only. Laboratories (PIs, departments, universities) are competing for scarce resources from federal, state, and philanthropic funding agencies. Of course (hopefully?) intersubjective and disinterested peer-review plays the major role in selecting worthy projects for funding. But, web visibility surely helps!

(The title of this post is of course a pun on Erving Goffman‘s classical The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959)

One thing is the haptic qualities of medical things. Another the olfactory. Many medical things smell, some are smelly. Yet another dimension of the curatorial life we ought to pay more attention to!

I was reminded of the olfactory dimension this morning when I glanced through the last batch of posts from the H-SCI-MED-TECH-list. One of the posts, from medical historian Margaret DeLacy, describes “a very strange and unexpected problem” with her library copy of Geoffrey Cantor’s otherwise excellent book Quakers, Jews and Science (Oxford UP, 2005): “The book stinks. Literally! A very strong chemical smell wafts from the pages when you open the covers”.

Margaret borrowed another copy from the University of Wyoming (American academics can enjoy an excellent interlibrary loan system!), but the problem remained: “it smells equally strange”.

It makes it nearly impossible to read the book. I can’t figure out whether this resulted from too much bleach being used on the paper or too much fumigation with pesticides when the book was in the Oxford University Press warehouse, but the book smells just like the pesticide shelves of our local garden store. Is an aberration of my own or has anyone else ever experienced this problem? Is it limited to this one edition of this one book? Has anyone noticed a problem with other OUP books from that year? Any suggestions? Electronic versions don’t seem to be available for this title. Amazon lists a paperback ed. but evidently it was never issued as no copies seem to be available.

Margaret has had an unusually bad experience indeed. But the phenomenon of smelly books is not that uncommon. Books always smell, of course, more or less, but in many cases they do so quite distinctly. I’ve also experienced books that emanated such strong odours that I felt it disturbed the pleasure of reading.

Vice versa, some books just smell so good! One of my best book smelling experiences is the 1960s multi-volume edition of Josef Stalin’s Collected Works from Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. You can say many bad things about the literary and political qualities of the ideas expressed in these collection of (mainly) talks — but not about the olfactory quality of the binding! I sometimes wonder if the Chinese publishers deliberately used a specially designed fragrance to attract readers to the old dictator’s wicked ideas. 

So the smell of books is one of the qualities of their presence as things. Wonder if book historians pay attention to this? Or maybe the olfactory qualities of books wane over the years so that it doesn’t really matter for a book historian. Today, Stalin’s Collected Works may be less attractive than they were in the early 1970s. And Cantor’s study of how the British Quakers and Anglo-Jewish community engaged with science in the 17th through 19th centuries may loose it’s pesticide odour over time.

(Added 13 Dec.: The H-SCI-MED-TECH list is flooded with good suggestions for solving Margaret DeLazy’s problem: the most frequent one is to use a ‘book deodorizer’. Never heard of this basic intellectual support product before — but one learns something every day 🙂

Open access on-line publishing has eventually reached the field of history, philosophy and social studies of science, technology and medicine (HP&SofSTM). It’s the Institute of History & Philosophy of Science & Technology at the University of Toronto that hosts the new free-access on-line journal Spontaneous Generations. First issue is just out.

The journal — together with a growing number of open access/on-line journals — is powered by Open Journal Systems (OJS), a journal management and publishing system that is developed by the Public Knowledge Project consortium. An awesome initiative!

(And by the way: the first issue of Spontaneous Generations contains a number of focused discussion papers on ‘Scientific Expertise: Epistemological Worries, Political Dilemmas’ by Michael Lynch, Steve Fuller, Stephen Turner, Stephen Bocking, Ben Almassi, Aaron K Martin, Edgar A Whitley, Palmira Fontes da Costa, and James Hull.)