Biomedicine in museums

Couldn’t sleep last night. Giorgio Agamben‘s books use to be the perfect over-the-counter remedy against insomnia, so I began reading his latest collection of essays (Profanations, Zone Books, 2007) and was just about to fall asleep when my eyes fell on this line (on p. 83):

The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact.

which made me wide-awake again. So here it goes:

The ‘Museum’ in Agamben’s vocabulary is not just a physical place (building) with collections and exhibitions, but “the separate dimension to which what was once — but is no longer — felt as true and decisive has moved” (p. 84). Agamben’s ‘Museum’ thus also includes the hundreds of properties on Unesco’s World Heritage List, national parks and other nature reserves (like Grand Canyon), protected ethnic groups, and so forth.

The ‘Museum’ pace Agamben is “the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing”, and as such it “occupies exactly the space and function once reserved for the Temple”. Once pilgrims travelled to sacred sites; today tourists “restlessly travel in a world that has been abstracted into a Museum”.

This contemporary mass pilgrimage involves a separation from the world of everyday practice:

the tourists celebrate on themselves a sacrificial act that consists in the anguishing experience of the destruction of all possible use,

Agamben says, and adds (p. 85) that “nothing is so astonishing” as the fact that the 650 million people who visit the ‘Museum’ each year

are able to carry out on their own flesh what is perhaps the most desparate experience that one can have: the irrevocable loss of all use, the absolute impossibility of profaning

Needless to say, Agamben’s analysis of the ‘Museum’ (including museums) is quite different from that of the museum and tourism industry. But this shouldn’t keep us from asking if Agamben is right in suggesting that “the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation” (p. 92)

And if this is the case, what are the implications for museum politics in general? And for Medical Museion in particular? And what would ‘profanation’ imply in the contemporary medical (history) museum field?

Grab your mouse and click for a discount ticket to Prague later this week to see the 3rd International Festival for Arts, Sciences and Technologies (enter3), 8-11 November.

Some of the works displayed seem to be very relevant for our biomedicine-on-display-project, for example Linda Čihářová‘s Streptomyces installation where “science methodology meets artistic creation in ‘performative’ photography'”:

Says Linda Čihařová:

I decided to study the photographs of the Laboratory of Bioinformatics environment by similar tools which scientist use there to study Streptomyces bacteria. Their research is based on analyzing, modeling, and simulating regulatory processes in the cell and they use bioinformatics approaches, tools and databases to interpret the data. In my work I perform similar processes on several photographs made in their laboratory and from this semi-artistic, semi-scientific and even pseudoscientific method, I hope to gain a different view of the photographs themselves and the limits of the medium (quoted from this site)

Or this one (Pavel Kopriva, Nanoface):

which he describes as a “new chapter of portrait history in the age of nanotechnology”:

Video and photography document an artistic experiment with nanofibres used in modern medicine to create artificial tissues. On the scale of the cell, small fibers are formed and the resulting nanoarchitecture is used to filter harmful elements. In the artwork, the nanoarchitecture is used for creating ‘artistic’ scaffold by actively changing the organization of nanofibres. The complicated technique of using electrospinning and the difference between the conducting and non-conducting base is used as a new type of portrait technique.

Cool!

I spent an hour last Wednesday at the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, DC. It’s not a museum in the usual sense of the word: they have not one single artefact (neither historical nor contemporary). But I understand why they don’t want to call themselves a Science Center, because that term smacks of a building with herds of school kids running around pressing buttons to try make laser-illuminated giant plastic dinosaurs roar.

This is not what the Koshland wants to do. Owned by the National Academy of Sciences (US) they cater for educated adults who want to be informed about some of the important science-related challenges in our contemporary world, like global warming, infectious diseases, etc.

One needs at least a high-school degree to make sense of some of the texts and the advanced interactives. It’s not for the feeble-minded. But that said, the Koshland does it very well. 

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Some medical (history) museums and exhibitions — like the Wellcome Collection in London — are easy to find and have a welcoming (!) attitude to visitors. Others are more of a challenge.

Last Tuesday I went to the (US) National Museum of Health and Medicine for a visit behind the public area. Curator Alan Hawk guided me around their rich collections, and personally I felt taken very well care of. But for the general public a visit to the NMHM is mildly off-putting.

Located in the northern part of Washington DC the museum is quite difficult to reach by means of public transport. It is placed on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, there are no signs to help you find it, and visitors have to undergo two security checks: first at the campus gates and then again at the entrance to the museum where they take a photo and a copy of your ID.

And finally, after having made your way through the security thicket you are confronted with this behemoth: Read More

British historian of science Jim Endersby’s learned and charming A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (a sort of history of biology through the lens of its experimental organisms, i.e., fruit flies, zebra físhes, bacteriophages, cress plants, etc.) is the first history of science book I’ve seen that is being marketed by means of specially designed badges and posters.

Here are the badges placed on copies of the book on the University of Harvard Press book table at the History of Science Society meeting in Arlington, Va. and the matching poster:

(it’s the humble author of this blog post to the left browsing the book). Together with the website the badges will probably contribute to this becoming a bestseller. I’ve only read half of it so far, and it’s really good — and charming!

Where else on earth would you, in a Metro station, find an ad like this (bacterial colonies in a petridish) for biomedical jobs?

(Medical Center Metro station, Bethesda, 29 Oct ’07)

The National Institutes of Health has a pretty large medical history collection, but you can’t see anything of it in any designated exhibition area. However, parts of the collection is on display in showcases around the huge NIH campus. 

Here, for example, is a Varian A-60 NMR machine which was used at NIH in the 1960s on display in the lobby of the Natcher Conference Center (I asked historian of medicine David Cantor at NLM to pose as the fascinated spectator when we went for lunch last Monday):

(Btw, there is a lot of good info about NMR and the Varian A-60 on this site)

The NIH Museum displays some of their stuff around  campus because they don’t have any designated exhibition space. But one can of course also make a virtue out of necessity — for example, I guess we could (with the right funding!) increase the visibility of the history contemporary biomedicine by placing selected objects in University of Copenhagen faculty and hospital buildings.

And if so, I guess it could be done somewhat more inspiring to the aesthetic senses than this particular Varian A-60 showcase. Even David who otherwise works in mid-20th century history of clinical medicine looked quite unexcited. 

The Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago, led by social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, is announcing a $2 million research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom:

Once regarded as a subject worthy of the most rigorous inquiries in order to discern its nature and benefits, wisdom is currently overlooked as a topic for serious scholarly and scientific investigation in many fields. Yet it is difficult to imagine a subject more central to the human enterprise and whose exploration holds greater promise in shedding light and opening up creative possibilities for human flourishing.

I must admit that I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about the underlying motives of the John Templeton Foundation, which funds the initiative. But in this case I believe something very interesting could come out of it. The Defining Wisdom programme not only raises new and largely ignored dimensions of ethics in general, but also could help redefine bioethical research agendas.

For example it would be interesting to study to what extent current biotechnoscience and the biotech economy are compatible with eudaimonia and the classical understanding of wisdom.

In other words: current progress in biomedicine and biotech may result in better and personalised medical therapies, longer life-spans, better understanding of the structure and function of organisms and biological systems, entirely new consumer products, higher agricultural productivity, more optimal solutions to environmental problems, new and exciting ethical dilemmas, higher profits, and brand new social relations and governance strategies. But will it also increase individual flourishing and collective wisdom? And if so, how?

Isabelle Dussauge from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (see earlier post here) and a former guest in our seminar series (see here) is presenting her almost finished phd-thesis in a paper titled “Anatomy Remediated: Aligning Recent and Older Technomedical Gazes” at the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, tomorrow, Thursday 25 October:

This presentation explores the paradoxical persistence of anatomy in recent high-tech medical imaging. For instance, magnetic resonance imaging’s visuality (“the MRI-gaze”) was consecrated with a Nobel Prize in 2003 as a breakthrough in the production of crisp, but historically traditional, anatomical depictions. The development in practice of the MRI-gaze in Swedish hospitals is taken as an example throughout this presentation. It exposes how the MRI-gaze was shaped in relation to medicine’s established methods of bodily analysis and bodily production, and argues that the shaping of the MRI-gaze enacted a remediation of pathological anatomy’s body. Finally, it addresses how relations between the observer (researcher or clinician), technology, medical gazes, and the body observed were recast in that remediation process.

For our US East Coast readers: the seminar is taking place in the Lister Hill Visitors Center, Bldg 38A, Bethesda, at 2pm.

The third meeting of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN; see more about the network in an earlier post here) will take place in Barcelona, 30-31 May 2008, focusing on the contemporary history and public understanding of human genetics:

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