And here’s some pictures of the speakers at the conference Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body, held last Monday (read abstracts of their talks here):
Richard Wingate (left) explaining brain cell iconography and Ben Fry (right) answering a question about data visualisation:
Here are some pics I took during Jacob’s sound event Sunday 2 September:
Here’s Jacob taking questions afterwards:
CRASSH and Newnham College in Cambridge are organising a conference on the theme ‘Bodies of Evidence: Fat Across Disciplines’ 19-20 September 2007.
The current fascination with obesity poses many interesting problems. Not least of which remains a question of definition: What is obesity? The obese body is on the one hand regarded to be somewhat self-evident and yet also evokes an increasingly complex range of explanations and explorations. This conference seeks to bring together academics from a broad range of disciplines to examine the obese body as a case study of both the contested nature of evidence and as a site for the construction of interdisciplinary evidence and problem-solving. It will seek to highlight the different ways of thinking about, researching and ‘doing’ obesity and will ask what is it about the obese body that makes it a particularly novel and problematic site for the construction of evidence.
Wish they had raised the issue of the public display of obesity in museums in addition to “thinking about, researching and ‘doing’ obesity”, because public display is an important form of evidence in the public sphere. In other words, this is an excellent topic for a (medical) museum exhibition! Who will come first ?
Details (including booking forms) are available at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/obesity.html
Added 14 September: The Battle of Ideas 2007 festival in London 27-28 October has a session on ‘Diet Nation: The obesity debate’ occasioned by Patrick Basham and John Luik’s recent book Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade (2006).
This blog has been silent for almost a week — because of the Art and Biomedicine meetings and events here in Copenhagen.
Thursday 30 August through Saturday 1 September we had some 30 scholars around the meeting table at the Museum of Art and Design discussing biomedicine and aesthetics in a museum context. (pics added here)
On Sunday night, September 2, about 180 people come to the Medical Museion auditorium to listen to the premiere performances of Jacob Kirkegaard’s new sound work Labyrinthitis. (pics added here)
And finally, on Monday, September 3, over 200 people attended the Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body conference to hear Ingeborg Reichle, Wolfgang Knapp, Steve Kurtz, Richard Wingate, Ben Fry, Ken Arnold, and James Elkins speak. (pics added here)
There are hundreds of pictures from the three events in my handy little Sony Cyber-shot, but I cannot find the USB-port connection cable! I’ll be back when the connection has been re-established. (established now, find pictures above)
On Friday 14 September William F. Crowley from the Massachusetts General Hospital will talk about “Changing Models of Biomedical Medical Research or Interregnums are Tough for Young Investigators” in the History of Biomedicine Lecture series at the NIH. He will address a basic phenomenon in biomedical policy in the postwar period:
Over the past 60 years, biomedical research has operated under Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision outlined in “Science: The Endless Frontier”. This unidirectional vision of bench to bedside movement of science has served the government, academia, and industry quite well. However, with the recent availability of more powerful phenotypic tools such as those of the Human Genome Project and ‘omic’ technologies, the starting point of biomedical inquiry has become patients, their tumors, and their diseases. The policy implications of each of these two models of biomedical research in terms of space, resources, and academic recognition are somewhat different and their implications are discussed.
This is an interesting topic — actually one that Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio dealt with in Biomedical Platforms (2003). If I remember their point righly, they meant that ‘biomedicine’ is the intertwining of these two ‘models’ and that it therefore doesn’t make sense to set them up against each other.
Further info from Joseph November, novemberj@mail.nih.gov. (Cannot find a website about it)
Jacob Kirkegaard has just finished the final preparations for his sound performance LABYRINTHITIS at Medical Museion in Copenhagen on Sunday at 6, 8 and 10 pm.
See this videoclip from the build-up phase last Monday.
Read more about the performance here. Free tickets on soundevent@mm.ku.dk
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us (Ecclesiastes 1: 9-10; from the King James Bible)
David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is in many ways a splendid book. It has a clear and well-argued thesis, it reflects the author’s long research experience and command of the history of technology literature, and it is well-written and eminently readable for a non-specialist audience. In addition, much of its argument is as relevant for (medical) museum curators as it is for bookish historians of (medical) technology.
Consequently reviewers have been quite enthusiastic, for example Steve Shapin in The New Yorker (14 May) and Steven Yearley in the TLS (25 May; no link because the TLS is the stingiest culture magazine on earth, they never put a single fragment of content online for public use).
The idea is quite simple, and not entirely new (indeed Edgerton acknowledges that Svante Lindqvist, for one, has expressed similar ideas before, but only does so in a footnote). Criticising a traditional innovaton/invention-oriented history of technology, he shifts the perspective from novelties to the long durée of technological applications and use; this is part of a more general historiographical shift:
from the new to the old, the big to the small, the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor” (p. xiv).
What’s historically significant then, in Edgerton’s view, is not how one damned new gimmick substitutes another over and over again, but how old technologies linger on and continue to play a significant social and cultural role long after they were innovations, not least in the less developed parts of the world. That’s ‘the shock of the old’.
It’s a sympathetic (but also very politically correct) approach, which can be read as a much needed antidote to a traditional innovation-oriented historiography. It is full of good and surprising examples, although it sometimes reads like a dead horse flogging exercise; after all, many social historians of technology over the years have said much that Edgerton would have difficulties to quarrel with. (Museum curators, on the other hand probably can learn more from reading it).
My major objection, however, is that Edgerton seems to undervalue the importance of a invention/innovation-driven historiography as a source of inspiration. In this he is not alone, of course. The anti-whig tradition in history of science, technology and medicine has generally been blind to the possibility that the critique of a history of innovation (and discovery and progress) may be a very innovative step for historians — but not necessarily useful for scientists, engineers and medical doctors.
If this is so, it opens up for an interesting metahistoriographical problem: If one applies Edgerton’s innovation- vs. use-oriented historiographical approach to historical scholarship itself, one will soon realise that almost all historians view their own practice in terms of historiographical innovation/innovation, but usually dismiss a user-perspective on historiography.
However, from a user-perspective (from the point of view of those who read history, for example scientists and engineeers) it would perhaps be as, and even more, relevant/useful to write a traditional innovation-oriented history? And maybe it is more useful because it stimulates the scientific/engineering imagination? While a user-oriented historiography easily becomes unimaginative, boring — and mundane.
But this book is neither unimaginative, boring or mundane. It’s a very masculine, rich and spectacular book. As the publisher’s jacket blurb points out: “The Shock of the Old radically revises our understanding … [it] is a radical new way of thinking about history and technology”. So much for the possibility of a shock of the old historiography! The anonymous authors of the Ecclesiastes must be disappointed with David Edgerton!
(If you read Swedish, see also the short discusison about Edgerton’s book between Gustav Holmberg and myself on http://www.gustavholmberg.com/tomrum/2007/08/01/gammal-teknik-2)
The on-line Journal of Visualized Experiments (mentioned in an earlier post on this blog), was the first web-based service dedicated to visual demonstrations of experimental methods and protocols. It has been followed by others, for example, LabAction. Both were started by young lab people with little financial backing and both (especially LabAction) have a nice YouTube feel about them.
As a commentator in yesterday web-issue of The Scientist points out these sites so far have fairly few visitors (100-500 a day to their combined collection of 115 videos), compared to the many thousands of daily unique visitors to the Nature Protocols website. Nature Protocols don’t have so many videos on-line yet, but what they display is usually of high quality and resolution, as you can see from this mpg-file which shows how one removes nuclear material from a mouse oocyte. (There are many more here.)
Sites like these have been set up by scientists for scientists, like ordinary scientific journals. But they may soon begin to play a role in the formation of ‘biocitizenship’ (for a critical evaluation of the concept, see here). Right now most of these videos are technically too specialised, and they leave a lot of tacit knowledge and contextual information out. But I guess it’s only a question of time before other versions that are more relevant for a somewhat broader audience begin to circulate on the net and mix with millions of other videos — and thereby inject some ‘biotechmindedness’ into the web-savvy population. (Thanks to Mats for drawing my attention to the idea of ‘X-mindedness’.)
The Arts & Genomics Centre at Leiden University is announcing three-month bioartist-in-residence positions as part of a larger research programme called ‘Imagining Genomics: Introducing Visuality in the Genomics Debate’ which focusus on “the role of visual art in moral debates on genomics”. The results of the bioart-in-residence projects are planned to be displayed in the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, Naturalis. The application deadline is 1 September, i.e., already next week. For further details, see here.
I think this announcement is interesting for the way it connects visual art and moral debate. This is not an unproblematic connection. The use of art for moral arbitration has a troubled history indeed, and it would be interesting to hear further arguments for and against the use of art-works in contemporary moral discourse about biosociety. We will get ample opportunities for this at next week’s workshop on “Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context” here at Medical Museion, where several participants are working on related research projects.
(thanks to Ingeborg for drawing attention to the announcement)
I have to confess (blushingly) that I find this short, and very PIC, Onion News Network news item about the 100 year old neurosurgeon Carl Wainwright quite funny.
Probably because it (somehow obliquely) reminds me of this summer’s much belated but nevertheless extraordinary reading experience — Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, in which the major protagonist is a perfect neurosurgeon in his prime.
It also (and more embarassingly, I think) reminds me of our own temporary exhibition ‘Oldetopia’ that is scheduled to open on October 11, and which includes a series of 15 absolutely fantastic pictures of 100 year old Danish men and women made by artist Liv Carlé Mortensen. More about the exhibition in a later post — and hopefully, by then, I will be able to erase my inner images of Dr. Wainwright.
As usual when it comes to news from The Onion, one should listen to the story with a huge pinch of salt (as they say ‘The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age’) but it may still have a lasting effect, I am afraid.
