Biomedicine in museums

The art gallery White Cube in London has just opened an exhibition of new works by Damien Hirst, called “Beyond Belief“:

In this exhibition, Hirst continues to explore the fundamental themes of human existence – life, death, truth, love, immortality and art itself. In two new series of paintings – the Fact Paintings and the Biopsy Paintings – Hirst confronts, as he puts it, ‘the intense joy and deep-set anxiety we can all feel in hospitals, where we are surrounded by both creation and decay’.

In the Biopsy Paintings, Hirst uses broken glass, scalpel blades and blood-like paint to create pictures based on microscopic images of different forms of cancer and other terminal illnesses. Like this one:

(Damien Hirst: “Appendix cancer light micrograph”).

More on the exhbition website. Show closes on 7 July. Must see it when I’m in London the last week of June. But I will probably be terribly disappointed …

(thanks to Martha for spreading the news)

Ever wondered what Foucault, Agamben and other interesting philosophers meant by ‘biopolitics‘ and ‘biopower‘? Here’s a concrete case. The Danish Conservative politician Pia Christmas Møller suggests today (Berlingske Tidende, 4 June) that the right to acquire a driver’s license shall depend on whether the license candidate is willing to take a stand on the issue of organ donation or not. You don’t have to say ‘yes’, but you must make a decision, says the Danish MP. What’s next from this vigilant guardian of organ supplies? You won’t be allowed to university unless you deliver a biopsy to the national biobank system?

Has anyone come across a study of medical compliance from a public understanding of/engagement with science perspective? Or vice versa? I’m asking, because I think there is an interesting conceptual overlap between medical compliance and public understanding/engagement with medicine.

Compliance (or adherance or concordance) is the term used by medical professionals to describe how (if ever) patients follow an advised treatment regime, e.g., taking prescribed drugs. The public’s understanding of, and engagement with, medical science and medical authority is not the only factor that accounts for compliance, but it is probably a major one.

There is quite a lot written in the medical literature about compliance, but as far as I can see, this literature does not contain any explicit references to the literature on public understanding of/engagement with science. Yet I believe something interesting might come out of a more systematic juxtaposition of these two traditions. Compliance studies usually deal with the behaviour of individual patients versus the health system, whereas studies of public understanding of/engagement with science often operate on the level of discourse analysis.

Any suggestions?

The Faculty of Health Sciences at our university has a “Great Clearance Day” on Thursday 21 June. The purpose is to prepare for the big faculty building reallocation exercise that is going to take place in the summer and early autumn. The faculty’s technical dept writes:

This will be the day when we will clear our shelves and the heaps that have accumulated in offices and laboratories over the years. Everything from old apparatuses and unused chemicals to documents and furniture can be removed (transl. from the Danish orig.)

As Jan Eric and Susanne pointed out the other day, this is a great opportunity to practice the archaeology of contemporary biomedicine — nay, even garbage archaeology, i.e., the kind of archaeology that studies today’s culture and society based on what people throw away. See, for example, William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992).

(Or maybe in this particular case we should speak of a potential garbage archaeology (or garbage-in-the-making), because we would rather catch some of the stuff before it goes into the dustbins and containers rather than searching through the Müll afterwards.)

Anyway, plans are currently being made for a corresponding “Great Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day” on Thursday 21 June. The idea is to mobilise the whole Medical Museion staff to follow the clearence day activities closely, from early morning to late afternoon. And, if necessary, to intervene, to save all these gorgeous ten year old garbage-ripe PCR machines, ELISA- and electrophoresis apparatuses — or maybe even a revealing photo album from some laboratory Xmas party in the 1980s 🙂

We’ll be back with further details soonish — and perhaps also some further ‘garbological’ underpinnings as well.

The Finnish artist Ville Lenkkeri from Taideteollinen korkeakoulu (the University of Art and Design in Helsinki) is just now showing the photo exhibit ‘Reality in the Making’ at Peter Lav Photo Gallery in Valby, Copenhagen. One of the pics is this one:

which has more than superficial resemblance with some of the precious objects in our collections at Medical Museion. As the gallery writes in its online presentation:

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Science studies scholars seem to have investigated almost all aspects of science in laboratories — except bodily gestures. Artists Herwig Turk and Günter Stöger are now exploring this neglected dimension of science in their installation “setting04_0006″ which is on display in the group exhibit “Say it isn’t so” in Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen until 16 September 2007. See a Youtube video of the installation here.

“Gestures are part of laboratory life, as are objects and scientist”, Turk and Stöger point out. In previous projects (see, e.g. here) they examined the perception of spaces when humans were removed and objects assumed centre-stage: “The object created an unambiguous and sharp language conveying new meaning and an alien identity to the laboratory space” (sounds like a traditional museum gallery to me :-).

However, in “setting04_0006” both human entities and objects have been eliminated:

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When I took my undergraduate courses in philosophy of science, the general dogma — laid down by mid-20th century philosophers and historians of science like Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn — was that logical empiricism was naïve and that the experimental sciences were thoroughly theory-laden. Post-Kuhnian science studies didn’t change this epistemological dogma; surely the Edinburgh school opened the black-box of scientific practice and actor network theorists eschewed epistemological issues altogether, but for the last fifty years or so nobody has ever really suggested that science might be an basically observation (data) driven enterprise.

But there are many signs that biomed/biotech practitioners are about to work out a new spontaneous philosophy of science. The whole jargon of systems biology (‘robust’ data, ‘high throughput analysis’) is based on the notion that hypotheses and theories can somehow be harvested from observational data. And in the editorial of the last issue (#2, 27 April 2007) of Lab Times, Craig Wenter’s recent large-scale collection of ocean bacterial genomic DNA is defended against critics who have suggested that such data hoovering is mindless because it doesn’t have the solution of any specific scientific problems in mind. In the editors’ words:

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Tuesday 29 May, morning: action resumed!

Blogs need some rest, too. Communicative vacation. Return to the materiality of life. This humble blog is no exception. But we’re back soonish (in a few days). Until then, search our archives — you’ll be amazed to find how many good posts there were back in 2006 and 2005. 

The recently announced marriage between Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki is not just an innocent piece of celebrity news (the circumstances of the Bahamas beach wedding last week are perfectly romantic though :-). It also signifies one of the basic tendencies in contemporary technoscience, viz. the web-based convergence between postgenomics and information technology.

Sergey Brin doesn’t need much of an introduction. But Anne Wojcicki, a molecular biologist, has been less known until recently. Last autumn, however, she founded 23andMe, a biotech-oriented start-up webcompany. The goal of

is “to take advantage of new genotyping technologies and help consumers explore their genetics, informed by cutting edge science”:

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