Biomedicine in museums

Anybody still believing that biomed & biotech STS is something that only goes on in Europe and North America and that universities in South/Southeastern/Eastern Asia are shunning STS in favour of robust but mindless lab bench work?

Think again! This job announcement from The National University of Singapore just came in through my mailbox. They are seeking applicants for open-range research & teaching positions in the STS area, and they put few restrictions on the specialised field of work:

Excellent research opportunities in Singapore exist in the areas of new media & visual studies; biology and biotechnology; and cultural or anthropological studies of science, technology, and medicine, although applicants’ interests need not be restricted to these topics, themes, and geographies.

Add to this “generous compensation, allowances for overseas conference travel, access to grant funding, subsidized housing, one of the finest libraries in Asia, superior digital connectivity, and a stimulating, English-speaking intellectual environment” — and you wonder vwhy any serious-thinking STS postdoc would consider staying in Europe or North America longer than necessary. For further information, see http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/sts/index.html.

IT geeks come up with one great visualisation project after the other. They have whole websites for visualising data related to information and communication technologies. Even self-ironic ones like the webcomics site xkcd which just aired this Lord of the Rings lookalike representation of online communities of the world:

(click here for a larger version)

(from xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language)

Biomed and biotech communities don’t seem to map their fields in this wonderfully childish fashion. Why? Does it have something to do with the fact that biomed & biotech people are geared towards solving problems of ultimate life-and-death importance? Whereas IT and Web 2.0 people are basically kids in adult skinbags that play around to invent the next gadget for entertainment and conspicuous consumption?

Most of us believe that high-tech biomedicine and biotechnology are the only roads to better medical therapies in the future. Yet low-tech treatments also flex their muscles now and then. For example, News(at)Nature reports how creepy crawling maggots can be used to treat wounds infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in diabetes patients:

There are many other examples of succesful low-tech technologies. My favourite one is to use phone books against gastric acid reflux/heartburn. It goes like this:

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The Google Books project is perhaps not that relevant for our field because we almost only refer to recent (and thus copyrighted) books which are only available in truncated form. But otherwise the project is potentially fantastic. Imagine having all books online that have published in the 500 years from the dawn of printing to the near present. Searchable!

But the owls are not necessarily what they seem. Robert Townsend, assistant director at the American Historical Association has tried to use Google Books for his own research over an extended period of time and has now written a scathing critique of the project in a recent post on the AHA blog. Poor scan quality, faulty metadata and a truncated public domain are some of the problems according to Townsend. The comments to his critical article give a fairly balanced view of the pros and cons of the Google Books project.

My personal experience is that Google Books is a marvelous search engine for browsing the literature — but when you’ve found the source you should quote from the original, not from Google.

Trust is a key concept in science studies (cf. Ted Porter’s excellent book Trust in Numbers, 1995, just to take one example). Now the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science are organising a workshop on “Trust in Science” to take place at Toronto’s CBC Conference Centre 15-16 October. What’s interesting with this meeting is that the organisers are focusing on trust in public understanding of science (journalism, broadcasting and museums).

Sessions thus include: Clinical Trials and the Pharmaceutical Industry; Publicizing Science, and its Effects; Public Controversies and the Distribution of Expertise; Who to Trust on Climate Change; and Museums and the Public Trust. To register for the workshop, email bessie@yorku.ca before 20 September. For more info,see this pdf-file.

Today’s big news in the Copenhagen health and life science community is the £55 mill. (600 mill. DKK) grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation to create a brand new center for protein research (proteomics, bioinformatics etc.) at the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, as it will be called, is planned to open in the autumn of 2008 with a total staff of around 100.

This is great news for Danish health and life sciences. The new center — which will be among the larger ones in the world — will boost research in postgenomics, proteomics and systems biology.

They forgot one important thing, however. When NIH and DOE launched the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, about 3 % of the budget was set aside to the study of the ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) raised by the HGP.

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… and I also wish I could be in Oxford on Wednesday at 5pm to attend the Museum of History of Science’s seminar and listen to David Gooding from the Science Studies Centre @ University of Bath when he talks about “Visual Theories: Materials, Models and Methods”. Here’s his abstract which brings up some interesting problems of relevance for the “Biomedicine on Display” project:

Alongside the study of texts, instruments and other artefacts, images have much to tell us about scientific work. Scientists in different domains use images and other non-linguistic objects in very similar ways. Common features of the manipulation of these objects indicate that general strategies for interpretation, simplification, modelling, elaboration and argumentation are at work. Some of these imaging methods are shared with the visual arts. Whereas social and cultural studies of science emphasise the diversity of local contexts of practice, the existence of common strategies shows that this diversity masks an important repertoire of cognitive strategies. I will show that scientists use this repertoire to adapt their representations to meet the demands that arise in different contexts of practice and will consider the implications of this finding for our understanding of scientists as agents in knowledge-producing systems.

My point is that what David Gooding says about cognitive research strategies could perhaps be applied to the domain of image-use in exhibitions and the public engagement with science. For example (to paraphrase Gooding), shall museums primarily been seen as more or less bewildering arrays of localised contexts of practice, or do curators rather use a repertoire of display strategies to adapt their exhibitions to meet the demands that arise in different museum contexts?

Some ten years ago analysts at Gartner, an information and technology research and advisory company, suggested that the acceptance of new information technologies tend to follow a ‘hype cycle’. First comes a trigger phase with intitial curiosity, then a peak with wide-spread publicity and inflated expectations (the hype), followed by a phase of disillusionment when the new technology fails to meet the expectations. Then comes a slow recovery phase; the press has forgotten all about it, but some business begin to see the value in it. And, finally, the new technology (eventually) becomes main-stream and accepted (no hype this time).

Gartner’s hype cycle thesis has mainly been discusssed in relation to marketing strategies for new information and communication technologies.  I haven’t seen it applied graphically to medical technologies (my favourite med&tech site, medgadget, hasn’t mentioned it) until yesterday when I found Pedro Beltrao’s playful graph on Public Rambling:

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Wish I were in Cambridge today! At 1pm, Nick Hopwood will speak about “Anatomist holds model embryo: A marble portrait from 1900” at the Natural History Cabinet’s bag lunch:

Embryo images have in the last few decades acquired extraordinary and controversial prominence in biomedicine and the wider culture. Yet an art work from a century ago can still surprise. In 1900 the Leipzig sculptor Carl Seffner made a marble bust of the anatomist Wilhelm His, the founder of modern human embryology, holding a model embryo in his right hand. Rather than straightforwardly signalling the subject’s achievements, the unusual accoutrement doubtless puzzled many viewers more than did the professor himself. The talk will discuss the design of this double portrait and reconstruct its display in art exhibitions and other settings. This should suggest some relations between embryology and portraiture and shed light on how the identities of embryologists and embryos have changed.

A wonderful item for any medical museum!

Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick (and sometime visitor to Copenhagen) is inviting everyone to participate in a cyberconference on the ‘emerging/converging technologies’ research agenda, i.e., the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science into a common interdisciplinary framework for the alleged betterment of the human condition.

The cyberconference — which is sponsored by the EU’s 6th FRP ( ‘Knowledge Politics and New Converging Technologies’ — will start on Monday, May 7. It is organized around a number of opening statements (see below), and a week later, Steve will intervene for ‘real time’ discussion, before the conference resumes for another week’s discussions.

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