Biomedicine in museums

The Office of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences and the University of Maryland are inviting to a virtual (sic!) meeting on “Visual Culture and Bioscience”, March 5-13, 2007.

This international event will create a virtual meeting space for experts from many disciplines to discuss the intersections between visual culture and the biosciences. Artists, scientists, historians, ethicists, curators, sociologists, and writers will present a variety of perspectives on topics of visual representation in art and science and its implications on culture and society. Suzanne Anker, visual artist and theorist, will facilitate this online discussion. Anker teaches art history and theory at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she is chair and editor of ArtLab23. She is also the host of BioBlurb on WPS1 Art Radio.

They don’t say how the meeting is going to take place — I’m quite curious to see how they will solve the technical problems. [Added 10 January]: The symposium consists of two parts: First, there will be a listserv where invited panelists are discussing issues such as artists in the lab, imaging in art and science, and the social dimensions of the science-art connection. Visitors are invited to view the discussion but only panelists are permitted to post comments(link will be active after March 4, 2007). The second part of the symposium will consist of a public blog. Visitors can post their responses to the discussion here (link will be active after March 4, 2007).

The list of panelists is impressive:

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I promised to come back to Michael Crichton’s Next.

I didn’t expect much — but was nevertheless sort of positively surprised. Not because of Crichton’s writing skills. I’ve always been ambiguous about his books (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Prey, etc.) because their literary value is, in my humble mind, not overwhelming. His characters only seem to have one emotion (in Next they invariably “frown” when they are supposed to express dislike of something).

Crichton reminds me of detective novelist Mickey Spillane who famously considered himself a “writer,” not an “author” (meaning that authors get prizes, while writers sell). Seven of Spillane’s titles are indeed among the ten best selling US books in the 20th century. Likewise Crichton will never get the Booker Prize or the Nobel Prize in literature — but the first print-run of Next is allegedly over one million copies.

And like Spillane, Crichton is a very efficient writer. The flap promises a blend of “fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new … genetic world” which is “fast, furious, and out of control. Well, Next is furious too — it’s a short-sentenced, dialogue-driven, fast-paced page-turner (it kept me awake until 2.30am) inhabited by dozens of rather unsympathetic, characters and interspersed with a few soft porn scenes.

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MuseumBlogs.org is a directory of (at present 98) museum and museum-related blogs. The majority of the posts are from the RSS feeds of the blogs listed in the directory (we don’t yet, but Benny will soon help us install the function). The site was developed by Ideum, a small design company that develops interactive exhibits and websites for museums:

“It’s our hope that MuseumBlogs.org will help increase the community’s awareness and authority. Policies MuseumBlogs.org is run as a public service and encourages community participation. The site does not accept commercial advertising of any kind”.

Believe it or not — but this humble blog has been nominated for the 2006 Medical Weblog Award, in three categories: Best Medical Blog, Best Literary Medical Blog, and Best Medical Technologies Blog. Vote now, here!

Thinking of our anthology-in-progress (Biomedicine on Display), I’ve pondered possible ways of encouraging collaborative writing projects — and was inspired the other day by Laura Cohen’s post “Why Can’t a Wiki Be More Like a Blog?” on Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective. Wikis are great for collective editing, but discourages people who “just” want to add comments. Blogs on the other hand don’t have the collective editing feature. Why not create a mix, a sort of Wikiblog? An example of a half-way solution that Laura Cohen mentions is the annotated edition of The Iraq Study Group Report which shows a very nice comment system where you can open windows and comment on each paragraph in the document. Says Laura: “Wikis and blogs could benefit from incorporating each others’ features. This could move us toward a truly full-featured integrated publishing platform in which the best of both systems are available”.

Medical gadgets on display for sale

I’m just browsing around to find examples of biomedicine on display in a non-museum context, like this Fujinon 400 Video Endoscopy System by http://www.1800endoscope.com/. Some are better, some (like this one) are worse. But they demonstrate the variety of object display practices out there.

Sara Kjellberg (who writes her PhD on science blogging at the University of Lund and takes part in the Towards a New Materialism-seminar) summarizes the science blog year of 2006. The tendency is clear: Postgenomic and Scienceblogs have already become the two major science blog portals.

On Monday 29 January 2007, we (the Medical Museion research group) will present our research project on the historiography and museology of contemporary biomedicine at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. Here’s the program:

• Thomas Söderqvist: Introduction: The Problem
• Søren Bak-Jensen: Out of Time: Collecting and Storing Kidneys for Transplantation.
• Hanne Jessen: What is a Laboratory Animal? A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Human-Animal Relationship in Biomedical Research.
• Sniff Nexø: A Matter of Disposal: Enacting Aborted Foetuses in Danish Hospitals.
• Susanne Bauer: Displaying the Biopolitics of Epidemiologic Risk Assessment: The Precard® Software as a Museum Object.
• Jan Eric Olsén: Representing Virtual Surgery in the Medical Museion.
• Camilla Mordhorst: Conclusion: Possible Solutions.
• Fredrik Svenaeus (Södertörn University, commentator)

Time: Monday 29 January, 4-7pm, followed by a postseminar buffet. Venue: The Swedish Academy, Källargränd 4, 2nd floor, Gamla Stan, Stockholm (around the corner to the right of the Nobel Museum main entrance). Prebooking: at bokning@nobel.se 

Isabelle Dussauge’s interesting comment to the earlier post on magical value of collections disappeared in some temporary spam comment box for a whole month — so we’ve reissued it below. Sorry for the fuzz, Isabelle!

It’s time to nominate and vote for the best medical blog in 2006. MedGadget, the ezine for new medical technologies invites to the third annual Medical Weblog Awards: “These awards are designed to honor the very best in the medical blogosphere, and to highlight the diverse world of medical blogs”. The categories are:

• Best Medical Weblog
• Best New Medical Weblog (established in 2006)
• Best Literary Medical Weblog
• Best Clinical Sciences Weblog
• Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog
• Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog
• Best Patient’s Blog (a new category this year)

Unfortunately there is no category for Medical STS, Medical History or Medical Metascience blogs.

Anyway, hopefully someone will nominate “Biomedicine on Display” before 31 December here (in the comment field at the bottom of the page). You can then return to the site between 3 and 17 January to vote for the best of the nominated blogs. We’re crossing our fingers — hard!