Biomedicine in museums

Museum displays are not just about the exhibitions. The museum shop often gets as much, and sometimes more, attention (and usually has more effect on overall income than the entrance fees). We don’t have a museum shop yet, unfortunately, but when we get one I’ll vote for a full series of computer mice in the shape of organs, like this cute little brain mouse from the Swiss mouseware company Pat Says Now (it was used to advertise a pretty stupid movie called “Zoolander” some years ago):

(Nice colour too! Looks like the brain has been dipped in some fluorescent stain)

Now we’re just waiting for a series of mice in the shape of hearts, kidneys, testicles, fibroblasts, T-cells, ribosomes and double-stranded DNA. Send suggestions to the manufacturer.

Progress in biomedicine is not all about new methodologies, new empirical findings and new patents. It is also about new metaphors that guide and connect research efforts, technological innovation, investment activities, public opinion, and health political initiatives.

Some metaphors are pushed over and over again, but never seem to take off — like the notion of “biosemiotics” which continuous to be a largely unsuccesful philosophical favourite within a small circle of devout believers (for some reason there are quite a few of them here in Denmark).

Other metaphors are extremely succesful, at least for the time being — like the notion of “high throughput analysis” which seems to be all over the place: in scientific papers, in applications for funding, in advertisements, and so forth. Together with the word “robust”, the phrase “high throughput analysis” is like an open sesame which, in careful dosage, gives you a competetive advantage in the race for funding and fame. Probably because it is a connecting metaphor between the spheres of bioscience and economy. “High throughput” is a word that both venture capitalists, biotech CEOs and lab bench workers can understand.

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The final conference of the EU project “Challenges of Biomedicine: Socio-Cultural Contexts, European Governance and Bioethics” will be held at the University of Vienna, June 14-16, 2007 under the title “Engineering European Bodies: When Biomedical Technologies Challenge European Governance, Bioethics and Identities” Read More

Looks like our spam filter is too efficient — in other words, it also blocks bona fide comments. Since we get about a thousand spam comments a day, we cannot spend time on sorting out which are sham and which are authentic. [Added 27 Dec.: now we’ve manually moderated all bona fide comments: excuses to Isabelle Dussauge, Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and David Wootton for being late with this]. When Benny (the new WordPress wizard) returns after New Year, we will ask him to install another filter.

PS: there are so many kinds of filters. E.g., my old friend Alex Pang has one which tells you that “The language of your comment does not match the preferred language of this user”, and then you are invited to do one of those recognize-six-distorted-letters-tests which I always find so humiliating (pattern recognition is not in my primary intelligence repertoire). I mean, what on earth is Alex’s “preferred language”?

I’ve just bought Michael Crichton’s new bioengineering thriller Next — about venture capitalists and biotech companies. The flap promises a blend of “fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS”; a genetic world which is “fast, furious, and out of control”. I’m not a Crichton fan (he’s just such a BAD writer) so I’m expecting yet another poor read. But what doesn’t one do for the sake of biomedicine and humanities! Will be back with a review after the holidays.

Added: see also 5 January 2007. 

In the last meeting of the “Towards a new materialism” reading group (at Medical Museion last Thursday) we discussed Sharon Macdonald’s Politics of Display. We touched upon several interesting topics, including the notion of democratising museums, and at one point in the (as usual very lively) discussion I wondered if anyone had thought about the possibility of a WikiMuseum.

It turned out that nobody had (and neither had I before the meeting). Now I’ve done a Google search on “Wikimuseum” and to my surprise I didn’t find anything useful. (There is an obscure hobby site at http://www.wikimuseum.org/ which started last spring with almost no content; and there is a dormant http://www.wikimuseum.com/ for sale if you make a “serious offer”.)

I think the notion of a WikiMuseum could be useful, if only for exploring the limits of the idea of democratising museums. I’m not thinking of websites with digitalised photos of objects which anyone can contribute to. There are already a number of such sites, e.g. Flickr, which could easily be developed into digital web museums.

More radically, a WikiMuseum would not be restricted to digitalised texts and photos, but would also comprise collections of physical objects. For practical reasons, it would probably not be possible to create a WikiMuseum at one single physical site, but it would have to be located at many sites simultaneously (physically distributed).

Imagine, for example, a WikiToyMuseum, containing the combined human heritage of toys. Not only toys in museum institutions, but also toys that have been gathered in millions of homes around the world: accumulations of generations of family toys from past decades, even centuries. If the items are still used to play with, or if just stoved away in the attic, they do not constitute part of the WikiToyMuseum. But at the very moment they are given away or sold to a museum institution they are publicly ‘museumised’; likewise if a private owner consciously orders, describes and/or displays them at home, they become privately ‘museumised’. In my vocabulary, they are then turned into parts of a potential WikiToyMuseum.

To be a true WikiMuseum there would have to be open access to all the distributed physical collection sites. I guess this is the tricky part of the realisation of a WikiMuseum. Would private toy owners accept opening the their doors to potential visitors? Well, in the art museum world, the borders between public and private collections are already somewhat fuzzy; for example, many private art collectors let museum institutions know what they own so that the items can be borrowed for exhibitions.

Keith Miller reviews Simon Schama’s BBC2 series “Power of Art” in TLS (1 December). Four central quotes from the essay:

• “What Schama gives us on screen is a series of deft essays in what used to be called art appreciation”
• “What is under discussion is primarily the thing in itself”
• “Schama’s purpose is to enact a kind of ritual. The power of art is personal, and as much visceral as visual. It is the power to hold our gaze across the years or centuries; and it goes without saying — or it does if you’re not trying too hard to contextualize — that only the best art carries such a power”
• “Prating on about brush strokes has long been somewhat unfashionable, and it’s a brave thing for Schama to do …”

We are closing in on the presence of museum objects now, aren’t we? 

Google (who else?) have just launched the beta version of Patent Search. The database currently contains all approx. 7 million US patents from 1790s to mid-2006 — and will be continuously updated and expanded to cover a number of non-US patent offices as well. Read more about it here.

Needless to say this is a potentially wonderful online tool for historians of medicine. True, 1) certainly not all medical history has to do with technology, 2) there is more to the history of medical technology than gadgets and technical procedures, 3) not all medical technologies have been patented, and 4) not all them have been issued by the US patent authorities. But that said, much can be done with this kind of online material. Read More

Steven Shapin has written an excellent critical review (in London Review of Books, 30 November, pp. 31-33) of David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (2006). In Shapin’s reading, Wootton’s book is a crusade against “the grain of contemporary historical writing” epitomised by the late Roy Porter; Wootton’s aim is to resuscitate the traditional medical historical project of identifying heroes and villains and distributing praise and blame.

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It’s only two weeks left before Medical Museion enters the centenary year 2007. Our earlier incarnation — the Medical History Museum — was established in 1906-1907. Strictly arithmetically speaking the centenary was in 2005-2006 — but like everyone celebrated the year 2000 as the Millenium year (and not 1999, which strictly speaking was the 2000th year after zero), we have chosen 2006-2007 (and especially 2007 🙂 as our centenary. This is the year when we will intensify our cultural studies of contemporary biomedicine for the benefit of our wonderful and rich collections and displays. This blog too will be revamped for the benefit of those who want to learn more about our research, teaching, acquisition and display projects on contemporary biomedicine. Stay attuned!