Biomedicine in museums

We have technical problems right now. We upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4 a month ago which solved the former spam problem. But there is some bug in the program that distorts the layout. The ugly result you can see for yourself (in the header, to the right, and scrolling down). We’re trying to find someone who can fix the bug. Please be patient!

Added: It turns out (thanks Nick!) that one shall avoid cutting-and-pasting texts from other websites or richly formatted texts (Word etc.) directly into the “Write Post” window because this introduces so much nasty font code that the system goes bananas. (In fact, one of the posts contained so much font-code that I couldn’t debug it manually. But when I deleted this particular post, the layout went back to normal again.)

So the trick from now on is NEVER EVER cut-and-past from a website or a Word document directly into the “Write Post”-window. Instead you shall:

1) first cut-and-paste the text into the HTML Source Editor subwindow of the “Write Post”-window. This removes all special fonts from the original site.

2) and then click “Update” to turn it into the rich HTML format, where you can then add links, images, bold and italics font, the “more” function, etc. as usual

If you’ve ony tried it once, it’s almost as easy as before.

Postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers are invited to attend the workshop ‘Approches to the History of Medicine: Discussing Methodology’ at the University of Warwick, Friday 19 January, 2007. Read More

See below the winner of the British Society for the History of Science‘s competition for the best 500 word essay aimed at a general audience answering the question: “Why should anyone need to know about the history of science?” (The winner was Michal Meyer from University of Florida). Can you do it better in 500 words? Read More

I’m sorry about the font. It’s pretty ugly — and we’re trying to find out what’s gone wrong. Please have mercy with us!!

Here is an announcement for a workshop that asks some new and interesting questions about the status of ‘biosociety futurology’. The “Futures of Life” workshop is organized by the graduate students and faculty of the Department of S&TS at Cornell University and will take place April 27-29, 2007.

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(originally published 11 October; updated 20 Oct because of new comments): 

Today’s (i.e., 11 October) big public health news report is the article by a Johns Hopkins University research team published in The Lancet on-line edition on the number of war-related casualties in Iraq. “We estimate”, the authors conclude, “that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2,5% of the population in the study area”.

As Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, points out in a comment, “this study adds substantially to the new field of conflict epidemiology, which has been evolving rapidly in recent years”. Unsurprisingly, US President George W. Bush questions the findings: “I don’t consider it a credible report”, he told a White House press conference (according to today’s Guardian ).

The Lancet’s report underscores the importance of the complex relations between war and (lack of) health throughout history.

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The following report of the annual meeting of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology (Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik, DGGMNT) and the Society for History of Science (Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, GWG) held in Braunschweig, 28 September -1 Oktober 2006 shows that the cultural history of science is flourishing in the German speaking part of Europe:
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Adam, here’s something for you: 

Conference on “Body and Textuality. Telling Bodies: Practices, Discourses, Looks”, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, 26-30 March, 2007

The body in the 21st century is everything but a certainty, a condition which raises an infinite number of questions. This Conference intends thus to be an interdisciplinary meeting point for discussing the body as a central cultural construction.
 

See further: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=152947

The journal EMBO Reports has a good review article (“Seeing is understanding: Improvements in computer software and hardware are revolutionizing three-dimensional imaging in biology”, Embo Reports, vol. 7, pp. 467-70) of the state-of-the-art of 3D-imaging in biomedical science — read it here. They refer, among other developments in the field, to a ribosome animation movie made by Said Sannuga, a molecular biologist and animation specialist, in cooperation with Venki Ramakrishnan at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Here’s a still from their movie:

The movie version will hopefully soon be available online.

Here’s another workshop that deals with one of the central issues for museums that try to make sense of recent biomedicine and biotechnology, viz. how humanness (“Menschsein”) is treated narratively in biomedicine and other cultural domains, like literature. Read More