Biomedicine in museums

Remember Michael Crichton’s science fiction thriller Prey (2002)? In which the bad guys created swarms of nanorobots, and the good guy lost his wife (but saved his kids) in his struggle to counter the swarms that left their secret lab environment somewhere in the Nevada desert to start replicating in a Darwinian fashion and thus potentially threatening to take over the earth. The book had no special literary qualities, but it was efficiently narrated, and too close to real biology to be dismissed as pure fiction.

Technology Review had a good report on the progress of the Crichtonian future made real almost two years ago. (See also the MIT-Harvard based Synthetic Biology working group.) Now The Economist too is catching up with the events. A Special Report in last week’s issue (2-8 September) gives an overview of how far the new science and technology of synthetic biology has come (see here and here). As the leader writer (alas, behind paywall) says, it is considered impolite among biologists to mention the ‘F’ word (‘F’ for Frankenstein, of course :-). Yet, we are not that far away any more, and historians of biology and medicine and biotech STS scholars should begin to prepare for the much needed reflexive work that needs to be done the very day after the reports announcing that the first artificial life form has been created.

The Special Report brings up one very interesting aspect about the new synthetic biology/artificial life field which I haven’t thought about before, viz., the similarity between the history of computer technology and the possible future history of synthetic biology.

We usually think about biomedicine and biotechnology as a Big Science/Big Pharma/Big Agro business thing; biology in the hands of Empire as it were. But to a growing extent biomedicine and biotechnology is beginning to germinate (sic!) in the garages. The number of biotech hobbyists is not overwhelming yet, but the large numbers of students graduating from universities with degrees in the new technologies is likely to increase the ranks of homegrown bio-hackers. And in the same way as there were electronic companies that sold components for computer hackers in the 1970 and 1980s, there are now a growing number of bio-suppliers that provide all the necessary utensils and reagents for garage biotech. Websites like DNAhack.com help you make your own DNA.

Bioterrorism is one outcome of this scenario of course. But another outcome is an exponential increase in the number of benign and creative biohackers who want to change the world for the better. Bioartists like Oron Catts are already building their own tissue culture labs. The democratic potential is enormous (biology and medicine in the hands of the Multitude as it were), while the ethical issues have not really reached the media yet (although it has been an issue among bioethicists for a while).

Her er programmet for afholdte Museion-seminarer fra december 2005 og frem.
Seminarer inkl. evt. abstracts og materiale flyttes til denne side, når de er afholdt.
For abstracts, klik på side 2
(for tidligere seminarprogrammer, se her)
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Contested categories, 2nd Annual Symposium of the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network, 14-17 January 2007, hosted by the Medical Museion, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

The symposium will focus on how the recent biosciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: The social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries are increasingly blurred and become populated by hybrids, cyborgs and boundary objects. New material objects, visual and virtual representations produced and circulated in biomedicine and biotechnology challenge and disrupt the analytical categories of the historiographical and social studies of science. The new categories emerging in this empirical field of the biosciences raise a host of questions:
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The 1½ year old internet video clip broadcasting system YouTube (the moving pictures counterpart to flickr.com) is expanding rapidly. Much of it is private rubbish from the horizon of a mobile camera and the technical quality of most clips is still pretty mediocre. But the range of topics is astounding and with an acquisition rate of about 65,000 new clips a day (yes!), there will soon be quite a lot to see, and statistically there will be some interesting quality stuff in between.

There are actually already a few pieces of interest for the biomedical museologist if you use their search engine creatively.
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I’ve just finished reading (or rather struggling my way through) Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Possibility of an Island (originally published as La possibilité d’une île). It’s crafted as the autobiographical story of a few years in the life of a successful stand-up comedian David who, after being co-opted by a religious sect and disbandoned by his female lover, commits suicide; his DNA is used to clone him into a so called neo-human, with eternal life.
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Liv Carlé Mortensen, “The Amazone” (from Huskegruppen’s website)

Medical Museion’s new exhibition, ‘The Face of Disease’ (‘Sygdommens Ansigt’), inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal, and now classical, essay Illness as Metaphor (1977) opens today, Thursday 24 August. The (uncensored) exhibition can be seen 24 hours a day in the 25 basement windows of Medical Museion at the corner of Bredgade and Fredericiagade until 15 October.
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Earlier today I went to the opening of Mette Bersang and Louise Bøgelund Saugmann’s exhibition “Suspended between breathing in and breathing out” in the subterranean passage between the Panum Institute and the Danish National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen (see announcement and flyer here). It’s a fairly small exhibition (only 14 pictures) of photos of interieurs of lab benches, storage rooms, instruments etc. from two clinics/laboratories. Soft colours (ink jet print on aluminium), no people visible, only traces and remains of their activities. A series of aesthetically very pleasing works that would fit nicely on the walls in the lunch room, but in my mind don’t raise any questions — perhaps other than: where goes the line between aesthetic and documentary photography?

We tend to think of recent biomedical artefacts as more or less spectacular high-tech things, like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines or knock-out mice. But many vital artefacts in the biomedical laboratory or medical clinic are mundane things — like plastic gloves, ink markers and centrifuge tubes. They may not be so fancy, but they are essential for the way the lab works.

Some of these mundane objects are more sophisticated than they immediately appear, however. Take, for example, the Eppendorf tube:

(thanks to Goodies: Things we would like to share)
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Like all historical research, the study of contemporary science, technology and medicine partly hinges on the existence of rich archives. (It’s also dependent on interviews and field-work, but that’s another issue.) The status of such archives is not without problems, however. They pivot on scientists’ interest in depositing material; their widespread use is closely connected to the possibility for on-line access; and perhaps most importantly, their existence is based on the willingness of funding agencies to support them.

These and other problems related to scientific archives will be discussed in this guest seminar with Dr. Peter Harper from the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists at the University of Bath, UK, on Monday 2 October. The seminar is organised by Finn Aaserud at the Niels Bohr Archive and takes place in Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen @ 2.15 pm.
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Celebrity plays an enormous role in popular culture — just think of film making and Academy Awards (Oscars). Yet with some exceptions, e.g. a recent conference and a follow-up blog, Academia (of the university kind, not the film industry’s!) shuns the phenomenon of celebrity.

Neither have historians of science, technology and medicine paid much attention to it. A notable exception here is Janet Browne who wrote an article on “Charles Darwin as a celebrity” in the journal Science in Context (vol. 16, March 2003), in which she explored the imagery of the famous evolutionist as a 19th-century scientific celebrity “by comparing the public character deliberately manufactured by Darwin and his friends with images constructed by the public”, and argued that “Darwin’s outward persona drew on a subtle tension between public and private”.

Janet Browne’s paper is the exception that proves the rule, however. And the rule includes science, technology and medical museums who also seem to be pretty uninterested in scientific celebrities. Take a tour around the Science Museum in London, for example, and you will hardly find a single individual, not to mention a famous one. You will have to walk across the city, to the National Portrait Gallery, to find pictures of individual celebrious scientists, engineeers and medical doctors, like Dorothy Hodgkin.
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