Biomedicine in museums

The theme of the 6th annual conference in the ‘Science and the Public’ series, to be held at Kingston University, London, on 2-3 July 2011, is ‘A Quarter Century of PUS: Retrospect and Prospect.’

The meeting takes the publication of the Royal Society’s report into the public understanding of science (the Bodmer Report) in 1985 as its point of departure. Introducing what Brian Wynne and others later called ‘the deficit model’, the Bodmer Report stimulated a widespread interest in the public understanding of science (PUS) in the UK and later in the rest of Europe.

The aim of the meeting is to take stock of where public understanding of science stands now, 25 years later:

Is there still (or was there ever?) a ‘public understanding of science movement’ and if so where is it and what form does it take? Is it now defined by ‘engagement’, by ‘dialogue’ or by some other mode of public interface? Is the deficit model dead and if so has it been properly buried or does it still haunt our corridors? What else is there? What shape does the PUS field now have? Is there a comparable agenda of concerns to that defined by Bodmer and if so what is it? And in what direction(s) should work now be going? What about the critical responses? Where have they taken us and where might they be taking us in future? Is there a consensus or do we remain a field in conflict with entrenched opponents, if no longer actively at ‘war’, then hunkered down in separate bunkers refusing – or simply neglecting – to speak to each other? Is there, indeed, a language we share to communicate with each other, let alone the public?

The organisers invite papers and panels that address themes and issues like:

• reflections on the Bodmer Report and its historical, sociological and/or cultural significance;
• the PUS movement and its off-spring;
• how engaged is ‘engagement’ and how dialogical is ‘dialogue’?
• the prospects and circumspects of ‘citizen science’;
• the new science communication – education, entertainment … or irritation?
• new forms and modes of popularisation;
• technoscience and its consumption;
• science, art and culture – changes, developments, continuities;
• theorising PUS
• methods of research – new developments, new thoughts, new proposals;
• new agendas for the science/public relationship and its academic study.

<250 words abstracts to l.allibone@kingston.ac.uk or s.locke@kingston.ac.uk not later than 28 February 2011.

More info here.

The NIH Office of History has just announced a new batch of Stetten Fellowship for postdoctoral historical research on the biomedical sciences and technology since 1945. The stipends are ~$45,000 per year, include health insurance and office accommodation, computer and phone, and can be renewable to a maximum of 24 months. Application deadline is 31 December 2010. Full announcement here.

Keep on eye open on the journal Heritage & Society (a refurbishment of the only three-year old Heritage Management), edited out of the Center for Heritage & Society at the University of Massachussetts, which will provide a forum for scholarly, professional, and community reflection on the cultural, political, and economic impacts of heritage on contemporary society:

We seek to examine the current social roles of collective memory, historic preservation, cultural resource management, public interpretation, cultural preservation and revitalization, sites of conscience, diasporic heritage, education, legal/legislative developments, cultural heritage ethics, and central heritage concepts such as authenticity, significance, and value.

No website yet, as far as I can see.

If we didn’t have a history of museums, but wanted to invent them now:

a museum invented now would be conversational and authoritative – here’s this thing, and here’s why it’s cool (my emphasis)

(from here)

A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.

(Blake Gopnik, “National Portrait Gallery bows to censors, withdraws Wojnarowicz video on gay love”, Washington Post, 30 November 30, 2010; thanks to Judy Chelnick for the link)

After reading Fierce Biotech’s evaluation of the Top 10 Phase III Failures of 2010, I’m convinced that Phase III trials are more exciting than goose-pimple horror movies or the ups and downs of the NYSE.

If a pharma company succeeds, there’s lots (lots!) of money in the waiting. But losses can be excruciatingly high too. Fierce Biotech’s list of the ten worst Phase III drug candidate losers of 2010 is a catalogue of perfect pharma disasters:

• Dimebon
• Ocrelizumab
• Taspoglutide
• Semagacestat
• ASA404
• NOV-002
• Zibotentan
• Vicriviroc
• Recentin
• NV1FGF

Late-stage drug development always requires being prepared for the kind of catastrophic failure that can damage big pharma companies and utterly destroy a smaller outfit

This is the flop side of the usual story of greedy Big Pharma. They earn of lot of dough, yes — but they also lose a lot.

Det er tid at planlægge eventuelle papers til den 23. nordiske medicinhistoriske kongress, som bliver afholdt på Nasjonalt medisinsk museum i Oslo, den 25. – 27. maj 2011

De vil gerne have indlæg om:

* Studier av kunnskap innenfor ulike profesjoner på det helse- og medisinhistoriske området
* Innsamling og bruk av muntlig kildemateriale innenfor helse- og medisinhistorie
* Medisinske bilder. Bildediagnostikk, utvikling og bruk av ulike visuelle framstillinger og framstillingsmåter
* Kunnskapshistorie innenfor nevrologi og hjerneforskning. En utstilling om hjernen, Mind Gap, åpner ved Nasjonalt medisinsk museum i april 2011 og vil presenteres på seminaret
* Emner fra psykiatriens historie
* Internasjonale forbindelser innen helse- og medisinhistorie

Der vil være tre specielt indbudte foredragsholdere (John Pickstone, Ludmilla Jordanova og Nick Hopwood) og i tilknytning til kongressen vil Ludmilla Jordanova desuden lede et kurs for ph.d-studenter onsdag den 25. maj.

400 ord abstracts sendes til medisin@tekniskmuseum.no senest 1. marts 2011. Konferancespråk er engelsk og skandinavisk. Deltageravgiften er 2000 kroner, som dækker deltagelse, fælles frokost og middag onsdag og torsdag, samt frokost fredag.

Kontakt evt. Olav Hamran, medisin@tekniskmuseum.no, eller Anne Kveim Lie, a.h.k.lie@medisin.uio.no

Remember Tom Cruise wawing hands in front of the imaginary screen in the movie Minority Report? Well, Hans Rosling (the famous visualiser-wizard of human demography) does it much better in this awesome presentation of changes in income and life expectance throughout the last 200 years. It’s a BBC production, and will certainly set new standards for digitally enhanced presentations—hopefully also in digitally enhanced museum exhibitions!

(tip from Jessica at Bioephemera; yes, she’s back again!:

Some conference announcements are distributed a year in advance, others just come all too late. Like the workshop on ‘Tacit Knowing: Manual Knowledge in Art, Science and Technology’ which will be held 15-16 December at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

The workshop will focus on Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowing’, i.e. the kind of knowledge which is associated with bodily experience, for example clinical expertise, making art, architecture, design, etc. and which Polanyi suggests is ubiquitous—and even primary to explicit knowledge.

The aim of the workshop is to reconsider Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ and its application in the study of the practice of architecture, art, science and technology:

If the generation of new forms, spaces and scientific objects is indeed closely bound to implicit, practical competences and skills, then: in what way and in which (epistemological) situations does it come into play? How is it acquired and transmitted? What is the relation between media, tools and implicit ways of knowing? Against a normative understanding of knowledge, the workshop aims to outline an amorphous field of practical competences and generative skills that always come into play when the trained body of an architect, engineer or scientist interacts manually with objects, instruments and media.

Here are some of the talks I would have liked to listen to:

• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: “Penser avec ses mains. On the Creativity of Experience”
• Monika Dommann: “Hands and Handling”
• Gloria Meynen: “Malen nach Zahlen – das stumme Handwissen der Fläche”
• Omar Nasim: “Astronomical Drawings and Tacit Knowledge”
• Tim Ingold: “Telling by Hand: Drawing Making Writing”

The workshop takes place in the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, 99423 Weimar, Germany. More info from Katharina Schmidt: katharina.schmidt@uni-weimar.de or here: www.knowledge-in-the-making.de

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate).

A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene.

The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the most common size is 96 wells, but there are plates with several thousand wells—and the results can be read in an automated plate reader. In addition, the small size of the wells reduces sample volumes (from milliliter scale to nanoliter scale), which in turn saves money spent on reagents, like enzymes, which can be forbiddingly expensive.

So it’s simple, low-tech, modest, cheap and cost-saving—no doubt the main reasons why the microplate is a ubiquitous tool in laboratories around the world for all kinds of biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. Most of today’s high-throughput analysis in genomics and proteomics is unthinkable without microplates.

In other words—the perfect lab technology.

What about the history of the microplate? Professional historians of medicine and/or technology haven’t paid much attention to the unassuming plastic lab device. After a few minutes on the web, however, I found out that the earliest microplate seems to have been constructed by the Hungarian medical microbiologist Gyula Takácsy (1914-1980). The Hungarian National Center for Epidemiology writes on their website that:

To respond to the shortage in laboratory supplies and a severe influenza outbreak in the early 50s in Hungary, Dr. Takácsy developed several excellent innovative lab supplies and techniques much ahead of his age. Describing his technical innovation, the spiral loop instead of pipette and glass-plates with wells instead of tubes, he used the term micromethods published in Hungarian in 1952 and in 1955 in English. He was the first to have the notion to apply calibrated spiral wire loops for multiple simultaneous serial dilutions in plastic multiwell strips.

“… very small volumes of blood taken from the fingertip or from laboratory animals can be taken up and diluted for quantitative work. The technique has been found particularly useful in virus research, since it is not negligible how much has to be used from costly immune sera and antigens”.

His paper focused on the use of spiral loops for serial dilutions and the testing methods for haemagglutination and complement fixation, however, the “8×12 grooves” that “can take up to 0.15 ml fluid” could describe the modern microplate.

So disease and shortage of supplies was apparently the mother of microplate invention. Also in the 1950s, US inventor John Liner (who founded a company called Linbro, which was later merged into Flow Laboratories Inc, which in turn was swallowed by ICN Flow, which is taken has been over by MTX Lab Systems; mergers and acquisitions in the medical and laboratory device industry is an extremely interesting history in its own right) introduced a vacuum-formed panel with 96 wells. Looking back in the late 1990’s, Liner wrote that “I consider myself  the grandfather to the disposable microplate, about 1953 I used a white styrene vacuum formed panel …”. Yet another case of multiple invention.

I also found some technical details about the early development of microplate automation here, and I found a reference to a web publication (Ray Manns, Microplate history. 2nd ed. 1999; http://www.microplate.org/history/det_hist.htm) in L.J. Kricka and S.R. Master, ‘Quality Control and Protein Microarrays’, Clinical Chemistry vol. 55: 1053–1055 (2009)—but the publication seems to be removed from the site.

So the microplate is almost untrodden territory for historians of medical technology. Maybe a medical student would like to explore its history and importance for the development of genomics and proteomics in a term paper?