Biomedicine in museums

Christoph Gradmann and Flurin Condrau of the ESF network Drug Standards, Standard Drugs are planning a workshop on the theme ‘Beyond the Magic Bullet: Reframing the History of Antibiotics’, to take place in Oslo, 17-19 March 2011.

Antibiotics have been celebrated as a medical success story around the globe from their first distribution at the end of WWII to the present day […] As agents of a medical revolution which shifted borders between health and disease and created new spaces for therapy, antibiotics have become one of the most popular scientific success stories of the twentieth century. [This] workshop will focus on recent and current research into the histories of antibiotics, which has started to move beyond the initial stories of the discovery of penicillin and the randomised clinical control trials.

They invite proposals for papers contributing to the four key themes:

• Research and development of antibiotics
• Antibiotics in clinical practice
• Antibiotic resistance
• Antibiotics as global medicines

Send <400 words proposals to Christoph (christoph.gradmann@medisin.uio.no) and Flurin (f.condrau@manchester.ac.uk) by 1 October 2010; they can also provide more detailed info about the themes. And yes — accommodation and travel will be supported.

I’m often thinking about how my presence on social web media platforms — mainly blogging and some occasional twittering — enhances or weakens my other scholarly activities, like writing books and papers for traditional history of science journals.

Personally, I believe writing on social web media is a significant source of inspiration for more traditional scholarly writing. Or rather: It’s not a question of either-or, but both-and.

But I have many colleagues who believe the opposite (mainly those who’ve never tried it seriously 🙂 So it’s good that someone tries to dig up some empirical evidence for and against spending one’s precious scholarly time on the social web.

Carolyn Hank, a phd candidate in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, is currently making a survey in support of her research study, ‘Scholars and their Blogs: Characteristics, Preferences and Perceptions Impacting Digital Preservation’.

Inspired by notions like ‘bloggership’ and ‘blogademia’, she’s asking questions about the publishing behaviour of blogging scholars, our perceptions of the blog vs. our scholarly activities, and our thoughts on how our writings can be preserved, i.e., questions like: 

Are blogs scholarship? Where do they fit in relation to one’s cumulative scholarly record? […] Will the scholar blogs of today be available into the future?

I’ll be happy to answer Carolyn’s thoughtful questions (received by email yesterday). If somebody else wants to participate, you can perhaps pursuade her to send you the questionnaire.

We’ve just published post #1400 — on ‘Handbook for the material turn’.
Still going strong? Yes!
Need a break? No!
Need an overhaul of layout, etc.? Yes!

I guess this quote encapsulates the notion of a current ‘material turn’:

There is the feeling that this is the moment in which understanding material culture, something central to humanity, its past and future, is being achieved at a level beyond anything that had previously been imagined

Says Daniel Miller in his blurb to the Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry and forthcoming on Oxford University Press in September. See the list of contents here.

The prepublished introduction, “Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view” gives an indication of the range of disciplinary backgrounds and topics treated. They call their approach ‘reactionary´, because they are “unpicking the culturalist uses of materials that developed during the 1980s and 1990s”; they want to present an alternative to “pure culturalism” and let things in again.

Accordingly the editors have invited contributors from four different diciplinary perspectives upon material things: archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies (STS), giving “a snapshot of the wide range of approaches to material things that emerge from putting distinctive methods into practice, and working within particular traditions of practice and enquiry”.

Yet they hesitate to call this edited volume a contribution to “a material turn that would replace the anthropocentric linguistic or cultural turn of the 1980s”. It is, they suggest, in the transdisciplinary reception of actor network theory “that the strongest possible model for what a ‘material turn’ would look like is developing”. However, such a material turn “would simply extend, through a rhetorical inversion, the cultural turn of the 1980s”.

Good point! In other words, they don’t find “a new series of ‘turns’: turn upon turn” attractive, it would just “add up only to academic spin” (I couldn’t agree more).

None of the contributors seem to address the problems of materiality in science, technology and medical museums (let alone museums in general) directly. Nevertheless, I will expect this volume, in spite of being so heftily priced, to become obligatory reading for science, technology and medical museum scholars.

Let’s get back to the topic when it has been published.

What’s interesting in the interview with Craig Venter in Der Spiegel last week is not, as most commentators suggest, that Venter stands out as a self-aggrandizing jerk. What’s really interesting is his pessimistic view on the medical implications of genomics and ‘personalised medicine’:

SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?
VENTER: Close to zero to put it precisely […] I was just in Stockholm for the 200th anniversary of the Karolinska Institute. The first presentation was about the many achievements the decoding of the genome has brought. Then I spoke and said that this century will be remembered for how little, and not how much, happened in this field.

SPIEGEL: Why is it taking so long for the results of genome research to be applied in medicine?
VENTER: Because we have, in truth, learned nothing from the genome other than probabilities. How does a 1 or 3 percent increased risk for something translate into the clinic? It is useless information.

SPIEGEL: [What about] the kind of personalized medicine that genetic researchers have always touted? Each person would get his or her own personal treatment that is tailored precisely to that person’s genetic make-up?
VENTER: That was another one of these silly naïve notions that was out there. It’s not, ‘Oh, we know your genome, we’re going to make this drug for you.’ That will never happen.

Reminds me that ‘personalised medicine’ is an excellent topic for a historical exhibition.

I’m thinking of the Corpus Museum between Amsterdam and Den Haag — a 100 feet high building designed as the contours of the human body.

The “museum” invites the visitors on a “journey through the human body” during which they can “see, feel and hear how the human body works and what roles healthy food, healthy life and plenty of exercise plays”.

Opened two years ago, this seems to be the most extreme example of medical edutainment I’ve heard about so far: 

Questions as ‘Why do I have to sleep?’, ‘what happens when I sneeze’, ‘how does my hair grow’ are answered in CORPUS by means of tangible, visible and audible conceptions during the ‘journey through the human body’. CORPUS uses the latest technology in the field of imagery, sound and 3D effects to present and explain all aspects of the medical aspects of the human body.

I’ve only read about it on their website, so maybe I’ll change my mind if I visit it IRL.

Anyone who has been there?

Thanks to Bertalan (ScienceRoll) for the tip and the pics!

I just read an interview with distinguished British art historian John Boardman made for CBS BNET a couple of years ago. Among other things, Boardman tells about his experience of once having attended one of classical archeologist John D. Beazley‘s (a specialist on Athenian vase painting) lectures:

By spending the entire hour analysing the painting of a single vase, he taught us how to look at an object properly.

There seems to be something lost when we put our artefact collections on the web — it makes slow attention more difficult.

Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector?

Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the structure and content of the book puts Wellcome rather than his collection in the center.

Oxford University Press tries to solve the problem on the book’s website, when writing that “An Infinity of Things tells the story of the greatest private collection ever made, and the life of the man behind it”.

But can you have it both ways? Or do you, as Bilak, suggests, have to make a choice. Either the story of the collection or the story of the collector will have to frame the content and structure of the narrative.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, has written an excellent overview of the online privacy problem, titled “The web means the end of forgetting”, in last week’s NYT (a reminder that old media often still publish the best stuff).

Despite Rosen’s focus on the legal aspects of our eternal exposure on the web, the most interesting aspect of the article is his discussion about the emergence of new social norms regulating our online presence. He has actually “been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, ‘Please don’t tweet this’”.

There is something important about changing social norms going on here. The few times I’ve taken photos of participants in academic meetings and seminar for this blog, I’ve felt somewhat guilty of breaching their right to privacy. But do Facebookers feel the same way?

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion.

When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that seeks to explore the connections between medicine, art and life. It has received very positive press attention throughout the world, attracted over 300,000 visits per year since 2007, and has been nominated for the Museum of the Year and European Museum of the Year awards.

The Wellcome Collection has emerged as the culmination of 15 years of innovative public work at the Trust, where Ken Arnold has run a variety of arts and exhibitions activities, including a gallery at the Science Museum devoted to exploring medicine in context. He also co-ordinated the establishment of the Wellcome Trust’s arts funding initiatives, which support collaborative work between scientists and artists. He was also Chief Curator of the highly successful exhibition Medicine Man: the Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome shown at the British Museum in 2003.

Ken Arnold gained a B.A. in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Princeton University, and worked in a variety of museums (national and local) on both sides of the Atlantic, before joining the Wellcome Trust in 1992. He regularly writes and lectures on the culture of museums past and present and on the contemporary relations between the arts and sciences.

Some of his articles in collected volumes are highly original contributions to the problem of how to use art in the presentation of medical science. Other articles have raised the problems of the relation between history of medicine and medical museums in new and fruitful ways. In the monograph Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (2006), Arnold draws on the historical experiences of the classical 16^th and 17^th century curiosity cabinet as a resource for opening up a new field of discourse for contemporary museum innovation. The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting (2000) raised new issues about the role of collecting in the history of museums. His academic activities also include supervision and examination of PhD-projects in science communication and museums studies at the University of Leicester, Leeds Metropolitan University, Oxford University and Open University.

We are very happy to get this opportunity for close encounters with Ken Arnold and thereby draw on his long experience in research-based exhibition making. If anyone wants to meet him during his Copenhagen sojourn, please contact him at k.arnold@wellcome.ac.uk.

(image credit: LabforCulture, www.labforculture.org)