Biomedicine in museums

Will this become the abstract of the 2010s?

We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome. The only DNA in the cells is the designed synthetic DNA sequence, including “watermark” sequences and other designed gene deletions and polymorphisms, and mutations acquired during the building process. The new cells have expected phenotypic properties and are capable of continuous self-replication.

From Gibson et. al., “Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome” in today’s issue of Science. Et al. in this case of course includes Craig Venter, who has now made an important step towards synthetic life.

It’s not really synthetic life yet— it’s ‘just’ a synthetic genome, which has been designed in the computer, assembled from chemically synthesised oligonucelotides, and then put into a recipient cell, where the new synthetic genome took over control, thereby creating a new Mycoplasma species. Nevertheless — it’s pretty mindblowing.

In this video, Venter shortly explains the work behind the paper, and then discusses the many possible applications, including vaccine production. He predicts, for example, that the production of flu vaccine can be speeded up considerably, making it both cheaper, more reliable, and more on-demand.

Tons of ethical, religious, environmental etc. issues will of course be raised in the wake of this.

One of my favourite medical technology websites, Medgadget, is launching a Medical Museum Competition.

They suggest you visit your local medical museum:

Chances are that no matter where you live, there is a medical museum nearby. Maybe it’s an overlooked building in the center of your city, or a hospital library. Inside, you’ll find bizarre specimens, important documents, and yes, medical gadgets.

So, write a report about it, showcase its treasures, explain how it grew out of the contributions of  scientists and clinicians in the local area, etc. To this end, Medgadget has implemented a dynamic website where you create an online presentation — upload pictures, file a report, embed videos, etc. to “impress the judges”.

The museum presentation shall be finalised not later than Sunday, June 13. The grand prize is an Apple iPad — and the honour, of course.

More here.

Just got an email saying that the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim has announced a postdoc position to study “the production of images of the interior of the human body on the cellular level”. See more about the background for the project here: The salary is splendid: 438.500 NKK annually. More info from Merete Lie, merete.lie@ntnu.no. Deadline is 20 June, 2010.

Large bladder stone, encased in silver and carried by the patient (1652). Medical Museion, public exhibition.

Oslo-based medical photographer Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) made an incognito visit to Medical Museion two weekends ago — and has now written a very nice travel report + slide show, which includes some of the best photos of our artefacts on display that we’ve ever seen in the public domain.

I’ve never had a chance to meet Øystein in real life — hope he will be back less incognito soonish!

Medical Museion is on Facebook. Not because because we love it, but because we follow the siren calls of other museums that believe they need this part of the social media spectrum to be visisble online.

Personally, I just hate Facebook. It’s not just the sneaky way they treat their customers (see the long list of their objectionable activities here), it’s also their business idea — to commercialise the need of human social interaction — which turns me off. For a short period I had a profile on it but left when I realised Facebook has effectively made the word ‘friend’ devoid of any useful meaning.

Micah White suggests that earlier protests against Facebook (like the outrage against the Beacon system) were made under the assumption that it was a cool hangout community that could be changed from the inside.

But with the new ‘social plug-in’-system that gives commercial websites access to your personal information through ‘I like’-buttons this myth is about to be shattered. White describes it as a sinister reinvention of Beacon. The bottom line is that Facebook is about to cash in its former reputation as a hip online social medium and is turning into just another MySpace.

The 11th Universeum network meeting, titled ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’, will be held in the university museum of Uppsala University (Museum Gustavianum), on 17-20 June.

The organisers say that none of the previous ten network meetings has received so much interest. Why this surge in the interest in the history of universities?

Is it the gradual implementation of New Public Management in universities that is eventually giving rise to a reaction? Are university people becoming so frustrated with managerial governance, new evaluation schemes and assessment procedures, and the nauseating hype of their central communication offices that we are looking back to those times when universites were still universities? Is the renewed interest in university heritage an expression of our longing for the good old days of university self-governance?

I would have loved to discuss these and other questions with colleagues from all over Europe (and my abstract for the meeting has been accepted). However, I must admit that the programme doesn’t look particularly enticing; the titles of many individual papers look quite interesting, but the organisers haven’t been restrictive enough when putting it together.

The result of accepting too many of the submitted papers is a terribly crowded programme — one damned presentation after the other for three long days, a mere 15 minutes allotted to each speaker and only a few minutes for questions afterward, short and inevitably rushed coffee breaks, etc. This doesn’t promise well for reflection or for networking.

More generally, academic conference culture is in dire need of meeting formats that invite to dialogue and creativity. Tech conferences are sometimes more inspiring (boot camps etc.), but academic conferences are often still held as in the 1980s when I first attended this kind of academic rituals.

Massimi Pigliucci’s essay ‘The Future of Philosopy of Science’ makes me think that articles (or meetings) titled ‘The future of X-logy’ may in fact be a symptom of X-logy being in a crisis. If scholars are really busy innovating, they will probably not think of their joint activities in these terms. They will practice the future, not talk about it — and especially not in terms of X-logy, because if their joint activities are really moving into something interesting the future discipline will not yet have an established name to be defended. If anything they will probably call it Y-ology to mark out their intentions to do something new and interesting.

I’m intrigued by a post by Ayusman Sen — a professor in chemistry at Penn State and a specialist in catalytically driven nanomotors (cool stuff!) — who writes that he spends most of his time in the lab “feeling fairly stupid”.

He says he continually feels that

either I am not asking the big questions or I am not designing the right experiments to answer them. And, to add to my predicament, I deliberately keep getting into fields that I know very little about! Small wonder that I feel frustrated so much of the time!!

I know the feeling! Always moving into something new with the feeling that the ground is always shaky.

Sen was in turn stimulated to think in terms of his perpetual stupidity by an article by cell biologist Martin Schwartz about the existential importance of stupidity in science. What makes research difficult, Schwartz reminds us, is that it is “immersion in the unknown”, which means that it:

involves confronting our `absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

The more comfortable researchers become with being stupid, he suggests, the further they will move into the unknown and the more likely they are to do something new and interesting.

Not the ordinary unvoluntary stupidness, though. It is important to be “productively stupid”, i.e., “being ignorant by choice”:

Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time

I believe Schwartz and Sen are making an important point about one of the existential conditions for creative research work — a point which would probably be quite easy to put to test.

But — can you make exhibitions about feeling stuped?

Missed this, because there’s an Atlantic Ocean between me and the event:

But Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera) attended and has a thoughtful comment about the science blogosphere. I will be back with a comment on her comment.

There is now a petition available online for those who wish to oppose the closure of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.