Biomedicine in museums

I’ve had this call for papers for the ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ workshop at Science Museum on 18 July laying on my desktop for months:

The lived life serves as an organising principle across disciplines. We talk of the biographies of things and places, and we use personal narratives to give shape to history. Biography is central to historians’ work but often unacknowledged and untheorised: it is used to inspire and to set examples, and to order our thinking about the world, but is a primarily a literary mode; biographies written for popular audiences provide material for the most abstruse work across disciplines; and the canon of well-known lives dictates fashions in research.
For historians of science, technology and medicine this is a particularly pressing issue: their discipline is founded on the ‘great men’ account of discovery and advance, and, though that has long since been discarded, the role of the individual in historical narratives has not diminished, and heroic tales have themselves become a legitimate subject of inquiry. For writers and researchers in other fields, the question remains: how do the lives of individuals intersect with cultural trends and collective enterprise?

It has been laying there since November because there are so many different things in it I would like to take issue with:

– Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of biography long overdue?

– Does the notion of ‘biographies’ of things and places make sense?

– Are biography and historiography necessarily narrative (story-telling) genres?

– Is it really true that the role of the individual in historical writing hasn’t diminished?

But given the restriction of a 20 minutes talk and my need to say something new, I eventually found out (but not until deadline day, last Friday) that I would rather like to engage with the explicit occasion for the workshop meeting — Science Museum’s Turing-exhibition —  and ask whether biographical museum exhibitions are really possible?

I have to confess I haven’t seen Codebreaker yet — but will certainly do so, before the workshop (and if my abstract is accepted).

However, I have long been thinking about making a biographical exhibition here at Medical Museion. I would like to be able to combine the two major strands of my scholarly life so far, which are (1) writing (about) biography and (2) curating (and reflecting on) the use of material artefacts in science museum exhibitions on the other.

So far, however, I haven’t really seriously tried — and I think there are two reasons for this lack of action from my side.

One is more conceptual, having to do with the uncertain role of material things in the life-courses of scientists as opposed to the role of ideas, concepts, writing, etc. Symbols and text on paper and images have such a prominent place in the self-awareness of scientists. Just read their autobiographies; there are ideas, concepts, theories etc. on every page. But material artefacts play a much more humble role in the way scientists understand themselves in interviews and autobiographical reports.

The other reason is more practical: scientists like to save documents and images from their work for the archives and archives are by tradition often organised in person-defined document collections. But scientists rarely donate the material things they have worked with to museum collections. Material artefacts are mostly collected by museum with an eye to the historical importance of the things rather than as personal material archives.

All this makes it difficult to display the material life of an individual scientist. The ‘material turn’ in the humanities doesn’t easily translate into artefact-based museum exhibitions about lives in science.

(featured image: cover of T. Soderqvist, ed., The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, Ashgate 2007)

Here’s my short speech at the opening of Biohacking: Do it yourself! last Thursday evening:

In true hacker style, this opening is somewhat ad hoc-ish. We will spend about 20 minutes up here in the old auditorium; several people will say a few introductory words each, in several languages.

Then — because there isn’t room for us all down there — the speakers will go downstairs to the biohacker lab, where they will make the official opening (clip, clip with the scissor) while the web camera projects on the screen. And finally you will get drinks and popcorn from the microwave while you can move freely around between this floor and the biohacker lab.

So why are we doing this? What’s a biohacker lab doing in a medical museum and in this venerable old building from 1787? It’s not an irrelevant question, because some of our visitors think a museum like ours should restrict itself to real medical history – the history of epidemic diseases, surgical instruments from the 18th and 19th enturies, gory human body parts etc.

OK, believe it or not, we’re still in the history business. We’re still displaying things from the gruesome medical past. But we are also very eager to engage with the present and the future. As some of you know,  our latest exhibition is about the current obesity epidemic and the brand new treatment method called gastric bypass surgery that accidentally also cures type 2 diabetes.

In the exhibition (or rather installation) you’ll see tonight, we’re taking yet another step away from the past, to the future of biology and medicine — to the emerging worlds of synthetic biology and biohacking.

Other speakers will say more about synthetic biology and biohacking in a few moments. I’ll just give you the background to this project.

The idea behind the exhibition/installation started three years ago, when some ten small European science centers and art institutions met at Le Laboratorie in Paris to prepare an application from the European Community for an art-science project, called StudioLab.

One of the themes we decided on at the Paris meeting synthetic biology – a very hot topic among life scientists. Using small parts of life to build more complicated living parts. Like in the famous Lego bricks.

What was then, three years ago, a pretty vague idea, has now materialized in a very concrete art-design-science installation –thanks to an interdisciplinary collaboration between a couple of biohackers and scientists, an installation designer, a science communication specialist and a historian of ancient technology. They come from the UK, Germany, the United States, and Denmark, so this is a truly international project team, based locally here in Copenhagen.

Before I give the word over to these people who made this come true, I will say that it hasn’t escaped my notice that the idea of biohacking may have further implications for a museums like ours, and maybe for museums in general.

Because there’s something in the hacker culture – whether it’s computer hacking or biohacking – that points to the ongoing cultural change in the museum world. As I said to one of the biohackers at dinner earlier tonight: museums are struggling to become more open, to involve their users, to draw on the creativity of non-professionals, to crowdsource the cultural heritage, to engage citizens in the construction and re-construction of collections and exhibitions. The do-it-yourself attitude is spreading to museums too.

This is what some museum people call ‘museum 2.0‘. It’s pretty similar to what social media are doing to the world of publishing right now. Or what biohackers are trying to do for the life sciences.

As a museum I think we have very much to learn from the hacking culture – and I’m proud that we have been able to engage people from the local biohacker community here in Copenhagen to help us – not only to open this particular installation – but in the long run help us rethink what a museum might be.

Now, I will give the word to Rüdiger Trojok, a molecular biologist who’s currently finishing his Masters at the Technical University of Denmark; Malthe Borch, who has a masters in Biological engineering, and who’s a co-founder of the local biohacker space BiologiGaragen here in Copenhagen; and Sara Krugman, who’s an interaction designer, and currently completing her masters at The Copenhagen School of Interaction Design.

(Rüdiger, Malthe and Sara give short speeches)

Thank you, Rüdiger, Malthe and Sara! And now over to Emil Polny, who’s a project coordinator at the Center for Synthetic Biology here at the University of Copenhagen.

(Emil gives a short speech)

Thank you, Emil! And finally I’ll give the word to the people here at Medical Museion who have organised and curated the biohacking space, namely Karin Tybjerg, who’s an associate professor with a background in the history of science and technology and Louise Whiteley, who’s assistant professor with a background in theoretical neuroscience and science communication studies.

(Karin and Louise give short speeches)

Thank you Karin and Louise! And now comes the tricky logistical part of the opening. I will ask you all to wait here for two minutes – and we’ll show a short video while you wait — while our presenters walk down to the biohacking lab to open it. The reason is the lab room is so small, we cannot all be in there – so they will cut the ribbon in front of a video camera – and we’ll transmit it over the web and stream up on the screen behind me. And after they have cut the ribbon you can do whatever you want – take drink, eat some popcorn, sit and talk – or even go down and visit the biohacker space.

Thank you very much!  Enjoy your evening.

Here are some of the objects that were demonstrated (touched, fingered, fondled, caressed, stroken etc.) during the touching seminar yesterday.

Here are bundles of hair from an often-caressed cat:

And here is a toy: 

At least two participants brought coffee/tea mugs, and two of us chose to bring small objects that they like to play with to distract their thoughts, a chestnut and some paper clips:

A cool computer mouse, of course: 

And so on and so forth:

And I, finally, brought my office chessboard, to illustrate the question whether chess is a purely cognitive game, or if the enjoyment is enhanced by playing it tactically: 

This seminar was an appetiser only. We’ll soon be back with discussions about tactile aesthetics in museums in general and science and medical museums in particular.

Next scheduled event in the material aesthetics meeting series is the workshop IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK: COMMUNICATING MEDICAL MATERIALITIES, which we organise here at Medical Museion 8-9 March with about 30 participants.

During the last 48 hours my mind has mulled over the latest announcement for Medical Museion’s internal Thursday lunch seminar series — with our own PhD student Emma Peterson, who will present her work on methods for investigating tactile aesthetics.

It’s a PhD project within the framework of Jan Eric Olséns project on the history of blindness from a material culture perspective. That’s a very interesting project in itself, but that’s not what has occupied my mind the last two days.

What has kept me busy is that Emma’s seminar will not be a conventional academic presentation only; she has announced that it’s better called an “experiment”, because she wants all of us each to “bring an everyday object you enjoy touching”.

I find this assignment very provocative. Not only because a combination of ordinary embarassment and university etiquette will probably keep us from bringing some our most enjoyable touch objects to the seminar table. But also because I’m really at loss when it comes to selecting an everyday object I really enjoy touching.

Not because I don’t like touching things. I usually do. But because I’m not used to reflect on the act of touching — and selecting an object forces me to think more systematically about the role of touch among my personal everyday aesthetic preferences.

I’m used to reflect about my visual and auditory preferences. I know exactly which books I enjoy reading because they produce pleasurable imaginations in my mind. Same with films and images I enjoy viewing.

I can also easily make a long list of people I enjoy being together with (and a somewhat shorter of people whose company I don’t enjoy). Or birds voices I like listening to. Or places I like to come back to. Or houses I like being in. And so on: cities, landscapes, streets, museums, etc.

But material things I enjoy touching? My first thought was that I have a favourite tooth-brush, which I like holding in my hand. Then I came to think of some of our plates and cutlery at home that not only look nice, but also feel good to handle. And then I thought some of my clothes are better ‘touch objects’ for my skin than others.

Then I remembered that holding a baby is extremely enjoyable (but are babies ‘objects´?). And besides, as soon as we get into people-things, the discussion about the enjoyment of touching becomes charged.

Back to impersonal thing-touch. The iPhone, of course — a recent and very enjoyable touch object. The iPad too feels good to finger. Which made me think of books, not as objects of reading, but as objects of handling. The experience of reading a good book in hardback cover in certainly enjoyable — maybe that’s why people still buy hardbacks?

And then a whole tsunami of material objects came welling up. The touch of grass in the summer, the sense of forming snow balls in the winter. Holding a piece of raw wood. Stroking a raw stone surface. Caressing the cat …

Still, after 48 hours, Emma’s assignment for our Thursday seminar, occupies my thoughts. I’ve suddenly begun deliberately touching objects at home to find out which of them I really like (not many it turns out).

And I’m thinking: What does my ‘life of touching’ actually feel like? Which objects are pleasurable? Which enrich my everyday? Are scientific, medical or health-related objects among these?

This is going to be a radically mind-expanding seminar.

(feature image: ‘The Touch’, from R.W. Wertz and D.C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America, 1989)

I just read about a great museum initiative in London — the Museums Showoff.

You may have heard about Science Showoff — a forum for all kinds of people working with science communication, who meet and share their work in a performance-based way, “and then chew it over with a pint in hand”. It’s very participatory, non-hierachical, and democratic — in other words, very Multitudinous.

Museums Showoff is the sister to Science Showoff, using the same basic idea and format “but filling the stage with people who work in, study or are interested in museums, libraries and collections rather than science” — “an open mic night featuring curators, conservators, librarians, collectors, Museum Studies students, archaeologists, social historians, educators, multimedia developers, explainers, visitors, theorists and everyone else associated with museums and library special collections” (I think they’ve listed all the relevant categories).

The format for this low-budget bimonthly event is emulation-worthy:

There are ten slots for presentation — each slot is 9 minutes each; some are for invited guests, others for first-come-first-slotted. After a short intro the signed-up performers take to the stage, where they might:

Show and tell:

• Their new acquisition
• Their favourite or a ‘star’ object from their collection
• An interesting find from the stores
• Something they’ve conserved
• Their current research
• Run a group handling session
• Tell us about something they’ve dug up
• Describe the weirdest thing in their collection

Pitch:

• Their idea for their next exhibition
• The most recent object their collection should acquire or dispose of
• Road test ideas for exhibitions/public programmes/galleries
• Tell us what a museum should be collecting and how
• Tell us about research into what museums are doing and why
• Demonstrate new digital projects/ideas/concepts

Or generally show off :

• Showing a film or oral history project they’ve just made
• Trying out a new demo or interactive exhibit
• Practicing a new museum-based comedy set
• Reading their latest poem/performing an interpretive dance about their museum work
• Performing an 9-minute play aimed at museum audiences
• Play their new song about the Tudors
• Re-enact an historical event
• Tell us about the latest behind-the-scenes goings on at their organization…

Or anything else!

With intermissions etc. they finish 2 1/2 hours later and then go over to beer and chatting.

Next Museums Showoff takes place on Thursday 17 January, with the following presenters:

Steve Cross – will be our compère for the night. What will he say about the Science Museum this time?

Katherine Curran – “Heritage Smells or The Terrible Fate of Tropical Ken”. Delivered entirely in verse, this will be both a description of my research project and an account of the dreadful things that happened to a Ken doll who found himself in one of UCL’s laboratories.

Danny Birchall ­– Why wrap the Freud Museum in ropes made of doll’s hair? Danny will present a lightning tour of artists’ interventions in museum spaces, from notorious pisstaker Marcel Duchamp to neo-neuroticist Alice Anderson.

Alice Bell ­– Why the very idea of a science museum is just plain silly, but if we’re going to have them they should be less like Harrods and more like a junk yard.

Alison Boyle & Harry Cliff – Higgs bosons, hadrons, high-energy physics … it’s a huge and incredibly complex machine, with lots of people busy doing things that nobody else understands. But that’s enough about the Science Museum. Find out what happened when Harry met Ali and the world of museums collided with the world of CERN.

Researchers in Museums – Gemma Angel, Sarah Chaney, Suzanne Harvey, Felicity Winkley, Lisa Plotkin, Tzu-i Liao and Alicia Thornton are a UCL-based gestalt entity whose mission is to engage the public with their research and UCL’s museum collections in ways never before explored. Bringing together their expertise in diverse subject areas, the team presents “Foreign Bodies” – their very first interdisciplinary group-curated exhibition, which opens in February 2013 at UCL.

Peter Ride – #Citizencurators was a twitter project that ran during the 2012 Olympics organised by Museum of London and Univ of Westminster. It’s goal was to collect Londoners response to living in London during the games – a social history for the museum collection. But it also also asked the question how can a museum collect tweets – as database, a visual object or a string of individual lines?

Hayley Kruger – is going to talk about some of the stranger steps on the path that paved the way to modern blood donation and provides a salutary warning of why it is unwise to be related to an anatomist and predecease them…!

The Ministry of Curiosity – will be recruiting for the newly founded collective dedicated to London’s museum social scene.

Jason Webber – Come the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse, which Museum will give you the best chance of survival? Who has the collection and venue to hold off the slaving hordes of the un-dead?

At the Wilmington Arms, 69 Rosebery Ave, Clerkenwell, London, starting at 7pm.

Do I need to say I hope they’re live-streaming the whole event. Otherwise, I’m seriously contemplating producing some carbon dioxide to get a chance to hear Alice Bell argue for why science museums should be more like junk yards than department stores.

(Junk yard poster, credit: http://www.hiskohulsing.com/animated-films/junkyard)

(Thanks to David Pantalony for reminding me that you don’t easily burn carbon dioxide off 🙂

Here at Medical Museion we’re interested in hosting future recipients of the recently announced Mads Øvlisen postdoc fellowship in art and biosciences.

Beginning in 2013, the Novo Nordisk Foundation awards a 2-year postdoc fellowship in art and biosciences, aimed at giving “outstanding younger researchers the possibility, as part of their research career, to conduct larger high-quality research projects, and through that yield a significant contribution to art-related research in Denmark”. The total award is 1 mill. for salary and operational expenses.

The Foundation is looking for applicants “whose research project examines the interdisciplinary field of art and life sciences, including technological offshoots of science”. Applicants must have obtained a PhD or have similar scientific qualifications, and note that the foundation doesn’t give fellowships to applicants who have already begun a postdoc programme.

Applications (in Danish or English) must be submitted electronically via the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s web portal by 1 February, 2013 before 4 pm. The selection procedure will take place by the end of March 2013 and the fellowships will be available from April 2013 and  not later than April 2014.

Medical Museion has no part whatsoever in the announcement or selection process, but — given our research profile and earlier practice in the medicine-art/design interface — we’re of course very interested in considering hosting the successful fellowship applicant. So if you are thinking of applying for the fellowship and not yet have any affiliation with a Danish university or research institution, you’re welcome to contact us (for addresses, see here).

(credit for feature image, see here)

One of the things I’ve learned from the history of science during my academic career is that the historicist critique of presentism — that is, the critique that says that historical actors and events shall be interpreted in terms of their own time horizon and not from the vantage point of the present — is a lofty ideal for historical research, but untenable in practice.

The basic flaw in radical anti-presentist (anti-whiggish) thinking is, of course, that all historical questions are asked from the viewpoint of the present horizon of interpretation. The present situation not only gives us new tools and concepts to analyse the past, but also identifies issues and problems which the actors of the past didn’t pay attention to or didn’t understand the same way as we do.

An example from my world of life sciences is last year’s conference in the series Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences titled ‘Participation and Exclusion from the Renaissance to the Present Day’. The terms ‘participation’ and ‘exclusion’ are our present terms for celebrating the advances in participatory democracy, and such they are very whiggish: historical actors before the 1980s didn’t think of themselves in terms of ‘participation’ and ‘exclusion’.

I’m not critical of reinterpreting history in these terms (it’s perfectly legitimate) but we shouldn’t forget that when we do so, it is difficult to uphold the radical critique of presentism and whig history.

Next year’s conference, ‘Creating Life: From Alchemy to Synthetic Biology’ too illustrates the impossibility of radical anti-presentism. The 13th in the Ischia series, it “aims to uncover the long-term history of the human production of life and living beings as well as the contexts of practices that defined the border between the living and the non-living, and hence what it could mean to produce one from the other”.

However, for centuries after the alchemistic era, natural history was about classifying the diversity of the living world of animals and plants, and later biology aimed to understand and explain the functions and mechanisms of living beings. Not in order to produce life, but to maintain and govern it.

In contrast, the production of living beings, which is at the center of synthetic biology, is a very late project. Frankenstein and other para-biological figures aside, the possibility of creating life from non-living molecules only became reality in the 1950s with the Urey-Miller experiment. To see a line from alchemy to synthetic biology — a “long-term history of the human production of life and living beings” — only makes sense from the horizon of contemporary synthetic biology.

That said, this sounds like a great conference. If I wasn’t too senior and too addicted to long summer vacations in Sweden I would immediately send my application form off, not least to get an opportunity to meet and learn from the distinguished faculty involved, including Peter Murray Jones, Jessica Riskin, James E. Strick, Helen A. Curry, Luis Campos, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Stefan Helmreich, Wolfgang Schäffner and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (and probably also the summer-school directors: Janet Browne, Christiane Groeben, Nick Hopwood, and Staffan Müller-Wille).

(feature image credit: NIH)

En af Medicinsk Museions mangeårige medarbejdere, lektor Jesper Vaczy Kragh, har fået en to-årig bevilling fra Socialstyrelsen til et socialhistorisk projekt som skal kikke på de udviklingshæmmedes, børnehjemsbørns og sindslidendes historie i perioden 1945-1976.

Projektet, som er et samarbejde med Svendborg Museum og Syddansk Universitets Center for Velfærdsforskning, er tilkommet efter at Kristeligt Dagblad satte fingeren på de udviklingshæmmedes situation på de store omsorgsinstitutioner i efterkrigstiden. Det fik daværende socialminister Benedikte Kiær (Konservativ) at tage initiativ til af afsætte 7,7 mio kr til forskning (5,7 mio kr) og formidling (2 mio kr).

En hjørnesten i projektet er at udforske og formidle historien ud fra et klientperspektiv. Derfor skal projektet indsamle mundtlige fortællinger fra ældre udviklingshæmmede og sindslidende og fra tidligere børnehjemsbørn. Se mere her og her.

For dem som ikke ved det, er Jesper uddannet historiker fra Roskilde Universitet. Han skrev sin ph.d.-afhandling med Medicinsk Museion og har derefter været ansat som forsker på eksterne forskningsmidler ved Medicinsk Museion.

Jesper har arbejdet med centrale videnskabelige, filosofiske, religiøse og kulturelle strømninger i mellemkrigstiden og har skrevet bøger og en lang række artikler om kulturhistorie, psykiatri og spiritisme. Han er måske bedst kendt i Danmark for sin forskning i den danske psykiatris historie, bla. for antologien Psykiatriens historie i Danmark (2008) og monografien Det hvide snit 2010, som for øvrigt blev ‘shortlistet’ til Weekendavisens Litteraturpris i 2011 og til Årets Historiske Bog i 2011.

Jesper vil forhåbentlig skrive mere om projektet her på bloggen fremover.

One of our PhD-students, Anette Stenslund, is currently visiting researcher at the Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal.

Under the heading “Ambient plasticity: aesthetics of the hospital”, she investigates everyday aesthetics and is currently exploring the atmosphere of the hospital by emphasizing smell impressions:

To most people, the hospital smell is unpleasant and uncomfortable: Why is that? How does it smell and how do smell experiences take effect when entering this functional environment loaded with gravity? It seems that the smell of the hospital has turned into a myth: Why is it so? The work suggests a multi-sensuous approach for perceiving phenomena like this. There is more to smell experiences than pure smell as they are e.g. ‘coloured’ by moods, sensations and a being-in-the-world in time and space. As follows, the vapours of the hospital deserve further cultural investigation.

The epistemological challenge dealing with smell (a phenomenon hard to grasp in words) requires a phenomenological sensitive aesthetical approach. This is accomplished through cross readings of phenomenological thinkers comprising philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural geographers respectively.

(from here)

Until recently I thought the use of mannequins in museums was an almost extinct species of exhibition design.

We removed the last mannequins from Medical Museion’s public exhibitions more than a decade ago and have only kept two of them in the staff area for the fun of scaring the shit out of new employees and visiting researchers.

But now that curators Bente Vinge Pedersen and Daniel Noesgaard got the excellent idea of using our remaining mannequins as silent actors in a 24 day long Yuelemedicalendar drama, my curiosity about mannequins (or manikins as they are sometimes spelt) was raised. Are there any serious museums that still use them?

A rapid web search resulted in some interesting mannequin images. The very first website I opened — that of the Danish Museum of Nursing History —  actually presents a series of good-looking mannequins on the frontpage.

After an hour’s browsing of images of museum mannequins I realised I have to revise my prejudice. Turns out that mannequins still loom large in the museum world, and that there are companies, like this one, that produce and sell them.

And for some reason it looks like “France has a thing for putting glorious creepy mannequins in museums”. (Can anyone confirm this? Or does it just reflect a prejudice that French museums are backward, designwise?)

Even museums who don’t use them for display purposes are apparently fascinated by having them in their collections, like the Chicago History Museum and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery:

Mannequin morgue in the Chicago History Museum

Mannequins in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

The aesthetic response to mannequins differ quite a lot. Since so many museums still use them in displays and keep them in storage, there must be quite a few visitors and curators that like them. Most casual commentators on the web dislike them, however. A common complaint is that they look too scary: “there is one thing that I have a fairly irrational fear about and that is mannequins in museums and displays”, writes a commentator. “Creepy things that pretend to be real, but don’t really look real, like mannequins in museums, creep me out”, writes another.

I cannot make up my mind as to whether they are just terrible or alluringly retro-chic. Bente and Daniel probably have the same ambiguous feeling about them (I haven’t asked them yet), because why should they otherwise use them as props for a whole Yulemedicalender (in spite of what they say, it’s not an advent calendar, because there is nothing religious about it).

Second question: When were these creepy monsters introduced in museums? I haven’t found any historical account of the use of mannequins (manikins) in exhibitions. Can anyone help me out here?