Biomedicine in museums

The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow is looking for a new director. More here.

The three first weeks in November, we are holding three internal staff meetings here at Medical Museion to discuss our plans for the next three years, 2010-2012 — with respect to research, acquisitions, collection management, exhibitions and web-based outreach. Starting Tuesday, then again next Monday and next Monday again. Here are five headings for the discussions:

1. Focus outreach on the core audience = Danish health system
2. Focus on small, experimental physical exhibitions
3. Stronger presence on the social web
4. Encourage participatory museum practices – a public experimental museum
5. Research focus on the subjective, material, and aesthetic aspects of the participatory museum

I’ll be back with details

A “team of pretty cool people” in Chicago are twittering and blogging under the name ‘Museumist’. “Putting the Museum World on Display” is their motto. We’ll twue them for infringing our precious trade marks (Museionist on Twitter and Biomedicine on Display) 🙂

… who have run a succesful and well-visited blog for a year now and

waxed lyrical about the Library’s collections in the areas of cataloguing and digitisation projects, new accessions, and new discoveries about existing items in the collections; bragged about the use of Library material in the media, news topics about the Library’s activities, and events and workshops going on at the Library or involving Library staff, or pontificated to the wider world about so many other areas of relevance to the Library and the History of Medicine that [they] can’t possibly list them all here.

That’s the spirit!

Nina Simon, best known for her awesome museum 2.0 blog, is visiting Medical Museion tomorrow to give a lunch seminar on her ideas on the participatory museum. Her visit fits very well into our current plans for engaging both the health sector and the public in re-organising the collections and permanent exhibitions — more about these plans in the next couple of weeks. If someone wants to attend, send Carsten a mail (holt@sund.ku.dk).

Here are some images from last month’s show with Phillip Warnell swallowing a pill camera in Medical Museion’s anatomical theatre:

See more images here (the event was originally announced here).

(thanks to Bente who published the images on our Danish blog the other day)

Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London.

The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and personal papers, films and photographs, forensic evidence and physical remains, etc. Speakers include Georgina Ferry (science writer), Julianne Simpson and Helen Wakely (Wellcome Library), Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons), Tim Boon (Science Museum), Paul Carter and Natalie Whistance (the National Archives) and Allan Jamieson (Forensic Institute).

The programme seems a bit unfocused, however — and the ‘researching lives’ theme a fairly loose umbrella for six talks that point in quite different directions. I mean, these are all smart and knowledgeable people and it would have been great if the organisers had created a meeting format that turned this mix of professional backgrounds into a sparkling discussion about the ‘researching lives’ issue, instead of letting them loose 40 minutes each on six different topics.

Anyway, I may be wrong — go and listen for yourself. Further details and a booking form are available from the website of the British Records Association.

Here’s an innovative way of putting biomedicine on display:

As Vanessa (Street Anatomy) says,

the menstrual cycle has never looked so exciting! […] Perfect for explaining the menstrual cycle for the first time to a young girl … or to a 26-year-old.  I had no idea I went through a luteal lunacy!

Created by I Heart Guts!, “the brainchild of an anatomically obsessed illustrator who loves internal organs and all they do”.

Maybe the next generation of the classic biochemical pathways wall charts could learn a lesson or two — or better, I Heart Guts could make a version of:

(click here for a larger version)

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science.

As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in the world today. Financial crisis, atomic weapon threats and global warming  aside — the rapid technical development in biology and biomedicine raises some pretty hefty social, political and ethical questions which we, as a museum, can hardly avoid dealing with if we want to stay just minimally atuned to the world around us.

Take the issue of synthetic biology. Forget about the potentials benefits and risks of stem cell biology, nanotech, gene therapy, and so forth. Synthetic biology — the design and construction of new biological systems not found in nature, for example, constructing living cells from simple molecules (proto-cells); creating new biological systems based on biochemical pathways not found in nature; etc — is potentially more powerful, not least for medical therapy and human enhancement. 

Is it safe and secure? Well, of course it isn’t! In yesterday’s issue of Public Service Review: Science and Technology, Markus Schmidt, who leads the SYNBIOSAFE project at the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management, raises some of the problems involved in the development of synthetic biology:

With the availability of genetic sequence information available on the internet and outsourcing of DNA synthesis to specialised synthesis companies, we are facing the risk that some person with malicious intents might place an order for pathogenic genes.

But there is always two sides to new technologies. In the future, more and more people will probably be able to construct new biological systems (read: democratic technology). Already, the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston invites students from all over the world to construct new biologies. And there are several DIY biotech groups who want to get the techne out of the laboratory, to bring it to the people. Such democratisation of synthetic biology might, as Schmidt rightly observes, lead to a creative revolution similar to that we have seen in the computer industry and the internet. Imagine synthbio 2.0 — love it or hate it.

Schmidt’s institute is only the last in a row of initiatives to discuss the safety and the political, governance and ethical issues involved in synthetic biology. Two years ago a report from the J. Craig Venter Institute discussed the governance problems associated with synthetic biology, and last year a report from the International Association of Synthetic Biology proposed a number of technical solutions for improved biosecurity. And there are several other initiatives around — enough to fill the agenda of a future-looking medical museum.

Schmidt’s analysis is expanded in M. Schmidt, A. Kelle, A. Ganguli-Mitra and H. de Vriend, eds., Synthetic Biology: The technoscience and its societal consequences (2009); there is also a 55 min video here: SYNBIOSAFE: Synthetic biology and its social and ethical implications.