Biomedicine in museums

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums:

In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a historical analysis of the various role that were conferred to university collections and museums within the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg for the last thirty years.

In the other, “‘The Sound of Silver’: Collaborating art, science and technology at Queen’s University, Belfast”, Karen Brown presents an interesting exhibition approach, viz., an exhibition of silverware and sonic art; she is using technology developed by the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University to display and interpret the university’s silver collection by letting a number of sound artists compose short soundscapes based on individual items from the collection. The artists’ approaches are based on the history and provenance of the items, and on materials, techniques, and the aesthetic qualities or emotions attached to to the objects.

Other, shorter and more descriptive, medical museum articles include Christa Kletter on “The Drug Collection of the University of Vienna” and “The Collection of Pharmaceutical Objects of the University of Vienna” and Helmut Gröger and Manfred Skopec on “Medical history collections of the Medical University Vienna in transition”.

Today, the poster for Design4Science got in place in our external showcases.

It’s made by the exhibition designer, Shirley Wheeler (see earlier posts).

If you are interested in buying a poster, please write to our outreach officer, Bente Vinge Pedersen (bvpn[atsigntoavoidawfulspamrobots]sund.ku.dk).

(more photos here) 

More pictures from today’s installation work by Shirley Wheeler and her crew (see yesterday’s post): 

(thanks Bente, see Museionblog)

Our next temporary exhibition is on its way. Today Shirley Wheeler arrived with her team from Sunderland (UK) to set up Design4Science, which will open next Tuesday.

It’s an exhbition about the interface between design and science, more precisely how design has interacted with molecular biology in the last 50 years.

How the invisible biomolecular world has been represented, modelled and visualized in co-operation with artists and designers. And, vice versa, how designers and artists have been inspired by research in molecular biology.

Design4Science will be on display in our temporary exhibition venue in Bredgade, Copenhagen, until 12 April.

Stay tuned — Bente will follow Shirley and her team while they install during this week and the following weekend. Here are some of Bente’s pictures from today’s transportation work:

   

The 14th annual meeting of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) will be held in Charleston, South Carolina, 16-20 June 2009. The ISHN encourages contributions about “all of the history of all of the neurosciences, including basic and clinical specialties, ancient and non-Western topics, technical advances, and broad social and cultural aspects”. Send abstracts to Sherry Ginn, sginn@carolina.rr.com, before 28 February. For details, see here.

I cannot really see the point in Corey Menscher’s much applauded (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) gadget Kickbee. In short, Kickbee is a wearable belly belt with embedded piezo sensors, which send a message to a Twitter account each time the foetus kicks around.

Writes Corey: “With the Kickbee, I wanted to create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby’s movements”.

“Give me a chance to be aware of our baby’s movements”? Give me a break! The Kickbee is a good illustration of how underrated haptic experiences are in our culture.

As I wrote in a post last June (and another post in November), this lack of appreciation of haptics is problematic, because it sustains the general cultural trend of drawing our attention away from immediate sensory experiences and transforming them into mediated experiences.

By transforming the tactile life of the foetus into an ultrasound-generated image or a series of Twitter messages — ‘I kicked Mommy at 06.23 on Thu, Dec. 18’, ‘I kicked Mommy at 06.25 on Thu, Dec. 18’, etcetera — we put yet another medium between the physical world and our senses.

It’s like tourists who never get a chance to see (or touch or smell) anything in a foreign city, because they’ve spent the whole vacation looking through a (video) camera.

The Kickbee also reinforces the general tendency in our culture to undervalue the sense of touch, making it less important than the other senses, especially the sense of vision (and partly the auditory sense). For another comment on this phenomenon, see Jan Eric’s and my conference abstract here.

Here’s a conference which looks interesting for medical museum people: “Amateur Passions / Professional Practice: ethnography collectors and collections”, to be held 2-3 April 2009 at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bristol (organized by Museum Ethnographers Group in UK).

The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism in museum collecting, Yet ‘amateurs’ have always been, and still are, important in the collecting practice. So how do amateur collecting practices differ from professional?

The meeting will address issues like the changing role of the amateur collector, the amateur-professional divide, the historic context of collecting (from cabinets of curiosities to contemporary collecting), the ethics of collecting, personal collections (from living room displays to private institutions), etc.

The organizers are basically interested in the relations between anthropology/ethnology and collecting, but other -ologies will be considered as well, for example specialist vs. non-specialist collecting among amateur/professional geologists or ornithologists.

I think this conference raises an interesting set of issues, because collecting practices in medical museums can be understood in similar amateur-professional terms. Medical doctors (i.e., amateurs in a museum context) dominated medical collecting until the second part of the 20th century.

One of the interesting features of medical museums is the distribution of skills and authority between amateur curators and professional curators. For obvious reasons, medical doctors and scientists often have better technical knowledge about the (sometimes very specialized) artefacts, their material composition and actual use than museum professionals have, and in addition the amateurs also have (or at least had) higher social and scholarly status in the academic pecking order.

Museum staff, on the other hand, not only have (or used to have) lower academic and social status, but also valued (and still value) other kinds of knowledge, such as cultural interpretation, methods of preservation, the aesthetics of display, etc.  Such differences in knowledge, skills, values and status have been sources of conflicts in medical museums — and sometimes still are.

Closing date for abstracts was last week, but maybe there is still a chance to attend — contact Sue Giles or Lisa Graves at the Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery (sue.giles@bristol.gov.uk or lisa.graves@bristol.gov.uk). 

Andy Miah in the School of Media, Language and Music at the University of the West of Scotland is announcing two PhD studentships of great interest for biomedical museum and communication studies (unfortunately with a very tight deadline, viz. 12 January!)

1) Prospects of immortality: public engagement with biogerontology and life/health span expansion:

Due to its broad application to a number of other sciences, biogerontology is one of the most relevant fields of inquiry today. It speaks to the convergence of the NBIC sciences and to the redefinition of health care that arises by describing ageing as a disease to be cured, rather than a natural process to accept. Biogerontology engages us with the prospect of extending health or life span to an unknown degree and, as such, it is a controversial discipline. Over the last ten years, work in this area has shifted from scientific impossibility to becoming a core part of scientific endeavour. A range of media coverage, from aspersion to fascination, has accompanied this shift. In the literature on public understanding of science, there is no research yet attending to this distinct, but profound area of scientific inquiry. As such, this PhD studentship aims to explore the following questions:

    * How has biogerontology been articulated though the media?
    * What issues surround the political economy of research into life-extension?
    * How do different research communities orientate themselves around the various media narratives on life-extension?
    * How do journalists report research on biogerontology?
    * What can be learned from this subject area to broadly inform work into science communication?

2) The ethics of human enhancement in film:

Studies in the ethics of human enhancement have advanced considerably in the last five years through the emergence of new communities of scholarly inquiry. A number of scientific disciplines have been brought under the spotlight due to their likely use for lifestyle, non-therapeutic purposes. The connections between filmic narratives and bioethics are made manifest in recent cultural studies and can be linked to broader, literary origins. Yet, there is very little research that investigates the range of narratives that emerge on the ethics of human enhancement within film. This absence affects the degree of complexity that is brought to how such debates are played out in the media and in policy. This PhD explores the contribution of film to such imaginations and aims to add complexity to our understanding of how film conveys such alterations. It should also help us understand how film functions as a posthuman device of expressing humanly experiences, such as process of remembering, perceiving and the possible disruption of sensory encounters. It also aims to explore the limitations of cultural reference points within scientific policy making on the ethics of human enhancements, exploring the range of metaphors, analogies and stories that contribute to shaping the public understanding of science.

More here: http://www.uws.ac.uk/research/MediaStudentships.asp

Her er yderligere medicinsk-inspireret legetøj til vores kommende butik — Matthias Köhler’s og Alessandro Beda’s “The Little Robots”: “Each robot features a glass tank with some floating organs”. Den perfekte fødselsdagsgave til familjen 10-årige nørd (ihvertfald inden friværdierne er helt spist op — de nuttede små kryb koster nok kassen). Vi må få gang i den butiksidé inden 2012.

(Tak til Jenny på Street Anatomy for tippet)

Assume you have submitted a paper for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine or Museums & Society or some other fine humanities journal. Then imagine the editors write back to you saying that the anonymous reviewers just loved it and that the journal will accept it for publication in a forthcoming issue — on the condition that you also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes your paper!

Sounds to me like a great vision for the future of public engagement with the humanities. And not at all unrealistic, because a precedent has already been set — by a science journal.

From now on, RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit their work to a new journal section that describes RNA molecule families. The journal will then send the pages for peer review before publishing them in Wikipedia (see Declan Butler, “Publish in Wikipedia or perish”, Nature News, 16 Dec. 2008).

The initiative is a collaboration between RNA Biology and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. According to the co-director of the Rfam database “the novelty is that for the first time it creates a link between Wikipedia and traditional journal publishing, with its peer-review element” — which he believes will boost the quality of the scientific content on Wikipedia (quoted in Butler’s piece).

It’s symptomatic that this initiative is taken by a science journal. Wikipedia has quickly been adopted by scientists of all categories, while humanities and social science scholars are so far more reluctant. Hopefully this will change soon. I bet at least one humanities journal will adopt a similar policy before the end of 2009.