Biomedicine in museums

The first regular post (in Danish) on this blog was published almost four years ago. Since then we have grown from a handfull of local readers to between eight and nine thousand visitors per month worldwide.

Our ambition has been to post something every day (at least Mondays through Fridays) that is relevant for the field of biomedical museology. And we’ve almost made it (at least the frequency part). Yesterday, we published post #1001 — a review by our senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen of the new online exhibition ‘Making Visible Embryos‘ by Cambridge historians of science Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood.

Why celebrate post #1001 and not #1000? Remember the old Persian story One Thousand and One Nights? About how Sheherazade avoided being killed by the evil king by telling him a new exciting story each night. After one thousand and one nights the king had been morally transformed and married her.

Today is World Philosophy Day (initiated by UNESCO in 2005), which gives University of Glasgow philosophy lecturer David Bain an occasion to ask one of these questions that generations of teachers have given their students for exams in moral philosophy: Should we kill healthy people for their organs?  

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

Are students in medical ethics also asked that kind of questions? Or is it considered inappropriate in a Medical School?

(thanks to Tim Lewens for the tip)

This blog uses a microarray pattern as background wallpaper — as a symbol of the new postgenomic challenge to the public engagement with medicine in general and to medical history museums in particular. And so we take every opportunity to display microarray images.

Like this pic which flew in my face this morning when I opened an RSS feed from Medgadget (vigilant as usual). It’s not an ‘authentic’ microarray pattern, though, but a cryptogram in the form of a pastel painting made by Peter C. Johnson, CEO of the Raleigh-based biomedical technology consultancy company Scintellix.

It’s called ‘MicroArray’ (very creative 🙂 — and you can win $1500 if you decipher it. Read more here.

This is the first image in a planned series that will “explore the hidden meaning found in biological imagery”, initated by Johnson/Scintellix in co-operation with Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, one of the oldest magazines in the field.

Very smart branding method for Scintellix, for GEN and for the sponsor (microarray producer Agilent).

Ethics looms large in the museum world. For example, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has an elaborate Code of Ethics which is translated into many languages and distributed to all its members.

The latest addition to the field of museum ethics is an Institute of Museum Ethics (IME) at Seton Hall University, NJ. Its mission is:

• to promote accountability, transparency and social responsibility in the museum
• to foreground museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century
• to create a physical and virtual community of emerging and practicing museum professionals and museum studies faculty who use our resources to make informed decisions about ethical issues.

Last weekend an inaugural conference was organized “to discuss what we mean by the terms transparency, accountability, and social responsibility”.

Next conference will then probably be about why “museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century”.

I’d like to see some arguments for this claim, because I believe it’s an exaggeration. ‘Ethics’ all too easily becomes a discourse about everything. Like when the IME holds that “museum ethics concerns all areas of museum work from governance to education, registration to exhibitions, since ethical dilemmas occur in all departments and each can work for the common good”. In their view, ethics is about “how the museum encourages social understanding and promotes human rights”. In short “museum ethics is about an institution’s relationship with its public(s)”.

Well, if this is the case, then not many museum activities fall outside the domain of ethics. So why not take the name Institute of Museum Studies instead?

Last week, Martin Fenner at Nature Network Bloggers Forum asked his fellow science bloggers nine inquisitive questions about their experiences with the genre.

Several people — e.g., Eva Amsen; Henry Gee; Clare Dudman; Steffi Suhr; Stephen Curry; Massimo Pinto; Larry Moran; Kristi Vogel; Maxine Clarke; T. Ryan Gregory; Mike Haubrich; John Wilkins; Paulo Nuin; Heather Etchevers; Lee Turnpenny; Ricardo Vidal; Bob O’Hara; Pedro Beltrão; Deepak Singh; and Bora Zivkovic — have already expressed their views.

Here’s my humble contribution to the roundabout (with two caveats, viz., that I haven’t consulted the other writers on ‘Biomedicine on Display’, and even though medical science fills much in this blog, it’s not just about science, but also about museums, history etc.):

1. What is your blog about?
We write about making sense of medicine and medical science in museums. About how to construct the history of that conglomerate of scientific disciplines, specialties and science-based practices which constitutes contemporary medicine. And about how the material and visual culture of medicine can contribute to the public engagement with this powerful and fascinating aspect of our society.

2. What will you never write about?
Never say never. But for now: things I’m not curious about, things I don’t have an opinion about — in other words, I will hopefully never write something just to keep the blog up and running.

3. Have you ever considered leaving science?
Well, I left doing science when I was 25 to become a historian of science, and I’ll probably never do science again. But I cannot imagine ever stopping being fascinated by the multifaceted drama of science. It’s about friendship and hatred, ambition and despair, about co-operation and abuse of power, scholarly virtues and vicious fraud — and sometimes even about knowledge production 🙂 In other words, it’s like society at large.

4. What would you do instead?
Probably enjoy nature, be with my family, sip some good wine, read Plutarch, and have occasional interesting conversations with a few good friends (sounds like a true Epicurean).

5. What do you think will science blogging be like in 5 years?
Five years is an incredibly long time on the web and I don’t believe there will be anything called ‘science blogging’ (or ‘museum blogging’ for that sake) then. Both scientists and historians of science will probably still be interested in expressing their opinions about science. But I doubt we will do it on this kind of platform. And certainly not under the label of ‘blogging’.

6. What is the most extraordinary thing that happened to you because of blogging?
There is no the most extraordinary thing. But I hadn’t expected to get so many interesting contacts with colleagues around the world. Lots of invitations to conferences, new people who I would probably not have met in other ways, and so forth. That’s extraordinary!

7. Did you write a blog post or comment you later regretted?
I regret every single post as soon as I’ve posted it. It could always have been done better. But when I take a look at it a few months later, I often think it’s pretty good. Was it really me who wrote that interesting post?

8. When did you first learn about science blogging?
Not until 2003, I think. But I didn’t begin until 2004. I mean, historians are always late-comers to technology and media platforms.

9. What do your colleagues at work say about your blogging?
Some of our museum colleagues are our best competitors, but historians of science are somewhat hesitant. Most of my colleagues in the medical faculty don’t understand what it’s good for; they consider it a waste of time, when you could have written yet another paragraph in your next peer-reviewed article. Medical scientists rarely think about themselves as public intellectuals.

Enough of musings about this self-indulgent genre for the moment.

The acquisition of medical museum artifacts is usually seen as a job for specialists (curators) with historical training. To curate a collected artifact for later use in exhibitions, you are supposed to know where it came from, how it was produced and used, what meanings were attributed to it, what role it played in medical practice, how it related to other things, and so forth.

In other words, curating museum artifacts is, as a rule, always already a historical practice. The future doesn’t seem to be of any immediate interest for the curator.

Yet the future creeps into the equation, whether the curator wants it or not. When curators handle artifacts from the past, the future of these past times is an integral part of the curatorial practice. The description of, say, the practice of auscultation using the stethoscope in the 1850s will not only depend on one’s knowledge of 18th and early 19th century pathological anatomy, but also on one’s knowledge of later auscultation diagnostics methods. (Pure historicism — evaluating things from the interpretative horizon of the historical actors at the time the thing was produced and used only — is a nice scholarly ideal, but not meaningful in practice.)

In other words, the already-known future is an unavoidable (and mostly valuable) resource for interpreting historical medical artifacts.

But what about the not-yet-known future? Do our more or less shaky predictions about the so far unknown future play any role in the curation of contemporary medical artifacts? For example, will forecasts about the future development of personalized medicine influence the curation of a 23andMe retail DNA test kit? (I’m using it as an example, because Adam will buy a kit and donate it to our collections afterwards — it’s one of his contributions to our joint anthology.)

To what extent does predictions about the future development of biomedicine and medical technologies constitute a cognitive resource for the curation of contemporary medicine? Are the forecasts of possible scientific, technological, social and cultural futures a sine qua non for turning the current medical world into medical heritage?

I’ve always found it difficult to bring together my two core professional interests. On the one hand, I’ve spent many years working on scientific biography and have been engaged in scholarly discussions about scientific auto/biography as a genre (see, e.g., this book). I’m fascinated in how texts, memories, interviews and personal (self)knowledge can be used construct the life-course of scientists.

On the other hand I’ve been engaged in museum business for some years now and have very much enjoyed discussions about the museological problems in the science/technology/medicine segment of the museum world, for example, how physical artefacts and visual materials can be used to construct images of scientific practice.

But so far these two fields of interests have remained separated in my mind. I’ve never found a way of integrating them. Probably because I didn’t believe there were others who were interested. (After all, we’re social animals; to engage in a scholarly field constituted by one person (oneself) is pretty boring, unless you are aspergerish.)

Therefore, imagine my enthusiasm when Craig Howes distributed the announcement for a conference on ‘Museums and biographies’ to be held at the National Gallery in London, 10-12 September 2009. The meeting — which is co-organised with the Museums and Galleries History Group and the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University — will bring together scholars who study the interconnections between museums and galleries, collecting and biography: “Drawing together analyses of representation, material culture and personality, we invite papers that can cast new light on the study of lives, objects and display”. Yes!

Invited keynote speakers are Arthur MacGregor, senior keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, and Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery. The rest of us are invited to send in abstracts for papers that cover areas like:

• The lives of curators, dealers and collectors
• (Auto)biographical display
• Institutional histories
• Object biographies
• Personality museums

There will also be opportunities for museum practitioners to detail new acquisitions or recent developments in the sector, and other forms of presentation may be considered as well as conventional papers.

One page abstracts (300 words), including brief CV, should be sent to Catherine Todd (catherine.todd@ncl.ac.uk) by 31 January 2009. More info here.

Maybe this will be an opportunity for me to become an intellectually more integrated person …

Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout’s website displays quite a few interesting works of interest for medical museum designers, like CasAnus (2007), a house which is (reasonably anatomically accurately) shaped like the human digestive system. It’s made to function as a small hotel, with bed- and bathroom. I thought it would be great to enter it through the inflated anus, but there seems to be a door behind the appendix.

Placed in our museum backyard, CasAnus would be a perfect B&B for our guest curators. Or maybe we could convince the Faculty of Health Sciences to purchase 10 different organ systems and put them together as a faculty hotel for guest researchers. (I doubt the National Hospital would like to use them for patient hotel, its probably too provoking for their core users.)

Cannot resist bringing this coffee cup collection by Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout, available at Illy:

showing four organ systems that are affected by drinking coffee (i.e., caffeine).

(from Vanessa)

Jens Hauser has just written to tell us that SymbioticA’s next Biotech Art workshop takes place in Stavanger, 18-21 November 2008 (part of the Stavanger ARTICLE BIENNALE 15-30 November. The workshop will accommodate 15 participants to learn techniques of microbiology, DNA extraction, genetic transformation of bacteria, gel electrophoresis, tissue culture and embryo rescue. More here.