Biomedicine in museums

Our colleagues in Leeds (i.e., the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds and the Thackray Medical Museum) are re-advertising a studentship for a project on nineteenth-century midwifery instruments. The successful candidate will be part of a group working on 19th-century topics connected with museums and material culture.

Applicants must be either UK residents (full studentship) or EU nationals (fees only). Relevant backgrounds include history of science, technology and/or medicine, museum studies and history. The studentship supports three years’ full-time work, but can be taken up on either a full-time or a part-time basis (over five years).

The closing date for applications is Friday 31 October 2008, and then interviews will take place in late November. Prospective candidates are encouraged to contact Adrian Wilson (a.f.wilson@leeds.ac.uk) or Graeme Gooday (g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk).

(image of early 19C obstetric forceps from Medical Museion collections)

Last week’s great news for us here at Medical Museion was that our International Advisory Board — which held its first meeting in late May (see earlier post here) — has completed its report to the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

The report says, among other things, that “the results of the museum activities were evaluated as being highly qualified and promising for future work”. The board members further pointed out that Medical Museion has “been able to create a highly profiled research environment” and they “praised and expressed their respect for MM’s internationally oriented research focus” (quoted from the faculty’s press release).

The Board also emphasised how important the museological research program is for the further development of the visions for Medical Museion. We couldn’t agree more — and are already looking forward to the next Advisory Board meeting, scheduled for June 2009.

Our good colleague Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has made an interesting observation about trends in science communication in the Times Literary Supplement (‘No strings’, March 28, pp.28-29).

Reflecting on a number of newly published books on cosmology, Jim points out that the role of the individual science writer seems to have been enhanced. Science communicators nowadays (compared to when Jim was a student, or what?) have a stronger personal presence in their writing, as though they “have decided that their readers need to see them as human beings”. It’s no longer sufficient to rely on writing technique and style, he notices — “personal reference, opinion and anecdote are now the favoured tools”.

Jim doesn’t sound too enthusiastic about this trend, although he seems to realise that it’s here to stay: “If history is autobiography, it seems that popular cosmology is going the same way”.

Despite his somewhat dismissive attitude to this personal stuff, Jim is right. Science writing is indeed becoming more author-centred (and in my humble view this is definitely to the better). What’s surprising is rather that — compared to other genres of writing — the arrival of the conspicuous first-person narrator and his/her whereabouts in science writing is such a late phenomenon (I’m not sure that it such a new thing, but let’s leave that for another post).

In other words, science communication has been one of the last bastions of impersonal writing. In journalism, in contrast, the self-reflexive and visible author has been around for decades. And in academia it all began in the 1970s and 1908s with anthropologists who wrote about the relation between themselves and their subjects. Today, the media abound with scholars who excel in self-presentation — just look how celebrity historian Simon Schama managed to fill the screen in his BBC series A History of Britain (2001), reducing the past to a mere background and extension of his own ego. Speak about history as autobiography!

However, the presence of the author in science communication isn’t restricted to the professional popularizers. ‘Real’ scientists too have become much more relaxed when it comes to flashing their egos in newspaper and magazine interviews. Many science magazines (like my favourite The Scientist) carry personal interviews with scientists. Websites and (especially) blogs are media that are tailor-made for scientists who are eager to present their science with a personal touch (see here for an earlier post on scientific self-presentation practice on the web). The genre of scientific autobiography too is having a revival with the publication of celebrity scientists’ memoirs, like James D. Watson’s (see here), Craig Venter’s (see here) and so forth.

The only kind of science communicators who seem to resist the self-presentational trend is apparently science museum curators. I still haven’t seen Jim expressing his ego through the Museum of the History of Science. Or perhaps I’m just blind — as Camilla pointed out earlier this year, cultural history exhibition curators employ rather subtle ways for sneaking themselves into their shows.

Eager to train myself for the role of a future biocitizen, I’ve looked in vain for a guide to bars, cafés and restaurants with medical motifs. I mean, if Jessica hadn’t put this pic online, I wouldn’t have known that there is a Pharmacy Bar in Washington, DC, would I?

Owned by a Latvian pharmacist’s grandson, it has table tops decorated with pills, mirrored medicine cabinets, display cases with potions and images of medicinal containers along the walls (says the Washington Post City Guide reviewer; more reviews here).

As prospective biocitizens of the world we cannot rely on Jessica and other locals to provide us with worthy tourist info. Wouldn’t a world guide to similar bars and restaurants around the world (including Singapore’s The Clinic, see earlier post here) be a worthy project for Intute or the Wellcome Trust? Should be combined with Google Maps of course.

… check out these pics from the installation of the brand new 32 tons heavy 7 Tesla experimental whole-body MRI at the Charité Hospital in Berlin (via Medgadget). Note the caption to the third image: the only thing the blogpost-writer knows about the guy inside the magnet is that he didn’t wear his nipple rings that particular day 🙂

These super-machines support the ‘contemporary-medical-museum doctrine’, which I presented to a conference group on contemporary medical museums in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden some years ago (and which some of my colleagues thought was baloney). On the one hand significant medical objects are becoming smaller and smaller (nanomedicine), on the other hand some instruments are becoming bigger and bigger (like these scanners). In contrast, human-sized medical artefacts are becoming less and less signifiant for what’s going on in the medical system.

This tendency — which is analogous to the situation in particle physics where bigger and bigger accelerators are needed to provide insights into progressively more tiny scientific objects — makes medical museum acquisitioning and collection management increasingly difficult. Today medical museum storage rooms are filled with human sized artefacts. But the storage rooms of the future will probably be more like a combination of those they have in museums of transportation (with really big objects like airplanes) and those they have in biobanks (liquid nitrogen freezers to keep molecular and cellular samples).

In other words the major future problem for medical museums is a peculiar combination of lack of space and lack of visibility.

Having an affection for scientific biography/autobiography, I was thinking of how I could possibly engage with the conference ‘Academic Autobiography, Intellectual History, and Cultural Memory in the 20th Century’ to be held 26-28 March, 2009 at Universidad de Navarra in Spain.

The aim of the meeting is to engage with current discussions among historians, literary critics, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. about how intellectual history and cultural memory may be developed, articulated, and promoted through autobiography. In other words, the organizers emphasise themes like

• the academic as author/historian
• academic life writing as history or cultural discourse
• academic autobiography as intellectual history
• life writing and the definitions of academic disciplines
• the intersection between private and public lives in academic autobiographies
• academic autobiography as a literary or historical genre
• the ways in which the notion of literary or historical discourse may be rethought in the context of this form of writing
• the ways academic autobiographies challenge our notions of historiography or literary analysis.

The limitaton to the 20th century is fine. But what about the organizers’ understanding of what counts as ‘academic autobiography’? Humanities and social science scholars like historian Eric Hobsbawm, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cultural critic Edward Said and others are mentioned, but scientists are apparenty not thought of as ‘academics’ in this context.

Yet the genre of scientific autobiography has a long and interesting history (also in the 20th century), which could be drawn upon for qualifying the discussion. Just think about how James D. Watson’s first autobiography, The Double Helix (1968) has changed contemporary perceptions of the life sciences! Its cultural impact led to it being ranked among the top ten titles on Modern Library’s 1998 list of best 20th century non-fiction books together with classics like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. (Watson’s second autobiography, Avoid Boring People [2007; review here] hasn’t made it to any list yet, though).

How would studies of scientific autobiography add to the conference theme? In many ways scientific autobiography is not much different from literary or political autobiography. Except in one crucial way, namely that the author’s understanding of self in terms of science may influence his/her understanding of what it means to write an autobiography.

Biotech maverick Craig Venter recently employed this autobiographical trope in A Life Decoded (review here). He claimed that he saw his life narrative as the result of a genome that writes reflexively about itself. It wasn’t very convincingly done, and at first I dismissed the idea as terribly naïve. But thinking about it again, I believe he points to an interesting space for future self-writing.

As the postgenomic worldview — and especially the results of molecular neuroscience — is spreading in our culture (at least the secular part of it; religiously based cultures are probably immune), more and more people will probably understand their selves as complex biological systems, as intricate protein-protein interaction and metabolic machines. To think about oneself as a bundle of biomolecular reactions may, I suggest, become a pervasive existential motif in future autobiographical narratives. Michel Houellebecq has already played with similar ideas in The Possibility of an Island (see here).

I don’t think it’s as far-fetched as it immediately sounds. Freudian understandings of the self became an immensely influential trope in biographical and autobiographical writing in the first half of the 20th century. The explanatory power of postgenomic, molecular neuroscience may become equally influentual for the understanding of self in autobiographical writing. Venter’s attempt wasn’t convincing, but other and better attempts will hopefully follow.

Anyway, I probably won’t have time to send something in — they want a 500-word abstract before 15 October. More info about the conference here.

Back in 2006 we wrote enthusiastically about the first issue of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments — the aim of which is to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. A “YouTube for test tubes”, as it was then called.

Since then JoVE has published more than 200 videos of laboratory procedures. Now (says Nature, 4 Sept, p 13), the content of JoVE will be indexed in the MEDLINE base and thus available through the PubMed search engine. An interesting policy move from the side of the National Library of Medicine, because it means that the video format is now being endorsed on a par with text articles as an acknowledged form of publication (cf. how NLM last year began to endorse blogs as publications, see earlier post here).

JoVE is a potentially great source for exhibitions on contemporary biomedicine, either for direct use, or indirectly, as an inspiration for producing new videos for public outreach of laboratory practices. The videos demonstrate how the laboratory has its roots in manual labour, and are a reminder about how thoroughly materially grounded biomedical practices are.

These and similar video repositories are a great complement to ethnographic description of laboratory practice and may contribute further to the rejuvenation of studies of the laboratory as a knowledge production space that Dominique Vinck and others are currently involved in (see, for example the special issue on laboratory studies in Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, vol. 1 (n° 2), 2007).

When I hear the word ‘curator’ I usually think of museums. Museum curators are the sort of knowledge workers that take care of stuff in collections and make exhibition narratives possible.

Now I’ve just learned about another — different yet similar — kind of curators. The background is the current enormous growth in the generation of data from life science research. Large-scale sequencing, high-throughput gene-expression analyses, and mass-spectroscopy projects produce huge amounts of gene and protein sequences and other bio-data.

It doesn’t take much thinking to realise that the usefulness of all this data-generating research depends on the scientific community’s ability to make sense of the massive amounts of raw data scattered among millions of scientific papers and hundreds of data bases.

Here’s where the new kind of curators come into the picture. A recent article in Nature (Howe et al., ‘Big data: the future of biocuration’, 4 September) discusses the emergence of “a growing cadre of biologists — ‘biocurators’ — who manage raw biological data, extract information from published literature, develop structured vocabularies to tag data and make the information available online”.

When I read the article it struck me that there are some interesting similarities between museums curators and biocurators. A central aspect of data-curating is annotation — so far, however, says the Nature article, annotation efforts have been limited by a perceived lack of incentive to do the job: “A mechanism tied to career or research advancement may be required before community curation can be established as a broadly accepted and productive scientific endeavour.”

In other words, what is needed to speed up bio-curation is “improvement in academic reputation or impact, career advancement and better funding chances”. Further, academic departments and funding agencies “should consider community annotation as a productive contribution to the scientific research corpus and a natural extension of the publication process”.

Sounds like a parallell to the situation among museum curators. They too are working in the shadow of university scholars. Curatorial work in museums doesn’t have the same reputation as university research. So whether you work as a museum curator or as a bio-curator, you risk being invisible among ‘real’ researchers/scholars and suffering a lack of scholarly status.

Wonder if this has something to do with the fact that curatorial work is ‘care work’ (from Latin ‘cura’ = care)?

Read more in Nature’s special issue on ‘Big Data’ here.

The Lentos Art Museum in Linz, Austria, has just opened an exhibition called ‘Ecology of Techno Mind’ curated by Slovenian “art-is-the-evil-of-culture” curator Jurij Krpan (thanks to Ingeborg Reichle for the tip). It contains, among other things, an array of art works relating to biotechnology and computerized medicine made in order to “eine Welt im Wandel zu verstehen” [to understand a changing world].

What’s interesting from a medical museum point of view is that the Linz exhibition (according to the website, I haven’t seen it IRL) tries to navigate between “die Total-Faszination von Wissenschaft und Technik” [the total fascination with science and technology] and the “Resignation und Feindseligkeit gegenüber Technik” [resignation and hostility toward technology]; it’s dealing head-on with biotech and medicine but not from the angle of “Fetischismus” or “Romantisieren von Interfaces und elektronischem Kabelsalat”. Sounds like a familiar problem for science, technology and medical museum curators :-). Maybe we could learn something from how Krpan, Director of the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, handles this sensitive issue.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 9 September at noon, we’re having a lunch seminar with Sebastian Abrahamsson, doctoral student at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Sebastian will speak about ‘Dead bodies in science and art’ — a topic which is very central to our research and exhibition work here at Medical Museion, so we’re expecting a lively discussion.

Here’s Sebastian’s abstract:

My research is interested in the ways in which dead human bodies are transformed into artistic and/or scientific objects.

As a point of departure, my project maps the work of an artist (www.angelaspalmer.com) who – together with museum curators, radiologists and Egyptologists – has been working with a mummy child making his body and journey the focus of an art exhibition in a gallery in London. This work brings this particular body through a set of heterogeneous milieus (museum, hospital, studio, and gallery) and environments – each with its own practices, routines and experts – thus changing the significance and interpretation of the body at each stop that it makes: going from museum object to aesthetizised sculptures.

Secondly, I look at the changing status of dead bodies (educational and scientific specimen turning into contested and controversial human remains) in British museums, taking Manchester Museum and their Egyptian collection as an example. Recently three of their unwrapped mummies were covered, provoking massive public reactions (mainly negative). The museum curators had clearly taken a controversial decision, but why this outrage? Here I argue the mummies become the focal point of a sort of public experiment, the outcome of which is still to be decided.

As a final example my project looks at Von Hagens’ Body Worlds as the site where a scientific/educational and artistic ethos come together to stage an encounter with dead bodies, where the above distinction between art and science is more or less erased. Out of these three examples emerges the question concerning how we can experience encounters with dead bodies differently.

If you want to attend, please call our technician Folke Jørgensen at +45 3532 3822, who can give you more detailed info about the location of the seminar room in Fredericiagade 18, Copenhagen, and how to get into the house. Bring your lunch! 

(Image above from Angela Palmer’s website)