Biomedicine in museums

Just a few words about the upcoming conference ‘The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship’ at Deutsches Museum in Munich, 27-28 November 2008 — a follow-up on the conference Research and Museums that was held in Stockholm in May last year.

It will be an interesting conference because — by bringing together exhibition makers, museum experts, designers, artists, cultural studies scholars and historians of science and technology — it addresses the core issue in our work here at Medical Museion, namely, the interplay between research and museum work. Two of us (Martha and myself) will present papers.

The motto of the meeting is: “No exhibition without scholarship”. In other words: museum exhibitions aren’t just about visualizing results of historical and other kinds of museum-relevant research results; they also stimulate academic scholarship and generate new research question and new knowledge:

How can researchers take advantage of this opportunity? In which way can scholarly arguments be translated into spatial arrangement and at the same time kept serviceable for reading and citing by later recipients? What might the results of the scholarly examination of an exhibition look like? Unlike for printed texts, the traditional publication media of scholarship, common standards of terminology and argumentation for exhibitions have yet to emerge. What exactly is the role of the objects on display? Recent history of science and technology has intensively interrogated the epistemic quality of these material sources of research. Yet how do the objects unfold their properties in being staged for exhibition purposes?

Sessions:

1) What is this thing called exhibition? Reflections on object, text and space

• Ulrich Raulff (Marbach), Old answers, new questions: What do exhibitions really produce?
• Jochen Brüning (Berlin), Exhibitions vs. publications. On scientific achievements and their evaluation
• Martha Fleming (Copenhagen/Toronto), Thinking through objects
• Commentary: Lorraine Daston (Berlin)

2) Stories on display. What and how do we see in exhibitions?

• Uwe W. Brückner (Stuttgart), Scenography – opera as model for integrative design
• Stefan Iglhaut (Berlin), Story telling and scenography: Strategies of science communication in exhibitions
• Commentary: Anke te Heesen (Tübingen)

3) History of science, objects, exhibitions: Interrelations, transitions, transformations

• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin), Making visible. Visualization in the sciences – and in exhibitions?
• Ulrich Großmann (Nuremberg), The Challenge of Objects – CIHA Congress 2012. The object in the focus of arthistorical studies
• Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), Do things talk?
• Commentary: Falk Müller (Frankfurt)

4) More than history of science?! Exhibitions, research, and the public

• Mosbrugger (Frankfurt/M.), Natural history research and exhibitions – a hermeneutical cycle
• Robert Bud (London), Power, belief and trust: a context for scholarly priorities in the history of science
• Ad Maas (Leiden), Tearing down the altar. A new view of displaying scientific intruments in Museum Boerhaave
• Commentary: Jochen Hennig (Berlin)

5) Making exhibitions: Concepts, constraints, critique

• Jürgen Renn (Berlin), Exhibitions as history of science in action
• Walter Hauser (Munich), Artefacts, visuals and topography as evidence: Working on an exhibition on nano- and biotechnology
• Thomas Schnalke (Berlin), Arguing with objects. The exhibition as a scientific format of publication
• Commentary: Karsten Gaulke (Kassel)

The conference is organised for the Max Planck Research Network ‘The History of Scientific Objects’ by Helmuth Trischler, Christian Sichau and Susanne Pickert at Deutsches Museum. You are welcome to contact Susanne Pickert at s.pickert@deutsches-museum.de if you want to attend.

There are many ways of finding biomedical images on the web for exhibition use, and some are better the others.

Getty Images, which is otherwise a fantastic online repository of professional high-quality images, is practically useless for a small museum like ours. Search ‘protein’, for example, and you get over a thousand images of eggs, tofu and pork meat and other everyday stuff associated with proteins, but very few scientific images — and the few they have are excruciatingly expensive (the cost for using a single ‘beautiful’ electrophoresis image is around 600 USD). I dare not reproduce even a thumbnail size image from Getty Images here because we risk being persued for violating their intellectual property rights; in fact, I’m not even allowed to show their company logo!).

Wellcome Images is much more useful for our exhibition purposes. Search ‘protein’ and you get over 500 images of protein molecule models, fancy microscopic images, high-tech protein research instruments, and so forth — like this image of a computer-enhanced analysis of a 2D protein gel (credit: Nicoletta Baloyianni; Wellcome Images). They’ve also got some good images of protein-rich food items and other everyday stuff. And best of all for a poor university museum like ours — their images are freely available for download under a Creative Commons licence.

Both Getty Images and Wellcome Images are collections of ‘beautiful images’ — that is, the kind of immediately aesthetically pleasing pics that science magazines fill their pages with and scientists like to hang on their office doors. The Yale Image Finder search engine developed by Michael Krauthammer’s lab at Yale Center for Medical Informatics is different (read more about the project here). It allows you to find the image content of (presently) some 35,000 open access articles from PubMed Central by key word searches in figure texts, captions, abstracts, titles and even full article texts. For example, searching for ‘protein’ in captions and figure texts gave 19,000 hits, like the Western blog analysis image to the right.

Yale Image Finder is developed as a tool for scientists, not for curators. Right now it’s somewhat bothersome to use, because you have to sift through so much material. But it gives you rapid access to hundreds of thousands of close-to-the bench kind of images which do not find their way to Wellcome Images, and as such it may become a useful supplement to the ‘beautiful image’ online repositories.

Ever thought about building your own collection of medical wet specimens? Spending your evenings and gloomy sleepless nights in the garage putting your family’s and friends’ pickled organs and body parts in jars? Founding a clandestine horror show?

Well, it’s not for real. Yet. It’s another Halloween idea:

(from I Make Projects.com; thanks to Paul at NMHM for the tip)

Have forgotten to announce the ‘Physics meets biology’ meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 18-20 November 2008. Interesting because, as the organisers say, collaboration between physicists and biologists has generated a host of fascinating philosophical problems; e.g., they often disagree about the role of hypothesis in research, what an explanation is, etc. Such differences have practical consequences for interdisciplinary research and also for the border area between applied physics and biomedicine. The Edinburgh meeting brings together physicists, biologists, historians, philosophers and science policy makers; confirmed speakers include Evelyn Fox Keller (Science and Technology Studies, MIT), Kevin Dunbar (Psychology/Brain Science & Education, Dartmouth), Steven French (History and Philosophy of Science, Leeds), Michel Morange (Biology & History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, École Normale Supérieure, Paris), Gregory Radick (History and Philosophy of Science, Leeds), Otávio Bueno (Philosophy, University of Miami), and Darrell Rowbottom (Philosophy, University of Bristol). More info on http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/pmb2008.

We are right now preparing for the next exhibition, Design4Science. It has been on show in Sunderland, Manchester, Cambridge and Stockholm — and will open here at Medical Museion in mid-January 2009.

It strikes me that we actually have two in-house names for it. Usually we call it Design4Science, but sometimes some of us speak about it as “Shirley’s exhibition” with reference to the fact that it has been curated by Shirley Wheeler at the University of Sunderland.

What’s the difference? Well, the first is the way we usually refer to exhibitions. To speak about them in authorial terms is not so common. There is something about exhibitions — as opposed to books, films, theatre performances, operas etc. — that speaks against putting the curator (the auteur) in the center.

Authorial intention used to be a minefield. In 1946, Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the notion of the ‘intentional fallacy’, i.e., that literary interpretation shouldn’t assume any authorial intention (in other words, no biographical readings of literary texts): “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art”. Twenty years later Roland Barthes took New Criticism a step further by declaring the author to be ‘always already’ dead (‘The death of the author’, 1968).

For decades, poststructuralists decentered the author as the originating source of meaning for the literary work. Authorial intention was a tabu area for most of the second half of the 20th century. But we live now in 2008 and authors are live and kicking. Fiction writers are cultural celebrities, biography is a popular best-selling genre, even academically respected. Poststructuralism is so last decade.

But what about museum exhibitions? Have they ever suffered from the attack on the ‘intentional fallacy’? Has there been a new criticist tendency to disregard the intentions of the exhibition curator? Has there been a poststructuralist decentering of the exhibition curator?

Or maybe the questions are wrongly stated: Maybe exhibition curators have always already been decentered — and still are. Maybe the discussions about intentionality and the ‘intentional fallacy’ never really reached the museum world, because the auteur never has, and still doesn’t, play the same role in the collective mind of museums audiences as it does among book readers and critics?

In other words: When did you last read an exhibition review that focused on the curator instead of the content of the exhibit? Cf. how most book reviews center on the author and film reviews circle around the instructor.  

Any ideas?

We’ve just been hit by a chain-blog game started by Arte y pico [Top art] a few months ago: they asked five other blogs to recommend another five, and so forth, and now the chain is rattling along.

I wouldn’t have thought of participating if it hadn’t been for the fact that one of the most interesting and most beautifully illustrated medical blogs these days, The Sterile Eye by Norwegian clinical video photographer Øystein Horgmo, was the immediate precursor in this chain. Øystein recommends Monash Medical Student, Øystein in Antarctica (another Øystein!), IntraopOrate, Sushi Or Death — and Biomedicine on Display. In our case with these kind words:

Packed with interesting information and thoughts on medical history, both ancient and contemporary, reading this blog is like watching a making-of-documentary where the museum is the feature film. Always interesting.

On behalf of the Medical Museion blog team: Thank you, Øystein, very much appreciated!

Chain-blogs can be as awful as chain-letters once were. The chances that it will stop pretty soon are high, either because people don’t bother to continue or because they increasingly recommend blogs that have already been cited. This chain is pretty okay, though — it’s always nice to take a few minutes off to think about why one really likes some blogs more than others — and because I think The Sterile Eye is such a pleasure to read, I feel obliged to continue it. So, without having consulted with my co-contributors, I recommend the following five blogs which I find very inspiring for the kind of work we are doing here at Medical Museion:

1) First and foremost In the Pipeline, single-authored by Derek Lowe, a first-rate blog for anyone who wants to understand what goes on behind the scene in the pharma industry. Derek publishes almost daily, he knows what he writes about, keeps a professional distance to the events, yet is passionate about his job. The best science blog I’ve ever come across (the only drawback is that there are rarely any images).

2) Then Medgadget, founded by Michael Ostrovsky in 2004 and co-authored by a team of medical doctors and biomed engineers who write daily about “the latest medical gadgets and technologies, discoveries in medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”. A must for anyone interested in med-tech and its impact on the medical system (the only drawback is that they apparently don’t care about the history and cultural context of the field).

3) Third, Relevant History — I link therefore I am by Alex Pang, a former historian of science who has transmogrified into a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank. Alex is one of these creative and independent minds who combines solid humanistic scholarship with an ability to connect very different roads of thinking — and he also writes with a nice personal touch (see also his The End of Cyberspace) (the only drawback is that The End of Cyberspace looks a trifle dark and gloomy … like, well, the future).

4) I also love Bioephemera by Jessica Palmer, a Washington based biologist and artist who posts regularly about all kinds of odd things and images, with an emphasis on biological and medical stuff. A wonderful repository of curiosities and ephemera which might one day become the internet version of the classic Museum of Jurassic Technology (the only drawback is that Jessica’s blog has been included into ScienceBlogs which is a strong recommendation in itself; on the other hand this doesn’t necessarily disqualify her from getting this chain-post).

5) Finally, I wish to recommend bbgm (business, bytes, genes, molecules) by Deepak Singh, a Seattle-based “geek, business developer, strategist, marketer, technologist, scientist, global citizen, and musician” who writes about the social and business aspects of open science, collective intelligence, the semantic web, bioinformatics, drug development, medicine 2.0 etc. with equal gusto (only drawback is that I rarely have time to digest all the interesting content in the latest post before he has posted another).

The rules of this particular game limits the number of recommendations to five. Otherwise I would have added, for example, A Repository for Bottled Monsters by Mike Rhode and his friends/colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC; Street Anatomy by Vanessa Ruiz; and Indulge in the Fascinating World of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine by Hungarian medical students Imre Kissík and András Székely — all three are very useful for our combined research and curatorial project here at Medical Museion. And personally I’d like to push for a handfull of Swedish blogs, including Det Perfekta Tomrummet by Gustav Holmberg, mymarkup – old school and shit by Erik Stattin (about everything!), and Kuriosakabinettet by Karolina.

If you want to continue the game, see the rules here.

National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Mike Rhode (‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters’) writes in a comment to Søren’s post the other day that he “feels good about” the fact that our storage problems “amazingly enough, appears worse” than theirs. I’m glad he says “amazingly enough” :-).

Thus, medical museums-in-arms we are, struggling to glean nuggets from the bottomless pit of confusion that is the biomedical material heritage (today’s favourite expression, paraphrased from Theresa Atwood, in turn borrowed from a manuscript by Susanne).

Have said it before, and am saying it again: In the Pipeline is a damned good science blog. Why? Because Derek Lowe (a bench chemist in a pharma company) tells us about laboratory practice in a way that makes you feel you understand what the craft is really about. The posts almost smell and sound like a lab itself.

Take, for example, today’s post about why chemists use vacuum devices so much and what havoc a wrongly applied water aspirator can create. Science studies people — not to mention science communicators and us science museum folks — have something to learn here. Science communication is very much about immediacy. That’s the skill Derek brings to his posts.

No, it’s not spaghetti waiting to be served in the Medical School cafeteria — it’s intestinal worms (Ascaris sp.).

Which demonstrates that some potential museum artefacts are just so much more evocative than others. (Maybe something for Damien Hirst to consider?)

I wonder if the worms can be preserved in alcohol fumes in a canteen-looking food container like that (with a glass lid on top, perhaps) to enhance the effect? Or does one have to soak them in liquid alcohol in a jar?

(from M.D.O.D. via Kevin, M.D.)

Like many of our readers, the Biomedicine of Display blog team is taking some break periods here in August.

Not because we are on relaxing vacations (most university people in Denmark take theirs in July), but because most of us are very busy writing draft chapters for our joint anthology ‘Curating Biomedicine’ — the book which will summarise our research efforts in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project of the last two and a half years.

We won’t stop posting altogether, but you will probably hear less from us over the next two-three weeks.