Biomedicine in museums

If you happen to be based in UK or Ireland you can now apply for one of Wellcome Trust’s Arts Awards — which are given to organisations or individuals for projects that engage the public with biomedical science through the arts.

The general idea behind the scheme is that the Trust believes that art is a great mediator for the public engagement with science in general and with biomedicine in particular:

Visual art, music, moving image, creative writing and performance can reach new audiences which may not traditionally be interested in science and provide new ways of thinking about the social, cultural and ethical issues around contemporary science. Collaborative and interdisciplinary practice across the arts and sciences can help to provide new perspectives on both fields. The arts can also provide imaginative ways of engaging and educating young people in the field of science.

Thus the scheme aims to:

• stimulate interest and debate about biomedical science through the arts
• examine the social, cultural and ethical impact of biomedical science
• support formal and informal learning
• encourage new ways of thinking
• encourage interdisciplinary practice and collaborative partnerships in arts, science or education practice.

All art forms are covered by the programme, i.e. “dance, drama, performance arts, visual arts, music, film, craft, photography, creative writing or digital media”. People from a wide range of professinal backgrounds are eligible for awards, including artists, scientists, curators, filmmakers, writers, producers, directors, academics, science communicators, teachers, arts workers and education officers, and so forth. The only restriction is that the applicant and the activity must be based in UK or Ireland. Deadline is 10 October 2008 — see more one the scheme’s webpage: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Public-engagement/Grants/Arts-Awards

How to handle human remains is a key issue for us and for other (medical) museums (see earlier post here, here, here and here). Last February, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris organised a series of round-table discussions about the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains. Now the full text of the discussions have been published (in French and English) — see here.

(thanks to Haidy L. Geismar, Material World, for the tip)

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary purposes.

‘Le Lab’ makes a lot of sense from the perspective of his own life narrative. But Edwards has the ambition to raise above the particularities of his own personal trajectory, to make a more general argument for what he calls ‘artscience’, i.e., the fusion of aesthetic and scientific methods. He wants to foster ‘idea translation’, i.e., to bring innovative ideas between academic disciplines, and across academia, the corporate world, and cultural and social institutions; he wants to break down the ubiquitous organisational and institutional barriers to creativity and innovation. ‘Idea translators’ are people who happen to be ‘curious’ and above all have the ‘passion’ to traverse cultural barriers. And ‘artscience’, in Edwards’s view, ‘holds a special key to succesful, sustained idea translation’, because ‘art-science barriers are among the most intractable of obstacles in human organizations of all kinds’ (p.172).

One of Edward’s points is a variation of the old science studies theme (popularized by, among others, Bruno Latour), namely that ‘science in the making’ (the construction of science) is very different from ‘ready-made science’ (which we read about in journal articles and textbooks). For example, there is a lot of art and science in museums (and sometimes ‘art AND science’ which museums have good reasons for bringing inside their walls). But museums usually only tell the story of ready-made art and ready-made science (and ready-made ‘art AND science’), and rarely give their visitors insights into the creative processes behind art and science. Thus the ‘laboratory’ shall explicitly not be a museum.

Le Laboratoire in the 1er arrondissement in Paris is the first instance of such an artscience laboratory (see earlier post here). It is supposed to become a site where ideas can be translated, where they can ‘accelerate’ and transcend barriers. In Le Lab the public is invited to experience the creative process that drives innovation as a fusion of art production and science production. Experiments by leading international artists in collaboration with leading international scientists are supposed to catalyze changes in cultural institutions, in industry, in educational institutions and in society as a whole. And more generally, by experimenting with the art-science relations in such specially designed artscience laboratories, we will somehow learn in practice how to break down the general institutional barriers that block creativity and innovations.

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A couple of days ago I tried to make a cloud of eDrugSearch‘s latest list of health and medicine blogs. But since I couldn’t make Wordle process all 883 blog names on the list into one single display, I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names (see the result here).

Wordle doesn’t explictly say there is a size limit, however. So I ran the list again and — lo and behold — after 90 minutes heavy traffic between my Thinkpad and Wordle’s server (it takes time because it’s a phrase cloud and not a word cloud), this image of all 883 health and medicine blogs on eDrugSearch’s list gradually emerged on my screen:

Cannot find yourself in it? Well then either you’re not a visible health-and-medicine-blog — or you just need new glasses. Or click on this image (if it doesn’t open properly you have to update your Java version to make it work):

Such a huge cloud isn’t very useful, of course, it’s mainly for the fun of it. Again, here’s the list of blogs that went into the image above: Read More

A couple of years ago there were only a few biomedical animation movies. Now they seem to be all over YouTube.

I have commented on the biomedanimation phenomenon before (e.g., here, here and here), but always feel an urge to come back to it, because I believe these movies (and there are many more in the pipeline because of the pull from the pharma industry marketing departments) will change the general public’s understanding of biomedicine and biotechnology dramatically in the future. As a consequence, a new kind of public biomolecularmindedness (analogous to airmindedness and terrormindendness) will probably emerge.

It’s just a question of time, I think, before a new generation of Spielbergs and Wachowski brothers will adopt this animation language into a new generation of films (perhaps a biomedanimation hybrid of Minority Report + The Matrix + Shrek 1-3 + Blade Runner as a starter). If so, biomolecularmindedness will be launched to the level of airmindednesses in the 1930 (and terrormindedness today).

Here are a few examples of current biomedanimation movies on YouTube:

[biomed]2WwIKdyBN_s&feature=related[/biomed]

 

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I was so glad to find this disclaimer at the bottom of Museumblogs.org‘s site: “No animals were harmed in the making of this website”. I mean, so many animal lives could be saved if only web masters were just a little more aware of what they are doing.

But we should also be aware of the harm we may afflict on innocent, sentient beings after having closed down our rich html source editors. As Gerard Butler writes on his blog: “No animals were harmed in the making of this website, although the Chihuahua next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you”.

Last week I used Wordle to create a blogroll cloud from my link list (which worked quite well, see here) — and today I tried to make a similar cloud of eDrugSearch‘s latest (25 July) list of 883 health and medicine blog names (i.e., the full names of the blogs, not just the single words).

It turned out to be too big a mouthful for Wordle to turn the whole health and medicine sector of the blogosphere into a cloud display. So I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names on eDrugSearch’s list. But even then it took Wordle about 45 (!) minutes to complete these 100: (click image to make it bigger; added 28 July: if it doesn’t work, upgrade your Java version).

Wordle has rapidly become a favourite pastime among internet users so their bandwidth seems to be quite filled up. Maybe its slow also because it takes more computing power to construct a phrase cloud than a word cloud. But if you want to make a blogroll cloud, as opposed to say a tag cloud, then phrase clouding is the only option, of course.

The image is printable, but so far not clickable. Maybe Jonathan Feinberg could add a function that makes it possible to open a blog by clicking on its name in the image?

And here’s the list I took from eDrugSearch (again, only the first 100 are in the cloud; maybe I can try to process all 883 when Japan and California have stopped playing with Wordle tonight): Read More

If you are interested in discursive techniques and practices for the formation and transfomation of bodies you may want to attend the Fifth International Somatechnics Conference which will be held in Sydney 16-18 April 2009 under the title ‘The Technologisation of Bodies and Selves’. So what does ‘somatechnics’ stand for?

“Somatechnics” is a recently coined term used to highlight the inextricability of soma and techné, of the body (as a culturally intelligible construct) and the techniques (dispositifs and ‘hard technologies’) in and through which bodies are formed and transformed. This term, then, supplants the logic of the ‘and’, indicating that technés are not something we add to or apply to the body, but rather, are the means in and through which bodies are constituted, positioned, and lived. As such, the term reflects contemporary understandings of the body as the incarnation or materialization of historically and culturally specific discourses and practices.

(Cannot become much more discursive, can it?). Keynote speakers include Claudia Castaneda (Brandeis University), Nichola Rumsey (University of the West of England) and Jennifer Terry (University of California, Irvine), and possible paper topics include:

• somatechnologies of the self (‘non-mainstream’ body modification, body sculpting, performance, fashion, drug use, ‘self-mutilation’, religious practice, etc)
• medical somatechnologies (cosmetic, reproductive, imaging, corrective, sex (re)assignment, implantation, enhancement, bio-techs, public health initiatives, etc)
• somatechnics of law
• somatechnologies of gender, sexuality, race, class, etc
• somatechnologies of normalcy and pathology
• somatechnics of war
• somatechnologies of the post-human (cyborgs, nanotechnology, virtuality, etc)
• soma-ethics

Deadline for 300-500 words abstracts and proposals for panels and performance pieces (wow!) is 30 November 2007. Further information from Nikki Sullivan, nikki.sullivan@scmp.mq.edu.au and somatechnicsadmin@gmail.com (or visit the Somatechnics Research Centre website)

The journal Medical Humanities — one of the journals in the BMJ Group portfolio, started in the year 2000 as a twice-yearly special edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) — is on the outlook for new manuscripts.

The incoming editor Deborah Franklin (who also has her own blog), says that the journal has the ambition to (continue to) be

a leading international journal that reflects the whole field of medical humanities, with high quality articles relevant to humanities and arts scholars, social scientists and policy-makers, medical educators, health care professionals, and patients

and so she is looking for original research papers — both theoretical and empirical — written by historians, anthropologists, literature scholars, philosophers, film studies specialists, and economists etc. (she seem to have forgotten reflective doctors and biomedical scientists which used to be the most frequent contributors to the field in ‘the old days’). In other words, Medical Humanities is broadening its disciplinary profile.

The explicit editorial policy is that papers should be readable by

any well informed individual, in particular by both health care professionals without specific expertise in the humanities, arts or social sciences and by scholars in the humanities, arts or social sciences with no practical health care experience

which may give some problems in the future when humanities journals will increasingly be divided into A, B and C etc. levels of excellence. Will a journal aimed at “any well informed individual” survive in this hardening journal policy climate? I cannot find Medical Humanities on the ERIH initial lists, but the 2007 impact factor of its mother journal (JME) is 1.103.

Anyway, if you wish to submit a manuscript, go to http://submit-mh.bmj.com, and if you have any questions, write to mh@bmjgroup.com.

I’ve learned about several kinds of DNA — non-coding DNA, junk DNA, satellite DNA, selfish DNA, triple-stranded DNA and so forth — but I’ve never heard about sleep DNA before. Until today:

Clue: I’ve been surfing around to find a new mattress for my aching back (bad REM sleep = bad blog posts) and found this ad by Ergosleep for a new system for measuring your body posture when you lie down.

It’s all about personalized bed adjustment. The French version spells the connection out even better (‘Your sleep DNA code is unique. You too’). It’s nonsense, of course, but it sort of sounds reliable and scientific, doesn’t it?

So what’s next? Sit DNA? Look DNA (buzzy neologism for the refractive error of your lens, i.e., the numbers your optometrist writes down for you when you need to order a new pair of glasses or contact lenses)? Or walk DNA? (shoe size).