Biomedicine in museums

We have repeatedly come back to the art of medical animation on this blog. Although in principle we are more interested in animation of invisible biomedical microstructures, animations of classical macroanatomical structures are still a source of awe and fascination, especially when they are well-done. See, for example, this beautiful animation of a human heart:

One thing is that it has an almost haptic quality — another bonus feature is that you can move an interface slider to seamlessly disclose the working of the valves beneath the increasingly transparent muscular ‘glass’ surface. Nifty! Imagine an exhibition room in which a real, preserved heart was shown with this animation in the background. (I don’t think they used any of these in the Wellcome Collection’s Heart-exhbition?).

The interactive heart is produced by Hybrid Medical Animation, a small Minneapolis-based company which specialises in creative medical and scientific imaging. And they don’t restrict their productions to macroanatomy; for example, they have also done instruction movies about molecular targeting, like the one to the right.

See more examples here.

(thanks to today’s Medgadget for the tip)

Cannot resist spreading this image from the Brazilian advertising agency NeogamaBBH, which is circulating in the blogosphere right now (e.g., Street Anatomy, Frame 2wenty 4our, etc.). For more, see here.

 

 

 

The James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the Saïd Business School , Universitry of Oxford, is announcing two research fellows in science and technology studies. The range of research topics includes (but is not limited to): biomedical innovation and society; cognitive enhancement; converging technologies; evidence and evidence-policy relations; governance of genetic technologies; science, technology and inequality; imaging and visualisation; law, property and inequality; mundane objects and ordinary technologies; neuromarketing; security and surveillance; sociology and ethnography of the social sciences; technology, mobility and urban geographies; technoscience and its publics; and visualisation in archaeology.

The fellows are expected to: identify potential new research topics and questions; critically evaluate existing literatures and perspectives bearing on these topics; devise research projects and identify likely funding sources; submit research proposals; undertake research and writing with a view to publication in leading academic journals; contribute directly and in support of all research, take an active part in research meetings and related activities; act as a source of information and advice to other members of the group on methodologies or procedures; present papers at conferences or public meetings; etc.

It’s probably difficult to do all these things equally well, but otherwise it sounds like the Perfect Postdoc Job for an STS-oriented PhD. Deadline for applications is 14 July and informal inquiries can be addressed to Steve Woolgar, steve.woolgar@sbs.ox.ac.uk. Read more here.

Together with some one hundred other hopeful Danish university academics, Søren and I spent three hours today listening to representatives of the Danish Council for Strategic Research instructing us how to write better applications for so called ‘strategic’ research projects in co-operation with Danish small and middle-sized corporations. It’s all about getting funding for projects that will promote long-term Danish economic interests; all us gathered in the room will compete for about 100 mill. euros in the September phase-2 application round. The success rate after having passed the first application round is about 33-50%, so we were all eagerly listening!

And then (inspired by Derek) I went home to read last week’s issue of Nature, in which cell biologist Theo Wallimann from ETH in Zürich writes (“European research needs a dash of anarchy”, Nature, vol. 453, p. 850) that “almost every significant breakthrough in the history of science has come about by serendipity — not as a result of strategic planning or problem-oriented and directed research”. And he continues:

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions. Good scientists are by definition anarchists, who don’t want to be managed by what Gottfried Schatz of Biocenter Basel calls ‘chronoclasts’ — people whose bureaucracy steals their research time and blunts their creative potential. Good science has an inherent potential for self-organization.

What a schizophrenic day! In the morning we had our minds focused on how to get a grip on some of this strategic research money. And then, a few hours later, Wallimann’s call for a dash of anarchy.

The first thing that comes to mind is Nietzsche’s distinction between slave and master mentality.

(occasioned by Derek Lowe’s post “Anarchy in the EU” in today’s In the Pipeline)

Participatory web media are increasingly being used for raising the medical scientific awareness of patients, caregivers and doctors (I guess this is the basic idea of ‘formation of biocitizenship’). Latest example is a video channel launched Monday by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in co-operation with YouTube:

[biomed]H-rJgmVuV7Q[/biomed]

with “the goal of promoting earlier diagnoses and getting more patients into research studies and clinical trials” (quote from the press release).

The UCSF people are also experimenting with two other forms of online communication. To the right you can see their widget with links to the YouTube channel and their own site.

They have also created a “Defeat Dementia”-group on Facebook.

Says the director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, Bruce Miller:

The YouTube channel and these other forms of online communications will enable us to engage a broad audience in the fight against these illnesses … One goal is to increase awareness about the earliest signs of some of the less well known diseases … If we can promote accurate diagnoses of patients, we can get them into clinical trials sooner

Looks like a very conscious strategic use of web media for the formation of medical scientific awareness. Expect to see much more of this kind from universities and research centers in the near future.

Learning new software tools takes a lot of time, so I always take the opportunity to learn some basic tricks by looking over the shoulders of my colleagues while they handle the interface. But often my colleagues are as unknowledgeable as I am. The obvious solution then is video tutorials. There are thousands hundreds of them if you want to learn Photoshop or how to create your WordPress blog and so forth. But I haven’t seen any specialized service for biomedical researchers before. Now Bioscreencast has created a video tutorial library where you can watch (presently 128) videos that tell lots of useful stuff — for example, I just learned how to create a RSS feed for continuously showing PubMed search results on my customized ig-Google page. Nifty! 

Last week Nature carried a fascinating advance online article^* written by a research group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) lead by Jack Szostak. They have created a simple artifical protocell in the form of a single-stranded DNA-template within a shell of such fatty acids that were likely to have been present in early life environments four billion years ago.

It turned out that this particular protocell could take up nucleotides from the outside without the help of ‘modern’ protein pores and channels and that these molecules then took part in the template-copying reaction. In other words, a precursor to a simple artificial life system. Read more here.

This is great stuff for everyone who is fascinated by the problem of the emergence of early life (and the construction of artificial life). But equally fascinating is the fact that this research is conducted by a group of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Mass General Hospital. This tells something about the open-minded research strategies of these two medical research institutions — a far cry from the narrow understanding of medical research (and research in general) which the Danish government and its research authorities have adopted over the last decade under the slogan ‘Fra forskning til faktura’ (from research to invoice).

I doubt that scientists in a Danish medical research institution (not even to think of a hospital) would survive for long if they focused their research efforts on the origin of life. Because even though such research may be very important for the understanding of cell functions in the long perspective, there is no immediate medical payoff; no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s in sight whatsoever.

^*S. Mansy et al., “Template-directed synthesis of a genetic polymer in a model protocell”, Nature online 4 June 2008.

After the minisymposium with Jens Hauser and Sepp Gumbrecht on the concept of ‘presence’ here at Medical Museion last spring, our research group has repeatedly come back to the relation between mediated visualizations of biomedical objects, on the one hand, and the immediacy of touching them, on the other (see, for example, Jan Eric’s earlier post on Condillac’s statue).

As an anecdotal illustration of the immediacy of touch, I’d like to present the following personal experience.

In mid-March, I accompanied my partner to the National Hospital here in Copenhagen for an ultrasound scan of our then 13 week old foetus. As thousands of other prospective parents we were of course thrilled by what we saw on the screen:

Watching our future baby ‘live’ on a computer screen like this was quite amazing, even though we had seen such pictures on the internet before. It’s an experience we share with millions of others:  digitalized ultrasound scanning foetus images have become an integral part of the contemporary understanding of what it means to deliver new citizens to the world. A striking image of early life that is easily communicated in our visual culture and as such an illustration of the formation of biocitizenship, both discursively and substantially.

Back to the anecdote: Six weeks later, we went for the second screening and watched the same kind of picture, just more detailed, with ears, fingers, toes and everything. It was, of course, very satisfying to see that the pregnancy proceeded well, and that there was no need to worry.

Yet, none of us were really moved by the experience. And I realised that even though I had been quite amazed during the first scanning session in March, both sessions left me somehow unsatisfied. There was something lacking which I couldn’t really articulate. My partner felt the same way, especially after the second scanning.

It was no big thing, and none of us found it wortwhile discussing it at length. For my own part, I shrugged it off as one of these many moments of distraction that acompany academic life.

However, two weeks after the second scanning, my partner suddenly said one evening: ‘put your hand on my belly’. I did — and there it was: the ‘rumbling’ that I had read about! Something moving inside. Not really kicking, but ‘rumbling’.

Wow! Double wow! This was our baby, no doubt. I couldn’t see it, of course, and I couldn’t distinguish arms, legs or head from each other. It was just a ‘rumbling object’ deep inside my partner’s belly.

From a medical point of view my subjective haptic experience was of course nothing compared with the detailed, objective and communicable ultrasound visualizations. And yet — as an experience of emerging life it was much more evocative. Touching our ‘rumbling’ foetus made a much stronger impression on me than seeing him/her (we don’t want to know ‘its’ sex yet) in high screen resolution. Now he/she was real — for real!

And then I understood why the two previous scanning sessions had left us somewhat unsatisfied, as if something was lacking. Despite all the exquisite visual detail, the perception of a scanning image is mediated. That is, there is literally a medium between the perceiving spectator and the foetus. In this case, a technically sophisticated clinical platform — an obstetric clinic with trained technicians operating state-of-the-art ultrasound echoprobe equipment according to standardized procedures and with the newest imaging software, etc. — stand between us and the foetus. While my hand on her belly is unmediated (unless you want to call the belly muscles and the placenta a ‘medium’).

As an anecdote this has rather limited evidential value, agreed. But it nevertheless makes me think about the immediacy of touch, and to what extent the sense of touch is an undervalued sense in a world which is dominated by the sense of vision (and partly the auditory sense). (For further views on this, see Jan Eric’s and my paper to the ‘Artefact’ meeting in Oslo last September.)

It also raises questions about touch as a basic cognitive sense (cf Jan Eric’s post on Condillac), about touch as an emotionally loaded sense, about the communicability and possibility for shared cultural experiences of touch, and so forth. Lots of questions for later posts.

(finally, to medical doctors reading this post: I’m not at all against imaging technologies, of course; I’m just fascinated by the relation between visual mediation and the immediacy of touch 🙂

As you may have noticed, this blog has a crush on microarray technology, both as a social and political phenomenon (see here) and as an object of display (see here and here).

Therefore – congratulations to the Berliner Medizin-historisches Museum for being the first museum (as far as I know) to display microarrays in a permanent exhibition.

It’s just one small showcase in the new permanent exhibition ‘Dem Leben af der Spur’ [On the track of life] which opened last October. The text is short and probably pretty unintelligible to non-experts, and the displayed Affymetrix^® chips are not contextualized, neither historically, nor socially or politically. Nevertheless, here they are — the first gene chips in a permanent museum exhibition.

I’ll be back with a review of the exhibition as a whole.

Yesterday morning, before our session on art and science, I took a walk through the beautiful old Charité area — now one of the joint medical campuses of Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität — with 19th and early 20th century buildings spread out in a large park.

When I passed by one of the buildings that houses some of the veterinary medical departments, an aluminium-box to the right of the entrance caught my eye.

Went closer and discovered a small handwritten red label on the front of the box:

‘Refrigerated samples (4^o)
Institute of Virology’

Apparently it’s a refrigerated drive-in (or walk-by) virus sample delivery box:

I asked a man who was standing smoking outside the building to open the lid to demonstrate how it works:

My anonymous assistant had no attachment to the veterinary virology department, so he couldn’t really explain how the box is (was) used. What kind of samples are (were) delivered here? By whom? A night-delivery box? What kinds of tests? And how does (did) the sender get the information back? Is (was) it a foot-and-mouth disease sample emergency delivery box?

And then I saw that someone has glued a green label below the official one:

 

‘bürgerinitiative / rettet die fleischerei’ (‘citizen initiative / save the butcher-shops’).

One of these witty anti-establishment micro protests and art installations which has made the Berlin autonomous movement world famous. Perhaps a vegan tongue-in-cheek criticism of a food industry which would be in serious trouble if institutes of virology weren’t producing knowledge that kept animals alive for later slaughter and sale.

A nice item for acquisition if we were a museum responsible not only for human medicine but also for understanding and displaying veterinary medicine as well.