When Jens Hauser gave a seminar here at Medical Museion last spring, he talked, among other things, about his next exhibitíon — on skin. His idea of exploríng skin “as a place where art, science, philosophy and social culture meet” is now becoming realised in Liverpool (UK) under the title of sk-interfaces.

“What used to be understood as a surface that represents the limit of the self and between the inside and the outside can today be seen as an unstable border”, says Jens on the website. He has gathered an awesome crew of bio-artists — a few old hats, but mostly exciting new acquaintances — to explore this tough, yet fragile bodily interface:

For example, ORLAN presents Manteau d’Arlequin (Harlequin Coat), a patchwork life-size mantle, which fuses in vitro skin cells from various cultures and species. The Tissue Culture and Art Project’s Victimless Leather are problematizing the concept of ‘garment’ by making it semi-living:

Art Orienté objet have created “biopsied, cultured, hybridized and tattooed skin made from their own epidermis and pig derma to create living biotechnological self-portraits”. In hymNext Designer Hymen Series Julia Reodica uses her own vaginal tissue combined with animal muscle cells to create designer hymens. And so on and so forth.

The director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) that hosts the exhibition, claims that sk-interfaces pushes “the boundaries of how and what creative technologies and art can be”; he wants to use the exhibition to invite debate and conversation “around life sciences and our changing relationships with our bodies and technology”.

Here is the full list of confirmed art works at the exhibition:
Art Orienté objet (France) Cultures de peaux d’artistes, Roadkill Coat
Zbigniew Oksiuta (Poland) Breeding Spaces
Yann Marussich (Switzerland) Bleu Remix
Julia Reodica (USA) hymNext Designer Hymen Series
Jun Takita (Japan) Light only Light
Tissue Culture and Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr) (Australia) Victimless Leather
ORLAN (France) Manteau d’Arlequin
Neal White (UK) Truth Serum
Wim Delvoye (Belgium) Sybille
Olivier Goulet (France) Skin Bags
Zane Berzina (Latvia) Touch Me Wall
Critical Art Ensemble (US)
Eduardo Kac (Brazil)Telepresence Garment
Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barriere (France) World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War
Jill Scott E-skin: Somatic Interaction
Stelarc Extra Ear: Ear on Arm

The exhibition opens on 1 February and runs until 31 March. The week after the opening, FACT is organising a conference to examine the topics and issues surrounding this exhibition. They are also publishing a book by Jens Hauser — SK-Interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society — on Liverpool University Press.

Looks like a three-star exhibition, i.e. worth a travel. 

Two seminars on public engagement with science will be held at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, 7-8 February.

1) A public seminar on ‘Public Communication of Expert Knowledge and Political Decision-Making’ on Thursday 7 February. Speakers include

• Christian Azar (Chalmers U of Technology): ‘Popularize? Agitate? Inform? What is the Role of the Expert in Politics?’
• Lena Sommestad (former Swedish Minister for the Environment): ‘Democracy Meets Science – Experiences from Environmental Policy-Making’
• Ulrike Felt (U Vienna): ‘Public Communication of Science: A Space for Collective Experimentation?’.

The talks willl be followed by a public debate bar and a panel discussion.

2) Next day (Friday 8 February) the public seminar is narrowed down to a closed workshop on ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ with talks in English and Swedish. Speakers include:

• Fredrik Bragesjö and Margareta Hallberg (Göteborgs universitet): Vetenskapskommunikation – ett led i samproduktionen av vetenskap och social ordning? Exemplet mässlingsvaccination och autism
• Maja Horst (Copenhagen Business School): Public Engagement with STS – Experimenting with the Social Science Laboratory
• Susanne Lundin (Lunds universitet): Moraliska räkenskaper. Etik och praxis inom biomedicinsk forskning
• Teresa Kulawik (Södertörns högskola): From Educational Towards Deliberative Governance in Science Policy? The Case of Embryo- and Stem-Cell Research in Germany and Sweden
• Per-Anders Forstorp (KTH): Magnetisörerna och den nya manikeismen: Den skeptiska rörelsen som vetenskapens publika väktare
• Jan Nolin (Bibliotekshögskolan Borås): The Information Turn in Research on Public Understanding of Science
• Anders Ekström, Solveig Jülich, Frans Lundgren och Per Wisselgren (Stockholms, Umeå and Uppsala universitet): Deltagande medier och publik vetenskap
• Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen): Science Blogging and the Multitude of Technoscience

 More info from Mark Elam, STS, U of Gothenburg.

Pharmaceutical history has long been dominated by a somewhat antiquarian interest in old apothecaries; post-WWII-developments have been fairly neglected, and the history of Big Pharma, biotech and the ‘pipeline’ has been virtually non-existing. But things are changing! Thus the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy organizes a meeting on ‘Perspectives in Pharmaceutical History’ in Madision, Wisconsin, 17-18 October, 2008 which promises to take these major contemporary trends into account:

The evolution of the modern pharmaceutical enterprise over the long twentieth century—from its early intersection with the image and later the structure of scientific research, to its dramatic postwar expansion and late-century saturation of medical and marketing media—has implications that stretch far beyond the traditional history of pharmacy and medicine to impact broader social, cultural, economic, business, legal, regulatory, and political developments. This conference seeks to foster and reflect on the growing body of pharmaceutical scholarship across historical disciplines and encourage novel theoretical and methodological developments by featuring newer scholars alongside more established figures in the field.

The organizers want one-page proposals by 1 February 2008; send to modernmedicines@aihp.org. More info here.

I was just reminded by Nick Hopwood on an email-list that the Wellcome Trust has quite recently introduced a more generous policy for the free use of Wellcome Images. The reproduction price is now waived for a wide range of non-commercial uses. See the terms here.

The large majority of the >100,000 (!) online items in the digital image database are classical medical history pictures. But the number of contemporary images is growing rapidly. Now you can choose among 40 molecular models, for example this molecular model of a prokaryotic ribosome (credit: MRC Lab of Molecular Biology, UK, and Wellcome Collection):

This colour-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of a 2-3 day old human embryo (credit: Yorgos Nikas, Wellcome Images):

can now also be freely used in academic publications, theses, university museum exhibitions etc. There are over 21,000 contemporary images altogether. I guess you need permission if you want to manipulate them though.

The 27th Symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission will be held at the Museum of Science, University of Lisbon 16-21 September 2008. Topics include ‘Instruments and spaces’ and ‘Instruments, heritage and society’. For more info, see
http://chcul.fc.ul.pt/sic2008.

Anyone interested in the collection, preservation and display of historical medical science instruments might get something interesting out of this meeting. Unfortunately, however, it overlaps in time with two other closely related meetings of interest for medical museum people, viz. that of the University Museums and Collections (UMAC) in Manchester 16-20 September and that of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) in Edinburgh 17-21 September. Medical museum curators may find it difficult to choose between these three meetings. Why weren’t they better co-ordinated and differentiated in time?

Academic ‘progress’ in the humanities and social studies could be described as one damned turn after the other.

In the good old days there used to be the linguistic turn plus a few others — the cultural turn, the social turn, the cognitive turn, a couple of anthropological turns and so forth. But now there seem to be turns all over the academic marketplace. (Science, technology and medicine don’t seem to be addicted to turns to the same extent as the humanities and social studies.)

A rapid browse reveals an economic turn, a material turn, (and a materialist turn), an affective turn, an emotional turn, at least two kinds of therapeutic turns, a whole lot of political turns (e.g., Bourdieu’s one). It goes without saying that there have been proposals for a post-modernist turn, a post-structuralist turn, etc. Our own field (museum studies) is replete with turns: a museological turn, a curatorial turn, etc. And then, of course, my own personal addiction: the biographical turn. Inventive internet users will easily find many more — and I haven’t even begun to search academic literature databases.

Some authors are humble, speaking about ‘a XX-ical turn’; others are more self-assured in their essentialist identification of ‘the XX-ical turn’, e.g., ‘the Foucauldian turn’.

The logic behind all these turns seems to be that they are proposed in opposition to an alleged one-sided hegemonic, reductive perspective on the phenomena under study. Thus spokespersons for an economic turn emphasize the need for more economic theory in political science, and vice versa. There seem to be a general feeling of Angst visavis theoretical reductionism around every corner: so better suggest a ‘turn’ in order to combat it.

So turns are turned against turns. I am surprised that nobody seems to have suggested an academic moratorium on turns yet. What would the humanities and social studies look like if we weren’t allowed to think in terms of ‘turns’? Maybe it’s time to propose an anti-turn turn?

In May last year a workshop on visualizations in the life sciences (“Graphing Genes, Cells and Embryos”) was held in Naples. The papers included a number of historical studies of interest for displaying biomedicine in a museum context, including studies of the history of:

• the visualization of chromosomes
• 3D-models of the Golgi apparatus
• representations of RNA
• the use of physical models to explore protein structure
• virtual 3D-embryos
• representations of gene regulation and cell signalling pathways and networks

and so forth (the abstracts from the 2007 meeting have been put together on this website).

The 2007 workshop will be followed up by a meeting at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, June 11-15, 2008. This second meeting will focus on a  fascinating and useful topic for medical and life science museum curators, viz., “how the life sciences visually mastered to manifest the dimensionalities living organisms exhibit when taking shape”: Read More

One of the great meeting events for us folks in the outer provinces of medicine science studies is the joint annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) — this year the theme is “Acting with science, technology and medicine”, and the meeting takes place in Rotterdam, 20-23 August.

As usual dead-line for abstracts and session proposals is tight, viz. 16 February. There are online submission forms on the 4S website. More information on the society websites: http://www.4sonline.org/ and http://www.easst.net/.

These use to be huge meetings with ten or more parallel session. But it is a good chance to get an overview of what is going on in some areas of science, technology and medicine studies. And the fact that this year’s program chair, Roland Bal, comes from the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam is an indication of the prominent place that medicine studies has got in the field — what used to be STS (science and technology studies) is now rather STMS (science, technology and medicine studies).

If you have seen our temporary exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing, you have probably also seen the room with Liv Carlé Mortensen‘s photo collages, ‘100 Light Years’. If so, you may be interested to read what the chairman of the Novo Nordisk Art Association (Novo Nordisk Kunstforening), Thomas Christiansen, writes about it on his blog. I quote (in free translation):

One of the fundamentally important — and most difficult — things in portrait art is to catch the personality behind the person portrayed, regardless of the medium: marble, oil, photo. As a spectator you usually relate to the portrait in two ways: either you get a general sense of a personality behind the portrait, or you really feel that you are meeting a real personality; the last situation is probably only possible if you know the person ‘in person’ and only rarely takes place. But when it happens it is a powerful experience.

What happened was that Thomas Christiansen suddenly discovered that his grand-aunt Gudrun was among the 16 collages in Liv’s collection: “The everyday was suddenly converted into art in a rather unusual and very personal way”.

Isn’t this a case of presence effects in art? 

The Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI) has just opened its Waywiser website. As of today it only contains 764 records out of the total of 20,000 objects in the collection, but the database is growing with a few hundred records every month; CHSI Director Peter Galison says (in a circulated email on Mersenne) that they will also add films and archival material to the site as time goes on.

The site mainly contains physical and chemical instruments and some anatomical models used in the teaching of psychology at Harvard, but not many medical objects so far. Nevertheless, it is worth visiting for medical museum curators, especially for its good interface and picture quality, which lives up to current standards for public collection databases; for example, they use Zoomify to enable zooming-in and paning of the pics, and the resolution is so high that one really gets something out of the zooming function. Several objects are photographed from many different angles and in exquisite detail.

The site is not without problems, however. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide links to other related websites (when will historians of science learn to link?). And I also found a disturbing case of possible copycat curating. Here’s a screen shot of a record of one of the (somewhat atypical) items:

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This test for colorblindness, a box with bundles of dyed wool in different colours, was invented by 19th century physiologist Frithiof Holmgren at the University of Uppsala, and became “a reliable and standard routine check for railway and shipping employees” in the early 20th century. Actually, postdoc Jan Eric Olsén here at Medical Museion published his dissertation about Holmgren’s physiology of vision a couple of years ago (Liksom ett par nya ögon: Frithiof Holmgren och synsinnets problematik, Lund 2005; abstract here).

I don’t know much about these bundles of wool — they look like a nice example of how low-tech scientific instruments can play an important social and cultural role (cf. David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old) — so I made a quick internet search and discovered that the University of Toronto Museum of Scientific Instruments also have a ‘Professor Holmgren’s Test For Color Blindness’.

In fact the similar object in the Toronto collection is better curated. Their record describes in detail how the test was used, it puts the invention in its historical context, and, most importantly, it contains references to some relevant secondary literature. Furthermore — and this is what is disturbing — when you compare the two object records, it looks like the Harvard collection record is simply a resumé of the Toronto museum record.

Particularly striking is that both contain the same uncommon spelling error of Holmgren’s first name (Fithiof instead of Frithiof), and that both have misspelled the name of the railway line where Holmgren made his colorblindness test (“Uppsala-Gabole line”, should be “Uppsala-Gäfle line”). (On the other hand the CHSI curators haven’t bothered to mention the relevant secondary references.) In other words, it looks like the Harvard CHSI curatorial team has made a shortcut and simply condensed the text from the Toronto museum database without proper reference.

Hopefully, what seems like a case of copycat curating is not a general feature of this otherwise nicely designed and potentially important on-line historical instrument database, but a singular mistake in the rush to get the site ready for public introduction.

The possible copycat mistake shouldn’t draw attention away from the very fine use of iconographical material on the site. The Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments is to be congratulated to an overall good and useful product — and with some revisions in their curatorial procedures it may well set standards in the field.