Yet another wish-I-were-there seminar organised by the History of Medicine Divsion at NLM (NIH), namely on 12 December, when Peter Keating (U Quebec, Montreal) shall speak about “Who’s Minding the Data? A History and Sociology of Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Cancer Trials”. Here’s Peter’s abstract:

Modern biomedicine is based on a number of novel institutions and practices running the socio-technical gamut from third-part payers to molecular biology. In order to function, these institutions and practices require a degree of formal and informal regulation that themselves form a spectrum from tacit conventions to legal mandates. In this we contribute to our ongoing investigation of these institutions and the forms of objectivity they generate by examining the emergence and development of DMCs and by discussing some of the issues and problems raised by this novel form of regulatory objectivity.

The seminar takes place in the Lister Hill Visitor’s Center on NIH Campus @ 2-3.30pm. Maybe they will video-record the seminar? Just to remind you all: Peter is co-author (with Alberto Cambrosio) of Biomedical Platforms (2003), one of the books that inspired our own research programme.

I’m thinking about one of the points that Joel Garreau brought up in an article titled “Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums?” in The Washington Post two months ago (7 Oct).

Referring to Wiliam J. Mitchell’s (director of the MIT Design Laboratory) writings about the digitalization of urban environments, Garreau points out that “the vast choices available on the Web punish places that try to be all things to all people”, and favor instead small specialized “places for the cognoscenti”.

This tendency may be valid for museums too, he suggests:

The lesson for museums is that nimble upstarts can win big. Large, long-existing players complacent in their old formulas can die.

An encouraging prospect for small mammals like Medical Museion (and Jim’s place in Oxford) who are competing with Science Museum dinosaurs!

What attracts the cognoscente/connoisseur is of course the exquisite artefacts. So, in a world of big digitalizing-frantic omnibus museums, the specialized thing-centered museum will perhaps thrive. Maybe (so believes Garreau) because it speaks to the squirrel collector inside us.

Ever noticed that the URI for this blog is www.corporeality.net/museion? In fact, this is a badly chosen URI. Corporeality means (OED) “the quality or state of being corporeal; bodily form or nature; materiality”.

Blogs (and other kinds of websites) are good for writing about and visualising concepts, ideas and things. But they cannot really convey the ‘thingness’ of material things.

So, how can material things (e.g., from our collections) be rendered in digital media that operate on the premise of textuality and visuality only? Maybe through some kind of haptic-internet browser? Like the device on this demo on the International Society for Haptic‘s website.

Any specialist out there who can help us further?

Last month, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford opened a new exhibition called “Small Worlds: the art of the invisible”. Made in collaboration with artist Heather Barnett and poet Will Holloway, the museum uses its collection of Victorian and Edwardian microscopical specimens to stage a display of images, animation and poetry. “Where else”, the Director, Jim Bennett, asks, “can you admire bespoke wallpaper and curtains while listening to poems derived on audio-handsets?”, and adds: “If you find yourself within reach, it’s worth a look, and a listen (we think)”.

The website pictures are alluring. The exhibition will continue till 6 April 2008. Regular opening hours are: Tuesday to Friday 12-5, Saturday 10-5, Sunday 2-5 (closed between Christmas and New Year). Until you have a chance to see it, you can send e-card greetings with specimen-pics to your friends.

Yet another event that shows that the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford is one of the most innovative STM-museums in the world.

As far as I can remember, my academic life has been a constant oscillation between grant applications and research evaluations. Now again. Tuesday we had a four hour long meeting with the Novo Nordisk Foundation reference group who commented on a 22 page report of the “Biomedicine on Display” project (which took at least a week to complete).

And now I’m working 18 hours a day to finish the pre-application for a new project, tentatively called “Material and Visual Culture of Contemporary Biomedicine” — deadline is tomorrow at 4pm!  So, not much sleep tonight — and no blog posts, except for this one. Added 30 nov: Finished the pre-application 18 minutes before dead-line. I guess there are probably 500 or more applicants to this 6th round of applications to the Danish National Research Foundation. Cross your fingers!

Most science, technology and medicine today originates in ‘Empire’, not in ‘Multitude‘. But there are interesting exceptions, for example The 2nd annual Maker Faire in the Bay Area in May, which seems to have been a feast for bottom-up inventive science and technology geeks — if you can trust this video (from Quest).

Make-zine described the Maker Faire as a “science fair, with beer”. Quest wrote:

It’s been called “Burning Man for science geeks.” The annual Maker Faire attracts thousands of amateur inventors and scientists, displaying their home-made prototypes and gadget hacks. In a world where the technological race is speeding up, the Maker movement has revealed that the do-it-yourself culture is in no danger of dying out.

Apparently not the boring standard ‘public understanding of science’ kind of event, but a truly sci&tech popular movement occasion. A sort of sci&tech of the ‘Multitude‘ pace Michael Hardt and Toni Negri.

But — most of the DIY things in the first two Maker Fairs seem to have been based on classical physical science and engineering. No biomedicine or biotech.

It makes me wonder (again) if there is any DIY-biotech movement out there? Where are the Steve Jobs of postgenomics fiddling around with recombinant technology and protein sequencers?

I shortly discussed the future possibilities of “garage biotech and medicine” with Steve Kurtz when he was in Copenhagen in early September. He suggested that the limiting factor for a DIY biotech and biomedicine movement is the costs of the reagents. In other words, it is not the complexity of the protocols, or the hardware, or the lack of ambitions that set the limits, but the fact that the reagents used, for example in basic recombinant technology, are so expensive that happy amateurs cannot afford them.

Is Steve really right? Does anyone have a price list at hand? Or are there other, and less pedestrian, reasons for the lack of biotech and biomedicine stands on the Maker Fair?

More on transplantation: The release of Google Body — “a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet” — has just been announced. The new service is said to include “a fuzzy-logic ‘match my organ’ feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor for multiple organ systems”.

From FutureFeedForward (via Erik/Mymarkup), reflecting the ever-growing nervousness around the expanding Google empire — now also stretching into the medical field (cf. their interest in 23andMe).

Besides this future-dated report from 2022, there are rumours around that Google will in fact launch (a less ambitious, I suppose 🙂 Google Body in 2008-09. Can someone substantiate this?

Apropos our own Søren Bak-Jensen‘s article “To share or not to share: institutional exchange of cadaver kidneys in Denmark” (forthcoming in Medical History in January) — there is also a more satirical side to the history of contemporary transplantation, as you can see on this recent Today Now! morning show in The Onion‘s online edition.

Sometimes I’m in doubt whether The Onion’s mockumentaries, -news and -shows are actually real programmes copied directly from Fox News or some other channel of the same ilk.

I’m waiting for someone to write a Begriffsgeschichte of the contemporary biomedical discourse.

The most recent Begriff-candidate on my list is ‘nanomedicine‘. The field’s pioneer, Robert A. Freitas, used the term ‘medical nanotechnology’ in a paper in 1998; a year later, the shorthand ‘nanomedicine’ appeared for the first time in a scientific article; and the same year (1999) Landes Bioscience started publishing a nanomedical book series with Freitas as its main editor.

Now ‘nanomedicine‘ is all over the place: the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine was started by Elsevier in 2005; the year after came Nanomedicine, and in March 2007 the European Science Foundation (ESF) published their authoritative report on the future prospects of the field.

It’s high time for historians of ideas to get involved in an analysis of the variegated and rapidly changing contemporary biomedical and biotechnological disciplinary discourses. Why are so many historians focussing on, say, 18th and 19th century political discourses when there are so many important biopolitical discourses emerging around us right now?

During the last two months, readers of The Scientist have nominated 60 life science laboratory web sites for the monthly magazine’s ‘Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards’. A group of judges have evaluated the nominated sites according to four criteria (design, usability, content and community) and shortlisted 10 of them. And now it’s the readers’ turn, again — to vote for the best site. Read more here.

It’s like parliamentary elections. I will vote, of course. Some sites are quite good, others turn me off. But even more interesting — from a humanities scholar’s point of view — is the voting and award event itself, because it reflects something pretty fundamental about what is going on in the world of biomed/biotech/life sciences these days, viz., the race for web visibility and the competition for recognition among scientists and labs.

Visibility on PubMed is apparently not enough any more to guarantee labs a net flow of grant money. Of course, a steady output of peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals is still a basic prerequisite for funding — but on top of that you seem to need to a strong web presence as well.

So The Scientist‘s lab site award is not just a parlour game or beauty contest. It indicates that web presence is about to become a sine qua non in the world of biomedicine and biotech too. Do astrophysicists need web presence?