Trust is a key concept in science studies (cf. Ted Porter’s excellent book Trust in Numbers, 1995, just to take one example). Now the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science are organising a workshop on “Trust in Science” to take place at Toronto’s CBC Conference Centre 15-16 October. What’s interesting with this meeting is that the organisers are focusing on trust in public understanding of science (journalism, broadcasting and museums).

Sessions thus include: Clinical Trials and the Pharmaceutical Industry; Publicizing Science, and its Effects; Public Controversies and the Distribution of Expertise; Who to Trust on Climate Change; and Museums and the Public Trust. To register for the workshop, email bessie@yorku.ca before 20 September. For more info,see this pdf-file.

Today’s big news in the Copenhagen health and life science community is the £55 mill. (600 mill. DKK) grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation to create a brand new center for protein research (proteomics, bioinformatics etc.) at the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, as it will be called, is planned to open in the autumn of 2008 with a total staff of around 100.

This is great news for Danish health and life sciences. The new center — which will be among the larger ones in the world — will boost research in postgenomics, proteomics and systems biology.

They forgot one important thing, however. When NIH and DOE launched the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, about 3 % of the budget was set aside to the study of the ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) raised by the HGP.

Read More

… and I also wish I could be in Oxford on Wednesday at 5pm to attend the Museum of History of Science’s seminar and listen to David Gooding from the Science Studies Centre @ University of Bath when he talks about “Visual Theories: Materials, Models and Methods”. Here’s his abstract which brings up some interesting problems of relevance for the “Biomedicine on Display” project:

Alongside the study of texts, instruments and other artefacts, images have much to tell us about scientific work. Scientists in different domains use images and other non-linguistic objects in very similar ways. Common features of the manipulation of these objects indicate that general strategies for interpretation, simplification, modelling, elaboration and argumentation are at work. Some of these imaging methods are shared with the visual arts. Whereas social and cultural studies of science emphasise the diversity of local contexts of practice, the existence of common strategies shows that this diversity masks an important repertoire of cognitive strategies. I will show that scientists use this repertoire to adapt their representations to meet the demands that arise in different contexts of practice and will consider the implications of this finding for our understanding of scientists as agents in knowledge-producing systems.

My point is that what David Gooding says about cognitive research strategies could perhaps be applied to the domain of image-use in exhibitions and the public engagement with science. For example (to paraphrase Gooding), shall museums primarily been seen as more or less bewildering arrays of localised contexts of practice, or do curators rather use a repertoire of display strategies to adapt their exhibitions to meet the demands that arise in different museum contexts?

Some ten years ago analysts at Gartner, an information and technology research and advisory company, suggested that the acceptance of new information technologies tend to follow a ‘hype cycle’. First comes a trigger phase with intitial curiosity, then a peak with wide-spread publicity and inflated expectations (the hype), followed by a phase of disillusionment when the new technology fails to meet the expectations. Then comes a slow recovery phase; the press has forgotten all about it, but some business begin to see the value in it. And, finally, the new technology (eventually) becomes main-stream and accepted (no hype this time).

Gartner’s hype cycle thesis has mainly been discusssed in relation to marketing strategies for new information and communication technologies.  I haven’t seen it applied graphically to medical technologies (my favourite med&tech site, medgadget, hasn’t mentioned it) until yesterday when I found Pedro Beltrao’s playful graph on Public Rambling:

Read More

Wish I were in Cambridge today! At 1pm, Nick Hopwood will speak about “Anatomist holds model embryo: A marble portrait from 1900” at the Natural History Cabinet’s bag lunch:

Embryo images have in the last few decades acquired extraordinary and controversial prominence in biomedicine and the wider culture. Yet an art work from a century ago can still surprise. In 1900 the Leipzig sculptor Carl Seffner made a marble bust of the anatomist Wilhelm His, the founder of modern human embryology, holding a model embryo in his right hand. Rather than straightforwardly signalling the subject’s achievements, the unusual accoutrement doubtless puzzled many viewers more than did the professor himself. The talk will discuss the design of this double portrait and reconstruct its display in art exhibitions and other settings. This should suggest some relations between embryology and portraiture and shed light on how the identities of embryologists and embryos have changed.

A wonderful item for any medical museum!

Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick (and sometime visitor to Copenhagen) is inviting everyone to participate in a cyberconference on the ‘emerging/converging technologies’ research agenda, i.e., the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science into a common interdisciplinary framework for the alleged betterment of the human condition.

The cyberconference — which is sponsored by the EU’s 6th FRP ( ‘Knowledge Politics and New Converging Technologies’ — will start on Monday, May 7. It is organized around a number of opening statements (see below), and a week later, Steve will intervene for ‘real time’ discussion, before the conference resumes for another week’s discussions.

Read More

National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) History of Medicine Division has launched a new web exhibit called “Diseases of the Mind: Highlights of American Psychiatry Through 1900”. It covers the 18th and 19th centuries only and thus falls outside the period limit of his blog, but since web exhibits are always interesting to learn from I thought I would mention it anyway.

Unfortunately, however, there are not many positive lessons to draw from this site. The texts are factually okey and there are some well-chosen and evocative pictures from the library’s Images from the History of Medicine collection. But the historiography is traditional at best, and the site architecture is far from what one would expect from a 2007 web exhibit — there are no references to the history of psychiatry literature, there are are few internal links, but no external links, and overall the website reads like a pretty traditional introductory historical chapter to a psychiatry textbook.

In other words, this exhibit does not live up to the usual standards of NLM’s History of Medicine Division. Any other opinions on this?

In a chapter titled “Primary suspects: reflections on autobiography and life stories in the history of molecular biology”, Rena Selya, lecturer in the Dept of History, UCLA, describes some of the challenges of writing biographies of contemporary scientists who have “a strong received history, complete with heroes, occasional villains and victims”. The chapter appears in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography which the author of this humble blog post has edited for Ashgate (UK) and which hopefully will be in print next week.

Read More

In the last issue of Nordisk Museologi (Journal of Nordic Museums and Museology), Kristian Hvidtfeldt Nielsen from the Steno Institute in Aarhus argues that science museums today are caught in a paradox.

On the one hand museums wish to establish two-way interactions with the public about science and its relations with culture and society in a mode-2 fashion, á la Gibbons et al. (1994) On the other hand, he says, science museums are often based on a mode-1 understanding of science, i.e., as academic, investigator-initiated and discipline-based knowledge production.

Nielsen finds this problematic, and — since he is apparently a supporter of mode-2 knowledge production — suggests that science museums ought to be recreated “in interaction with similar transformation processes in the mode-2 society” (p. 40, my transl.) to emphasise the close interaction between science and society.

Read More

I think the three-day symposium on presence and meaning cultures in museums held at the Medical Museion last week worked quite well. Jens Hauser‘s seminar has already been reported here. Sepp Gumbrecht’s Wednesday guest lecture “Do Productions of Presence Yield a Presence Culture? A Retrospective” was attended by about 75 scholars and students who were treated with a 1hr45min impassioned tour-de-force by one of the most gifted lecturers in the humanities today.

Read More