‘Systems biology‘ is the label of the new interdisciplinary field of study of organisms as integrated and interacting networks of genes, proteins and biochemical reactions. In an essay in the 8 February issue of Nature (vol 445, 2007), MIT historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller discussed the clash between a traditional physics and a traditional biology culture as they meet in this new scientific trading zone.

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Science Museum already has two educational websites: www.ingenious.org.uk and www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk. Now (as announced last Tuesday) they are going to build a new multimedia website based on their medical history collections aimed at high school and undergrad student (and the general public, of course).

The goal is to place images (supplemented by a series of interactive tools) of around 4,000 “interesting, sometimes beautiful but also occasionally macabre objects” online — objects that range “from carefully decorated 16th century maiolica made for pharmacists to ingenious 20th century prosthetic devices to help soldiers damaged in the First World War”. Hopefully they will also put images of some contemporary biomedical objects online, even if these are usually much less macabre than some classical blood-and-gore objects.

The first batch of object images will go online in 2008 and the whole project (which is supported by the Wellcome Trust) will  hopefully be completed in 2011. Congratulations to the grant — we’re looking very much forward to see the final result, including some crisp images of gene chips and transgenic mice!

Jens Hauser’s seminar last Tuesday (17 April) was a very inspiring overview of the field of bioart as wet art. 

Based on a precirculated paper (‘Observations on an art of growing importance: Towards a phenomenological approach to art involving biotechnology’) Jens developed his idea that bioart as wet art is a phenomenon of increasing re-materialization in art and that it needs to be analysed in its phenomenological oscillation between meaning effects and presence effects.

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As contemporary biomedicine — the use of molecular and digital biological and medical technologies — is coming of age, its pioneer practitioners are passing away. As a consequence ‘life writing’ (biography) becomes increasingly important as a genre for understanding its development and workings.

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Next week is a busy ‘presence’ week at Medical Museion. As already announced we are arranging three public events — 1) a seminar with Paris-based author and curator Jens Hauser on Tuesday at 2pm; 2) a guest lecture with Sepp Gumbrecht, Stanford University on Wednesday at 3pm; and 3) the  workshop ‘Making Sense or Sensing the Made’ on Thursday morning. For details, see here. We’ll be back with more details in the next couple of days.

Traditional Danish university freedom was severely restricted by a new university law introduced by the present conservative-liberal (in the European sense) government in 2003. A group of Copenhagen university professors are now opening up for blog discussions about the law and its consequences. The new blog was initiated last autumn by Curt Hansen, an associate professor in education, under the (slightly ironical?) name Professorvældet (‘Professorial power’), but it was recently renamed Forskningsfrihet? (‘Freedom of research?’) to strengthen its legitimacy as a serious forum for discussion of current issues in Danish university and research politics. (Frankly, I think I like the name Professorvældet better — in the long run irony is a better weapon against populist politics than seriousness.) Anyway, good luck!

Dutch medical science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol og Jeanette Pols are giving talks under the joint title ”Care in practice: notes about good and bad technologies” at Center for Health and Society, University of Copenhagen (Ø. Farimagsgade 5, CSS room 2.1.12) tomorrow, Thursday 12 April @ 3.15 PM. Annemarie Mol (Uni of Twente) is best known for The Body Multiple (2002); Jeanette Pols is postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam. The meeting is organised by Mette Nordahl Svendsen og Finn Diderichsen, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Heather Munro Prescott, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Harvard University Press, 1998), is conducting a survey about women’s experiences in using emergency contraception (e.g., ‘the morning-after pill’) — information she will use to strengthen the patient perspective in a forthcoming book on emergency contraception. She writes:

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As you can see (and like last year), we’ve had a few days of (well-deserved) Easter break.

By the way, when googling “easter break”, the highest ranked page coming up is the post “Easter Break” from the Information aesthetics: form follows data – data visualization & visual communication”-blog — which is one of the best newsblogs on visual display of data and information. What a coincidence! Makes you feel you really need a break. (The screen shot below is from an earlier post, it’s well worth an hour’s browsing to see all their inventive ways of visualising data.)

When thinking about collecting contemporary medical objects we are constantly haunted by the question ‘Why?’. Why collect? What is collecting about? What’s its cultural significance? There are shelves of books that try to answer these and similar questions. The last in the row is Paul van der Grijp’s (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Science and Technology in Lille, France) Passion and Profit: Towards an Anthropology of Collecting (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006) which the author describes as follows:

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