The National Library of Medicine has just launched an on-line exhibiton about conjoined (‘Siamese’) twins called “From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles“. It contains a number of fine images from the 15h century to the present, with short accompanying texts, based on a careful selection of the most autoritative primary and secondary sources.

Yet I’m not that impressed, because it is far from using the potential of the medium. After all, the strength of web-based exhibitions, compared to IRL exhibitions, is the possibility of using hypertext links. This NLM product does not even make use of internal links to its own bibliography. One has to guess which image is taken from which source.

“From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles” sustains my general impression that libraries are good at finding books and images, but often poor web-designers. Please, send it back to the web curator and ask him/her to revise it!

DeWitt Stetten, Jr., Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health seeks to encourage historical research and writing about biomedical sciences and technology by providing a postdoctoral fellow, at the beginning stages of the professional career, with a year’s research experience in residence at the Office of NIH History.
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Her er en tilbageblik på et studieforløb fra en af de medicinstuderende, som hvert år skriver opgaver på Medicinsk Museion. Mikkel Myatt skrev sin OSVAL II-opgave (en 8 ugers skriftlig opgave på lægestudiets 10 – 12. semester) om ”Psykiatriens historie fra 1970’erne til i dag – oplæg til en udstilling”. Ideen var at undersøge hvilken slags genstande, billeder og dokumenter der vil kunne indsamles fra psykiatriske afdelinger, hvis man vil give et billede af psykiatriens nutidshistorie, som jo i høj grad er præget af den såkaldte ’psykofarmakologiske revolution’.
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After trying some of the free online English-English dictionaries on the net I’ve concluded that the one I like best is Free Dictionary. Maybe because you can hear many words in a ‘real’ (?) voice recording, an excellent feature for all of us who want to know how useful words like armamentarium and anthropomorphize are pronounced in standard American English. (But why not Australian or Scottish voices? I would have loved to hear some Sean Connery-sound-alike pronounce ‘armamentarium’.) Has anybody found another good English-English dictionary?

How shall we relate to ‘reality’ of the recent biomedical past? Is there a ‘real’ past or a narratively constructed past? And which past is most ‘real’? Or is the concept ‘real’ out of of question here? Fredric Jameson indirectly makes a nice point with reference to Hegelian dialectics in his recent review (in the last issue of London Review of Books, 7 September 2006, p.7) of Slavoj Zizek’s The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006) when he says that

There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.

The argument, as transferred to the problem of historical past, then goes:
1) ‘thesis’: there used to be a stupid stereotype about the ‘past’, namely that it appears as ‘real’.
2) ‘antithesis’: then new historicist ingenious corrction is that the underlying reality/essence of history is that it is a non-essentialist cultural construct
3) ‘synthesis’: finally, after all, we return to the reality of the appearance, which is: what the historical past appears like, (i.e., real) was true after all.

A reading group/PhD course with the title “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine”, is starting next month in Copenhagen and Lund.

The seminar is arranged by the History of Technology Division at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, and the Research Policy Institute at Lund University. Here is the announcement:
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Remember Michael Crichton’s science fiction thriller Prey (2002)? In which the bad guys created swarms of nanorobots, and the good guy lost his wife (but saved his kids) in his struggle to counter the swarms that left their secret lab environment somewhere in the Nevada desert to start replicating in a Darwinian fashion and thus potentially threatening to take over the earth. The book had no special literary qualities, but it was efficiently narrated, and too close to real biology to be dismissed as pure fiction.

Technology Review had a good report on the progress of the Crichtonian future made real almost two years ago. (See also the MIT-Harvard based Synthetic Biology working group.) Now The Economist too is catching up with the events. A Special Report in last week’s issue (2-8 September) gives an overview of how far the new science and technology of synthetic biology has come (see here and here). As the leader writer (alas, behind paywall) says, it is considered impolite among biologists to mention the ‘F’ word (‘F’ for Frankenstein, of course :-). Yet, we are not that far away any more, and historians of biology and medicine and biotech STS scholars should begin to prepare for the much needed reflexive work that needs to be done the very day after the reports announcing that the first artificial life form has been created.

The Special Report brings up one very interesting aspect about the new synthetic biology/artificial life field which I haven’t thought about before, viz., the similarity between the history of computer technology and the possible future history of synthetic biology.

We usually think about biomedicine and biotechnology as a Big Science/Big Pharma/Big Agro business thing; biology in the hands of Empire as it were. But to a growing extent biomedicine and biotechnology is beginning to germinate (sic!) in the garages. The number of biotech hobbyists is not overwhelming yet, but the large numbers of students graduating from universities with degrees in the new technologies is likely to increase the ranks of homegrown bio-hackers. And in the same way as there were electronic companies that sold components for computer hackers in the 1970 and 1980s, there are now a growing number of bio-suppliers that provide all the necessary utensils and reagents for garage biotech. Websites like DNAhack.com help you make your own DNA.

Bioterrorism is one outcome of this scenario of course. But another outcome is an exponential increase in the number of benign and creative biohackers who want to change the world for the better. Bioartists like Oron Catts are already building their own tissue culture labs. The democratic potential is enormous (biology and medicine in the hands of the Multitude as it were), while the ethical issues have not really reached the media yet (although it has been an issue among bioethicists for a while).

Her er programmet for afholdte Museion-seminarer fra december 2005 og frem.
Seminarer inkl. evt. abstracts og materiale flyttes til denne side, når de er afholdt.
For abstracts, klik på side 2
(for tidligere seminarprogrammer, se her)
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Contested categories, 2nd Annual Symposium of the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network, 14-17 January 2007, hosted by the Medical Museion, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

The symposium will focus on how the recent biosciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: The social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries are increasingly blurred and become populated by hybrids, cyborgs and boundary objects. New material objects, visual and virtual representations produced and circulated in biomedicine and biotechnology challenge and disrupt the analytical categories of the historiographical and social studies of science. The new categories emerging in this empirical field of the biosciences raise a host of questions:
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The 1½ year old internet video clip broadcasting system YouTube (the moving pictures counterpart to flickr.com) is expanding rapidly. Much of it is private rubbish from the horizon of a mobile camera and the technical quality of most clips is still pretty mediocre. But the range of topics is astounding and with an acquisition rate of about 65,000 new clips a day (yes!), there will soon be quite a lot to see, and statistically there will be some interesting quality stuff in between.

There are actually already a few pieces of interest for the biomedical museologist if you use their search engine creatively.
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