I stumbled over the following, rather sweeping, statement about the genre of academic conference proceedings in a recent book review by Anke Timmermann, formerly historian at Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia:

The genre of conference proceedings is a dying one, and in many cases for good reason. Too often they stage a cacophony of scholarly voices — some of them playing their discipline skillfully, others following a solitary, slightly offbeat tune far away from the crowd, and yet others missing the tone of the orchestration altogether.

(in Technology and Culture, 50: 687-688, 2009)

My immediate reaction is nodding agreement. Proceedings from big conferences are probably the last kind of collected volumes I would expect something exciting from. They are usually almost as bad a Festschrifts.

However, it depends on the kind of conference. Proceedings from world congresses are dying dinosaurs, agreed. But a volume of selected papers from a well-planned workshop on a well-defined topic at the research front is a different affair. So I don’t think you can generalise as Anke does.

Her remark was one in passing only. It opens up for a more systematic study of the rise and fall of genres of academic writin — and of the concept of ‘genre’ in academic publishing generally.

Enjoy our Yule tree with gene chip decoration — combining German midwinter tradition with the contemporary biomedical heritage:

Four years ago, San Francisco-based biochemist Raven Hanna quit protein sequencing and began designing silver necklaces and earrings in the shape of molecules instead. Today she sells more than 2000 pieces a year: 
neurotransmitter earrings, endorphin necklace, amino acid jewelry, serotonin cufflinks, and so forth. For details and order form, see her website, Made with Molecules:

See also interview in San Francisco Chronicle online. She could have been part of our Design4Science exhibition last spring.

(Thanks to Jessica for the tip)

A laconic message from our colleagues at the NMHM in Washington, DC:

The Federal Government in DC is closed on December 21 due to the snowstorm, so the Medical Museum will [be] closed.

Here in Nopenhagen, it’s minus 2 centigrade, and the medical museum is closed for historical reasons (museums in the Nordic countries have always been closed on Mondays). Wouldn’t dream of closing down state institutions because of a few inches of snow.

People interested in medical science communication in museums are well advised to broaden their vision to other domains of science communication studies and practices. There is much to be learned from science communication studies dealing with a wide array of sciences through a variety of media.

One forum for such learning from others is the series of annual ‘Science and the Public’ conferences in UK. These meetings aim to bring together, as the organisers put it, “the various strands of academia which consider science’s relationships with groups generally called ‘the public’”  (I must admit that I love that phrasing, “groups generally called’ the public'”, it sounds so academically keep-a-distance-ish :-).

I participated (and presented) at the meeting in Manchester in 2008 — a very positive experience; very informal atmosphere and high quality presentations; good scholarly karma.

Next year’s meeting is going to be held at Imperial College in London, 3-4 July 2010. Alice Bell and her organiser-colleagues are expecting participants and contributions from a wide range of disciplines, like science and technology studies, history of science, geography, psychology, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, development studies, English literature, science policy studies and much more. And the range of topics covered may include (but are not limited to):

* PUS, PEST, PR.
* Surveying public knowledge and attitudes.
* Science and the arts (including science fiction).
* Science, publics and personal identity.
* The role of industry and/ or the third sector in public engagement
and scientific research.
* The challenges of ‘upstream’ engagement.
* Popular science and professionalization.
* Specific public-science issues: e.g. climate change, MMR, energy policy, GMOs.
* Studies of specific media: e.g. film, books, the internet, museums, radio.
* Science, religion and the ‘New Atheism’.
* Politically engaged scientists.
* Churnalism vs. investigative science journalism.
* Edu-tainment.
* Scientific advisers, spin and secrecy.
* Patients and publics in health services.
* Science and the sceptics.
* Amateur science.

I guess that would cater for most science communication palates. Send a 300 word abstract to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 1 March 2010. You can also send in a panel proposals.

(Thanks to Alice for the info).

A new spam type has appeared in my Akismet filter, viz., announcements for dissertation writing services. For example, DissertationResearch is a “custom thesis writing service that will always give you custom written dissertations and original thesis and dissertation service”; they claim they can deliver 100% authentic, fully referenced Masters theses written by certified writers about all kinds of academic and professional subjects; customers are guaranteed privacy and confidentiality (I bet they need it) and they go out of their way to ensure that there is no plagiarism involved. EssaysExperts’s website looks somewhat less professional, but promises approx. the same.

This is academic capitalism in its purest form. Why bother to write a mediocre thesis when you can buy a first-class product written by a certified writer with a real (because he/she needs to know what they are writing about!) PhD?

I wonder how many dissertations that are actually being produced this way today? It must be difficult to get a realistic picture of how common this kind of fake thesis production is. A custom written dissertation with no plagiarism involved is almost impossible to expose. The quality of the websites indicates there are enough customers out there who are willing to pay (they don’t look like vulgar phishing operations).

Den fjerde årlige konference for det svenske medicinhistoriske netværk finder sted på Insitutionen for idé- och lärdomshistoria, Uppsala Universitet, den 10. maj. Fokus i år er teori og metode mht. “medicin og magt”, med følgende mulige udgangspunkter:

Läkarmakt och medikalisering (ex. maktrelationer läkare–patienter, läkarrollens makt över livets gränser, maktrelationer medicin–andra vetenskaper)

Professionalisering (ex. maktrelationer läkare–andra yrkeskategorier inom vården, maktrelationer medicin–kvacksalveri).

Medicinens roll i styrning av moderna samhällen (ex. biomakt och governmentality, teorier om samhälle, befolkning och politik, självstyrning och avancerad liberalism).

Normalisering (medicinens makt i förhållande till ”den andre”, definierad utifrån parametrar som kön, ras, klass etc.)

Eller, varför inte: medicinhistorikerns makt.

Det sidste lyder ret tiltalende 😉

Send interessetilmelding til Tony Gustavsson, tony.gustavsson@idehist.uu.se, eller Annika Berg, annika.berg@idehist.uu.s

A new book titled Transnational Lives (eds., Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) discusses how the transnationalism of lives “threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography”. As the editors point out in the blurb, nationality has been determined by “complex combinations of birthplace, language, residence, citizenship, sex, ethnic identity, racial classification and allegiance”; but “human lives continually elude official classifications”.

Indeed. And many scientific lives are among the most transnational of all. In my experience, scientists often think about themselves in terms of their disciplinary background and research specialty rather than in terms of national identity (“I’m a molecular biologist”, rather than “I’m Swedish”). And most disciplinary identities are of course transnational, at least since the 19th century.

Immunologist and 1984 medical Nobel Prize winner (1984) Niels Jerne is a case in point. Born in London by parents who carried Danish passports, he grew up in the Netherlands, married a woman from the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, studied medicine in Copenhagen and then pursued his career in the US, Germany and Switzerland, before retiring in the south of France where he died at the age of 83. (More about his life story here.)

Nevertheless, biographical dictionaries continue to label Jerne as a “Danish” scientist. And so it is with most scientists; short biographers and obituarists are almost always classifying scientists in terms of their nationality, as if this was the most important distinguishing characteristic of a life in science: “American biochemist XX”, “German physiologist YY”, “British molecular biologist ZZ”, and so on. Why does nationality have this strong status in life descriptions and identity formation , even among scientists, who are among the most transnational of all human kinds?

I’ve always wondered why bioethics and research ethics are routinely referred to as obligatory passage points in most biomedical and life science PhD programmes — and why science communication is more rarely emphasised in postgraduate training.

Does this emphasis on ethics and the corresponding  lack of attention to science communication reflect a deeply felt need from the side of biomedical and life scientists? No, not necessarily, at least not if we should believe the results of a survey made by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) about the importance of a variety of useful ‘transferrable skills’.

Of the transferable skills listed in the survey, management and grant application skills are considered the most desirable by senior scientists. But they also value the importance of improving their skills in public communication. Whereas skills in research ethics/bioethics are considered much less important. 

When ~400 senior Europan life scientists were asked which complementary skills they would have liked to receive training in earlier in their career, 37% and 33% mentioned public communication and peer-to-peer communication, whereas only 17% and 11% mentioned research ethics and bioethics:

When asked which complementary skills they would like to improve, public communication and peer-to-peer communication was chosen by 28% and 13% respectively, while research ethics and bioethics was chosen by 3% and 5% only:

Another interesting angle to this is that senior scientists value the importance of research ethics and peer-to-peer communication skills for research students (in contrast to themselves) very highly (4,4 and 4,2 points on a scale from 5-1), whereas bioethics and public communication skills are valued less important for the students (3,6 and 2,8 on the scale). In other words, senior faculty values more general mind-expanding skills for themselves and wants their students to stick to narrow technical training.

All in all, it seems like science communication skills in the biomedical and life sciences — either public engagement skills for senior faculty and peer-to-peer communication skills for PhD students — ought to be upgraded.

(thanks to David Karlin, Wellcome Trust, for making me aware of the EMBO report on transferrable skills)

I just got a mail from Springer that offers me to publish my short article on crowdsourcing and museum acquisitions (forthcoming in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin) in their so called ‘Open Choice option for Open Access programme’, so that it can be “freely available to everyone everywhere”.

I love open access, of course, like all other scholars and scientists. But my love of open access cools down considerably when I see what this ‘option’ would cost my research grant or my university. It’s pretty hefty: US$ 3000/ € 2000 (!). And it’s only 5-6 printed pages.

Well, I’m becoming used to this kind of capitalistic publishing policies. But what irritates me especially in this case is that if I happen to click on the wrong online button — these ‘yes’ vs. ‘no’ buttons are pretty hazy, so it’s really easy to press the wrong one when you’re in a hurry — the US$ 3000 ‘Open Choice, yes please’ order “is final and can’t be cancelled later”. One wrong little click, and you are tapping your research grant for a considerable amount of money! Not just robbing fees, also robbing methods.