Haidy Geismar (Material World) draws attention to Collective Access, an open source collections management program that can be modified and made to fit any kind of collection. Geismar thinks Collective Access is “a great resource for democratizing the process of making collections digital, moving away from proprietary software packages, and is great for rethinking and making flexible ways of organising knowledge around material/visual/digital objects”. Has anybody else tried it?
A few weeks ago, Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives‘s Sara Piasecki kindly called Biomedicine on Display her “current favorite blog”. Thanks! (Though “current” sounds a bit ambiguous; do we risk being thrown into oblivion soon?)
Maybe our potential precarious status has to do with the fact that Sara felt it necessary to take issue with a post about biomedical memory in which I wrote, among other things, that there aren’t many archival and museum institutions around the world that collect contemporary biomedical material and that it costs a substantial amount of money to travel to get access to their holdings. “And here I really must protest”, writes Sara:
it’s not always that hard! We do a huge amount of “e-reference” (meaning you email us and we email you back and information gets exchanged) and a lot of digitization-on-demand (meaning you can see the stuff, or a digital reproduction of it at least, right on your own computer!!). Sure, it might take us a while, but a little bit of delayed gratification never hurt anyone (I think: we may have an old case report on that in the archives…) Here at OHSU, we are keenly aware of the need to collect materials from all corners of the health sciences, to collect as broadly as possible (within the scope of our mission, of course), and to represent all sides of a given issue.
That’s okay. My thoughts will go to OHSU’s archival collection next time I feel like devouring some some original lab protocols. But OHSU aside, few institutions put their stuff online. And in addition, delayed gratification has never been my trademark.
An initiative to learn from: In connection with Jeff Hughes’ (CHSTM, Manchester) talk at the Whipple Museum in Cambridge next week about the early culture of the Cavendish laboratory and its tradition of singing scientific songs, music scientist Torben Rees is getting together a choir to perform some of these songs. Scholarly and art performance mutually support each others.
Maybe we could arrange a combined scholarly and art event in our medical theatre? Is there any archival material that records how pathologists were singing sarcastic medical songs during autopsy? Do the pathologists in CSI-series discretely hum rap texts about maimed bodies? There are many possibilities. Where’s the nearest medical choir?
One of the potentially most interesting workshop titles I’ve seen announced so far this year is ‘Biodigital lives: making, consuming and archiving the lives of technoscience’.
The meeting — convened by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex) and Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster) and hosted by the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), the Centre for Material Digital Culture and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex on 14 July — will “examine issues and questions about digital and biodigital life, lives and identities framed by biosciences, contemporary media and biopolitical cultures”:
From the lives of scientists to the technologisation of life, ‘Biodigital lives’ will analyse biotechnological and bioinformatic forms and practices of identifying, archiving and storying the living. It will discuss diverse forms of new/digital mediation and informatics as they pertain to the lives of people, plants, animals, microbes, viruses and ecosystems entangled in global media, biopolitical institutions and bioeconomies.
Topics might include:
- How digital/life history and genetic genealogies intersect
- Biomediation and biotechnological media in reading and writing lives
- Biodigital memory, narration and identity (e.g. memory and archive, genetics and life story, digital life practices)
- Genomic databases and biobanks as biographical resources
- Techniques of writing, reading, editing and publishing the lives of species and populations
- Life archives and life histories of humans and non-humans
- Synthetic biology and bioinformatic communities from the perspective of biological literacy, design and participation
- Genomes as digital/media artefacts – new media/biotech convergences and commercial genealogies
- Genetics and genomics as/in life narratives and popular culture
- Aesthetic encounters in biodigital life in sci-art, film, games, software, art etc
- Genealogies and critical potentials of bioart/digital media art intersections
The workshop will be arranged around short presentations and will favour discussion and broad participation. 300 words abstracts + short bios to Kate O’Riordan (k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk) by 20 April 2009. Final confirmation and draft programme by 11 May.
Science Museum have just aired their new history of medicine website, Brought to Life. Intended for students and educators, it shows some 2,500 newly-made images of objects from the museum’s history of medicine collection together with historical interpretations, interactives and thematic introductions. The plan is to let it grow to 4000 images over the next year.
Hopefully we’ll be back with a review soonish. Have someone else tried it yet?
(thanks to Robert Bud for the tip)
We’ve just finished the application (in Danish) for a major grant to develop and expand Medical Museion:
See it in greater resolution here:
Unfortunately, the foundations we are sending it to, don’t have the software to disentangle the Wordle-cloud, so we will have to send them a more conventional text version.
We will be back with further info when (or rather if) the application is succesful.
The history of pharmaceutical and biotech history is pretty difficult to get an overview of. Some daring visualizations would be most helpful.
Here’s a promising approach: mktlgcs has created this visualization of FDA pharma application approvals 2000-2008 — an excellent way to get an overview of the activities of the global pharmaceutical industry (all major manufacturers want an FDA approval to operate on the US market):
The interactive original — in which you can put the cursor on a circle/dot to get the application frequence number — can be found here on IBM’s visualization website Many Eyes.
The big circles (Merck, GlaxoSmithCline, Wyeth, Novartis etc.) are the big players, but there are hundreds of small ones in between (FDA also approves medical devices, but it doesn’t look like the medical device industry is included into this data set.)
There is plenty of room for further work along these lines. It would be great to add a dynamic feature to this kind of visualization, for example, make the circles expand and diminish over time, somewhat like Hans Rosling is doing with his dazzling dynamic epidemiological statistics. This would also be a nice way to display the dramatic merger&acquisitions pattern in the pharma industry and the rise of many new small pharma/biotech actors over time.
Pharmaceutical drugs — especially late 20th century drugs — is a pretty challenging topic for medical museums because of the limited variety of material artefacts available for display.
Vials, capsules, tablets, bottles, cartons and prescriptions look much the same; nor are they among the most evocative kinds of artefacts. Curators have to work hard to compensate for the lack of ‘innate’ presence effects in most objects related to pharmaceutical drugs.
It’s not impossible, of course. Images can do the trick, and so can the pills themselves, if arranged in an innovative way. The ‘Cradle to Grave’ installation in British Museum’s Wellcome Gallery was a revelation when it was first shown in 2003 because it blew new life into these otherwise so non-evocative objects by relating them to the audience’s existential imagination.
In other words, much can be achieved by mobilizing imaginative concepts and ideas. The workshop on ‘Drugs, Standards, and Chronic Illness’ to be held in Manchester, 27-28 November 2009, could be a source of inspiration for how to conceptualize an exhibition on drugs. Says the CFP:
Non-communicable illnesses such as … cancer and cardiovascular disease and the role that the development and marketing of treatments for chronic illness have played in the broader history of standardization in medicine will be the central theme of this workshop. The histories of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other non-communicable illnesses have much in common, but there are important differences between them that are worth exploring. Many of the blockbuster drugs of the last 50 years have been developed for the treatment of cardiovascular disorders. In the course of this development, some illnesses have been transformed from acute to chronic (e.g. malignant hypertension) and it has become acceptable to treat physiological parameters that do not cause symptoms but are statistically associated with illness later in life (e.g. mild hypertension or hypercholesterolaemia). In contrast, and with few exceptions, cancer drugs have often been used to treat what might otherwise be considered as orphan diseases and have rarely been as commercially profitable as cardiovascular drugs. Nevertheless, cancer has been central to the development of many of the practices, such as testing, clinical research, and standardization, which are increasingly applied to other fields of medicine, above all the multi-centre randomised clinical trial.
The meeting will be organized around four main analytical points:
- the management of risk and efficacy
- the structure of biomedical research: laboratories, clinics, protocols
- market conceptualisation, market realities, sales and uses
- regulatory frameworks and regulatory practices
Possible themes include: comparisons, e.g. between different illnesses or across different national contexts; issues surrounding notions of the chronic and the acute or the relationship between risk and disease; spaces of drug administration, from inpatient to outpatient departments; institutional developments; the meaning of ‘chemotherapy’ in different contexts; regulatory institutions, policies and practices; the consumption of medicines, the role of patients and patient organizations, and questions of gender; the establishment of standards, etc.
Send less than 500 words abstracts to Carsten Timmermann (carsten.timmermann@manchester.ac.uk) and Viviane Quirke (vquirke@brookes.ac.uk) before 3 April 2009, More info here.
We are currently preparing a small exhibit on the culture and history of proteins and protein research, which is planned to open Friday 4 september in connection with the official opening of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research.
The aim of the exhibition — which shall be placed in the main hall of the Faculty of Health Sciences’s Panum building on U Copenhagen North Campus (right at the entrance to the new eco-friendly and health-promoting canteen) — is to give a historical and cultural perspective on the current focus on proteins in biomedicine and biotechnology.
We want to create an object-rich exhbition, and therefore we would like to get in contact with laboratory and clinical scientists on the Øresund area who may provide us with objects, images and documents (for loan or as gifts) from the last 50 years, which can illustrate research on or clinical use of proteins: measuring instruments, separation equipment, images from laboratory environments, posters, and so forth.
We are especially interested in everyday laboratory and clinical objects, like paper electrophoresis strips, gels, blotting membranes, immunoprecipition plates — in other words, things which laboratory workers usually throw out, but which give a good feeling of how protein research is done in practice. Call or write me (see address here).
To stimulate your imagination with a (more than 50 years old) thing — here are two iconic artefacts in the history of protein research: two vial bottles of raw insulin from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo from around 1935. Insulin was the first purified protein with a well-defined therapeutic purpose and it was also the first protein to be sequenced (in 1955 by Frederick Sanger; Nobel Prize in 1958). 
(the vials are from Novo Nordisk‘s collection of historical objects)
Medicinsk Museion arbejder i øjeblikket på en udstilling om proteinforskningens kultur og historie for at stimulere interessen blandt studerende, ansatte og gæster i Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultets hovedbygning (Panumbygningen) på Blegdamsvej.
Udstillingen skal placeres i vandrehallen i nærheden af det nye kantineområde. Den vil åbne fredag den 4. september i forbindelse med den officielle indvielse af Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research og lukker medio december.
Udstillingsgruppen efterlyser genstande, billeder og dokumenter fra de sidste 50 år, der kan give et billede af forskellige typer af forskning som involverer proteiner. Det kan dreje sig om måleapparatur, separationsudstyr, fotos, eksperimentelle opstillinger, posters, etc. Vi vil ikke mindst have fat i hverdagsting som elektroforesepapir, kolonner, geler, osv. dvs. ting og sager som man nemt kommer til at smide ud, men som giver et fint billede af, hvordan arbejdet er foregået i praksis. Vi kan tage tingene til låns eller som gave.
Kontakt mig på tlf. 2875 3801 eller min mail.
For at stimulere indsamlingsfantasien, her er et glas med råinsulin fra medicinalfirmaet Novo, ca. 1935. Det er ikonisk genstand i proteinudforskningens historie — insulin var det første renfremstillede protein med klar terapeutisk funktion og det første protein der fik bestemt sin primærstruktur (af Frederick Sanger i 1955; Nobelpris 1958).
(glaset indgår i Novo Nordisk A/S samlinger af historiske genstande)