No biomedical lab could function without pipettes — the ‘containment of precision-measured transfer of liquids between containers’, as I use to think of them.

Everyone who has a crush on pipettes (and I tell you, there are many of us, as you can see in this Eppendorf video) will just love the new blog Labtutorials in biology.

Created by Bálint Bálint (a junior lecturer at the University of Debrecen), this blog is meant to become a teaching aid for basic biochemical and molecular biology lab practices. The first post was on water, the second is about (YES!) pipettes. All sorts of them. Scroll down the post, and more and more different kinds of pipettes, in still images and videos, appear.

Bálint’s next post will be about serological pipettes. Stay seriously tuned!

(Thanks to Berci for the tip)

Wellcome Film (which is part of the Wellcome Library in London) announces the launch of their own YouTube channel (see more here), Very nice initiative — but how do you get access to the movies???

Added 9pm: Aha, here they are: http://www.youtube.com/user/WellcomeFilm (couldn’t find the link on their website, but found it via YouTube)

Den 28 februar åbner et af mine svenske favoritmuseer, Kalmar Konstmuseum (se tidligere post her), udstillingen “Spridd isolerad konst” som er lavet som en kommentar til et af kunstverdens centrale problemstillinger: Hvad er et kunstobjekt?  Ikke helt uinteressant, når man tager i betragtning at de fleste af vores historiske museumsgenstande er (eller kan betragtes som) kunst- eller kunstindustrielle genstande:

“Utställningen tar sin utgångspunkt i hur ett antal konstnärer och formgivare förhåller sig till (konst-)objektet. Betyder ett (konst-)objekt något i sig? Kan ett objekt i sig bära med sig ett minne, eller en historisk eller politisk implikation? Eller är objektets betydelse något som bara kan existera i en kontext? Eller handlar objekt bara om en yta och att de därför är utbytbara? Själva bruket av objektet förenas i de motsatta uppfattningarna att å ena sidan fungera som något reellt, verkligt och autentisk, i synnerhet i en värld där många känner allt större osäkerhet. Det fysiska objektet blir därmed något att hålla sig fast vid. Å andra sidan ser många individer objektet som något utbytbart där det enda som betyder något är ytan. Det handlar om hur en sak framstår, inte vad det är. Ett synsätt som merparten av varumärkestänkandet går ut på idag. Den fysiska varan med dess bruksvärde är underordnad dess representation på status och personlig identitet. Utställningen kompletteras och inflikas med ett antal sidoperspektiv kring begrepp som massa, relationen konst och design, ytans betydelse, rekonstruktion av kulturella artefakter, lyxprodukter och objektets värde m fl.”

I udstillingen deltager 35 kunstnere og designers (og en professor i erhvervsøkonomi 🙂  Udstillingen er åben indtil 3. maj. Den perfekte søndagsudflugt — der går tog direkte fra Kbh til Kalmar, som i det hele taget en smuk by med bl.a. et oldgammelt slot. Se mere om udstillingen på www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se.

The quest for bringing new and unexplored areas of human life and practice under the conceptual reign of the arts and humanities is endless. For example, the “very short conference” organized by Tate Modern (?) on 20 June — on the theme of shortness:

This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations. Topics that Shortness aims to cover include: aphorisms, txt msgs, short attention spans, nanophilology, music samples, ephemeral relationships, short narratives, punch lines, orgasms and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

Sounds like the perfect conference (it will only last a few hours). The organizers invite submissions for presentations or performances of up to 7 minutes to take place during the “very long dinner” after the conference.

The complete list of medical historical or museological topics which I can think of in this context is extremely short but impressive, for example:

• a short history of short-term memory
• dielectric relaxation of short molecules — a science studies perspective
• episodic museum displays of shortening telomers in ageing rats.

Period.

Send a max 200 word abstract (why so long?) + a max 100 short bio to short.at.tate@googlemail.com before 20 March. More here.

The announcement is from here — it’s not on Tate Modern’s website yet, so it may be a hoax — let’s wait and see 🙂

Historians of medicine are grudgingly beginning to acknowledge the changing media habits in the population — that is, why read a book or a journal article when you can see a streaming video on the web instead?

To prepare the scholarly community for the new media age, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is organizing a workshop on ‘History of Medicine in Motion’, Tuesday 26 May 2009:

The internet is rapidly transforming the boundaries of what is considered serious scholarly material, and allowing for a broader dissemination of findings than has hitherto been possible in history. The increased video saturation among new generation of students has been both a cause for alarm and excitement among academics as they note the decreased attention span of students for print literature on the one hand, and the potential for making their materials more immediately accessible on the other.

Grad students and university staff are invited to submit 3-5 minute video clips and podcasts on any subject within the history of medicine. The workshop will be led by Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard), Hal Cook (UCL) and Asher Tlalim (National Film and Television School). For those who don’t know how to make movies there will also be a one-day training session on 6 March, where participants will learn to use iMovie, Keynote and Garageband.

Excellent inititative. My only caveat: it’s not just ‘new generations of students’ who are changing their media habits; many old hawks like me are also saturated with new media.

I forlængelse af tidligere poster om Design4Science og Colin Rennies glasskulptur;

Colin’s værk tager udgangspunkt i den seneste højopløsningmodel af ATP-syntase, publiceret i en artikel i tidskriftet Science i 1999 (D. Stock, A.G  Leslie og J.E. Walker, “Molecular architecture of the rotary motor in ATP synthase”, Science, vol. 286, ss. 1700-1705). Strukturdata er deponeret i RCSB Protein Data Bank (id nr. 1qo1). Sådan her ser modellen ud i jmol‘s browser:

Og her er Colin Rennies skulptur i glas:

Sådan her skriver Colin på vores engelsksprogede blog, Biomedicine on Display om baggrunden til skulpturen:

“I used this as the most resolved model with the right amount of detail. The stator and the unsolved parts of the molecule are not represented. This model was chosen for its complexity over the earlier fourier maps. It has been translated through various applications and finally rebuilt as a series of NURBS spheres one per atom that intersected with the planes, a Boolean difference operation has then been used to generate holes in the virtual sheets, these have been averaged, and turned into something resembling a stencil, then each sheet imported into the waterjet machine and nested for cutting, so I have had to alter the format of the information quite considerably so as to make this idea work, but have attempted as much as possible to keep the science as accurate as I could, by minimizing disturbance of positions of the atoms used however approximately half of the atoms are not represented”.

Colins værk skal selvfølgelig ikke opfattes som en alternativ videnskabelig model. Han arbejder som glaskunstner, ikke som forsker (selv om han bygger på forskernes arbejde og resultater):

“I do not intend the work to be a model of the molecule. it is not intended to be an aid to understanding the structure of ATPase. More a sculpture responding to some of the conceptual and philosophical questions surrounding humanities search for understanding and our need to see and to construct models of the phenomena we are investigating”.

Størrelsen er ikke uvigtig:

“The monumentality of the scale of the work is important also. it is deliberately one meter cubed, as this is the central measurement, close to human scale and fairly close to the mean of the between subatomic and cosmic and a reference for most spacial measurement. A meter cubed is also a sculptural scale, one that effects the viewer physically and occupies a volume that a human can relate directly to”.

Og valgt af glass som materiale var selvfølgelig afgørende:

“The glass does not represent anything explicitly, it it a vehicle for the image and the material properties are chosen to cloud the view in both the limited transparency of the standard normal iron float glass and the reflections generated in between the sheets. The gaps between the glass deliberately introduce these reflections to add a haze or a halo around the object. It is intended to be difficult to see detail internally, it is not about detail it is more about complexity, about what is and what is not fathomable by human thought. Semantically I wanted the image to appear ghostly, as if it was hardly there, a trace, something mysterious a metaphor for vision, and understanding”.

For en længere diskussion her på bloggen om molekylemodeller, design og kunst, se her.

For some reason I have until recently been unaware of rete, a mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments. The archives (from June 2003 onwards) are available online. The list owner (the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford) will not accept messages for commercial purposes like announcing instruments for sale, etc., but otherwise all messages for academic and museum purposes are welcome. To join, send a blank message to rete-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.

(thanks to Gustav for the tip)

Looks like this blog — together with some 1700 other health-related blogs — has been taken advantage of by WellSphere (see the ugly little banner at the bottom of the right column), which has now been sold to HealthCentral Network. Read more about their copyright scam in this well-researched post on BetterHealth. In principle they seem to own the copyright of everything we’ve posted here since last September. Better be more careful next time one gets mails from a former Stanford physician (Geoff Rutledge) turned CMIO in an internet company.

Tilli Tansey — historian of contemporary medicine, a specialist in oral history, and the prime mover behind the famous Wellcome Witness Seminar series — will give her inaugural lecture as newly appointed professor at UCL on Monday 9 March 2009 @ 6.30 pm (Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre, London). The lecture is titled ‘Models and Mechanisms: Aspects of Biomedicine at UCL in the Twentieth Century’ and will be followed by a reception in the Roberts Foyer.

Just a reminder about the 10th annual UNIVERSEUM Network meeting in Toulouse, 11-13 June, 2009, which we announced a few months ago. The second call emphasis the following topics of interest:

• enhancing and promoting knowledge about European university museums, collections and archives
• preserving and documenting contemporary science and humanities in universities
• European projects for the study and increased access to university heritage

Proposals of max. 200 words to Catherine Gadon (universeum09@adm.ups-tlse.fr) 31 March. For further info, see www.ups-tlse.fr/universeum09 or www.universeum.it.

A perfect set of topics for us here at Medical Musieon — except for the fact that we have scheduled the opening of our new exhibition, ‘Split & Splice’, for Thursday 11 June. Maybe one or two of us could go to Toulouse on the 12th and 13th?