PS to last post: don’t miss the Medical Museion/’Biomedicine on Display’-born session “Recent biomedicine and vitality” on Wednesday 4 june at 15.45-17.15 in the Virchow-Raum, Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. The session is chaired by Jan Eric Olsén and contains the following papers:

• Sniff Andersen Nexø: A matter of disposal: Enacting aborted foetuses in hospitals.
• Hanne Jessen: Vitality of a scientific model: The coming into being and trajectory of a new laboratory animal.
• Susanne Bauer: Risk assessment software and the biopolitics of prevention.
• Jan Eric Olsén: Life struggles and the invaded body.

If you happen to be in Berlin next week, you are welcome to take part in the session ‘Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences’ at the 5th Biannual European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). The session takes place in the Kaiserin-Friederich-Haus (Robert-Koch-Platz 7) on Friday 6 June, 11-13 and has papers by Suzanne Anker, Rob Zwijnenberg, Thomas Söderqvist and Ingeborg Reichle.

First Suzanne Anker (New York), will present a paper about “Semaphores and Surrogates: Stand-ins and Body Doubles”. In 2004 she published (with Dorothy Nelkin) The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004; see http://www.geneculture.org/

Then art historian Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden) will talk about “Bio-Art: Concepts and Matter”. Rob is head of The Arts & Genomics Centre at the University of Leiden, see http://www.artsgenomics.org/

As the third speaker, I will talk about “Five (Good and Bad) Reasons why a Medical Museum Director wants to Bring Art and Science together”.

Finally Ingeborg Reichle, who organizes the session will talk about “Art in the Age of Technoscience” and will present some issues she is dealing with in her forthcoming book “Art in the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art ” (Springer, New York 2009; see: http://www.kunstgeschichte.de/reichle/pub_technoscience_EN.html

For an updated program for the whole SLSA meeting, see here: http://www.zfl.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/bilder/Projekte/slsa/update_20080529.pdf

Interesting websites come and go. There are pompous upstarts that fade out because nobody upgrades them, and there are more humble initiatives that flourish gradually. In the latter category is the Synapse website — a very useful tool, not just for us in the science, technology and medical museum world, but for anyone interested in art-science connections.

The core of the site is an continuously updated database with information about collaborative projects between artists and scientists, an overview of art-science exhibitions, details about more than 200 individuals interested in the field, a thumb-nail gallery of works and so forth. Latest added functionality is an active discussion list which has so far dealt with bioart, robotics and augmenting technologies.

Add to this a pleasant interface and easy navigation — and the result is the next-to-perfect online tool for promoting art-science-technology collaborations.

The only thing I miss is a blog function — but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is in the pipe-line.

Congratulations to Vicki Sowry, program manager for art-research-science at the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) in Adelaide for setting the site up last year and keeping it so well updated.

A couple of months ago the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine asked Medical Museion if we were interested in making a small exhibition about the history of Danish anaesthesiology and intensive care in connection with the fourth Annual Meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (Euroanaesthesia 2008) in Copenhagen.

With 5000 potential exhibition visitors in mind, we said yes, of course! So during the last two months Søren Bak-Jensen and Nicole Rehné have worked hard planning the exhibition and setting it up. The European society has supported us with ~10.000 euros, and we have received valuable help from specialists and a few companies (see credits below).

And today it opened in the west end of the main hall of the Bella Center. An 80 sq.m. display area with a Dräger iron lung from 1952 as the iconic object of modern intensive care placed in the middle:

encircled by showcases that display a number of exquisite artefacts from our collections, including, for example, Ruben resuscitators and a curare flask from the turn of the last century. We have also borrowed some objects from medicotechnical companies Radiometer, AMBU and an evocative movie from Klinisk Film.

Here are some more pictures from first couple of hours when the meeting participants streamed into the huge congress building:

And finally the credits:

Special thanks to Dr. Hans Kirkegaard, Chairman of the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine and a specialist on curare, who took the initative in the first place — here photographed while he is inspecting one of the showcases:

The exhibition closes on Tuesday.

No doubt, this kind of exhibitions is a great opportunity to foster contacts between the medical profession, the medicotechnical industry, medical historians and medical ethnographers. We’ll soon be back with more pictures and reflections on this particular kind of extra-mural medical historical object exhibitions.

On Friday 13 June, Andrea Tone, Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill, will give a talk at Medical Museion about her new book ’The age of anxiety: A history of America’s turbulent affair with tranquilizers’ (forthcoming on Basic Books). Among her earlier books are Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America and Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History (with Elizabeth Siegel Watkins). Now she’s working on the history of post-WWII psychopharmacology, which is one of our active research areas here at Medical Museion — see more about Jesper Vaczy Kragh’s research project here.

The meeting, which begins at 2pm, is co-organised by Jesper and the Danish Society for Psychosocial Medicine (Rikke Krølner). Please pre-register at sej@si-folkesundhed.dk.

At last, we have put together a list of books, articles and unpublished PhD-theses with relation to the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project published between 2005 and 2008. Unfortunately, very few of these publications are yet available online. If you want a copy of any of these, contact the author.

Only publications with relation to the BoD-project are listed. For full publication lists for each author, see here.

Historians of contemporary biomedicine are well advised to listen when leading scientists and well-placed science administrators air their views on interesting trends in the field. When Francis Collins announced yesterday that he will step down as head of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, he also said that he is planning to write a book on the regulatory and scientific issues involved in personalized medicine. Because, in Collins’s view, this is “a fundamental shift in medical care”. An excellent topic for a research project in contemporary history — but a damned difficult one for an exhibition. 

Suggestive calls for papers to interesting seminars and conferences appear in the inbox almost daily. Usually I understand what these messages mean, but sometimes I’m in doubt. For example, I just received one for “Thinking and Making Connections: Cybernetic Heritage in the Social and Human Sciences and Beyond”, a conference to be held at Södertörn University College in Sweden, 10-11 November.

‘Cybernetic heritage’ — sounds good, but what is it? Didn’t find any info on the department’s website, then tried to google it (25 hits today, 26 tomorrow :-), but didn’t become wiser. Is it about the acquisition and preservation of robots in museums? Or the lingering-on of old cybernetic ideas in the social sciences and humanities? Both could be exciting — but maybe the organisers mean something entirely different? 

Attila Chordash (Pimm) reminds us that we spend many hundreds of hours a year looking at desktop background images. Maybe they are among the most looked-at images in our lives. What are scientists’ preferred desktop background images? I know some people who choose awesome images from the Hubble telescope, while others stare at scary creatures from the bottom of the ocean. Pimm prefers this one:

from Bonnet et al., “A Mitochondria-K+ Channel Axis Is Suppressed in Cancer and Its Normalization Promotes Apoptosis and Inhibits Cancer Growth”, Cancer Cell 11 (1), 37-51, 2007 (Figure 1. A Reversible Metabolic-Electrical Remodeling in Cancer Contributes to Resistance to Apoptosis and Reveals Several Potential Therapeutic Target).

Well, it reminds me about the sad fact that the aesthetics of desktop images is so far a much under-researched area of visual culture studies 🙂

Yesterday, we had a whole-day meeting with our new advisory board, appointed by the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences for a three-year period. After a short resumé of our Annual Report for 2007 (which will be on-line soon) the ten Board members engaged in a very lively discussion about our work — from research and teaching to acquisitions and temporary exhibitions. Lots of constructive feedback! In the afternoon we proceeded with the future plans, some of which will later also be presented on this blog.

It’s pretty exhausting to be scrutinised for six hours by a group of ten highly qualified research scholars and museum directors. But it is also an extremely useful exercise. First, the production of a detailed annual report has given us a unique chance to pause for a moment and recapitulate our activities. Second, it’s great to hear a group of experienced people evaluate your work (especially when they are mainly positive :-). And third, the discussion around the table generated a lot of insights which we wouldn’t have been able to produce on our own. In fact, several members of the Board thought that, in the course of the day, the meeting developed from an evaluation event into a mutually inspiring seminar. 

The aims of the Board are:

• to evaluate Medical Museion’s activities, i.e., research, teaching, collection management, acquisitions, exhibitions, and other public outreach initiatives, in the preceeding year
• to evaluate the present and possible future status of Medical Museion in relation to the long-term strategy for the University of Copenhagen and the development of similar institutions internationally
• to discuss Medical Museion’s vision for the forthcoming years and provide inspiration for long-term planning
• to advice the Director of Medical Museion with respect to the realisation of these plans.
• to advice the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences with respect to the overall future development of Medical Museion.

The members of the Board are: Gert Almind, Director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation (chair); Ken Arnold, Head of Public Programmes at the Wellcome Trust, London; Bodil Busk Laursen, Director of the Danish Museum of Art & Design, Copenhagen (vice-chair); Liselotte Højgaard, Head of the Department of Clinical Physiology and Nuclear Medicine & PET and Cyclotron Unit, Danish National Hospital, Copenhagen; Svante Lindqvist, Director of Nobel Museum, Stockholm; Sharon MacDonald, Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester; Robert Martensen, Director of the Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.; John Pickstone, Wellcome Research Professor at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester; Thomas Schnalke, Director of Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin; and Cornelia Weber, General Manager of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, Humboldt Universität, Berlin.

And we were: Bente, Camilla, Søren, Ion and myself. 

Ken Arnold is instructed in the art of sword-opening a Cremant bottle right before the Board dinner on Sunday 25 May.