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Biomedicine in museums

Is Single Cell Electrophoresis ("Comet Assay") an "Imaging Technology"?

Hi Susanne — this is an awesome one:

(from Metasystems)
I’ve been browsing around for a while. These are cool images, yes. But do they involve “imaging”?

Aren’t they rather “images” that serve as approximate “measures” in a metonymical way, as a “stand-ins” for physical parameters, in this case the “degree of DNA breakage”? Like this variant:


(from Mariusz Jankowski’s website, University of Southern Maine)

“Imaging”, on the other hand, would, in my view, be a technology which, in this case, produced an “image” of the break “itself”. Like Ehrlich’s “beautiful pictures” depicted the alleged side-chains on the surface of cells …

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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