Blog

One of the challenges for a museum of medicine intent on collecting recent and contemporary medical artefacts is to get an overview of the historical development of medical instruments, medical technological systems and the medical device industry. Trade shows and their catalogues (published or online) are excellent sources. But memoirs and reminiscences of people who have been […]

I det ene hjørne i Det Kgl. Frederiks Hospitals Apotek på Medicinsk Museion knejser en 63 cm høj grågrøn bemalet beholder af tin på en rektangulær sokkel. Det er en smuk beholder, som næppe undgår den besøgendes blik. Med store bløde guldbogstaver på sort baggrund toner Christian d. 5’s monogram frem omgivet af en båndkartouche […]

Seed is running a series of monthly portraits of workbenches of interesting people (like Oliver Sacks, a renowned bat expert, an industrial designer, etc.) The latest portrait, published in yesterday’s online issue, is the lab bench of Martin Chalfie, one of the three who won a medical Nobel last year for the discovery of green fluorescent protein […]

Gott exempel på forskningsformidling som tilfredsstiller alle nyhedsverdens krav på “lige her og nu!” reality show: The Brain Observatory ved University of California San Diego viser på streaming video hvordan de laver histologiske tyndsnit af hjernen af en patient. Og de gør det altså lige nu. Patienten (som kaldes H.M) led af alvorlig amnesi. Efter […]

The Brain Observatory at UCSD is right now showing the slicing of the brain of an amnesic patient into histological sections on streaming video. The whole brain of the dead patient (called H.M.) was frozen to -40C and is now being sectioned in a whole-organ microtome during one continuous session that they expect will last about […]

We have just recruited Morten Hillgaard Bülow as a PhD candidate. The three-year stipend is financed by the new interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen. The Center was established last year with a budget of 300 mill. DKK for a five-year period — and a smallish amount of the total will […]

Nu ligger Medicinsk Museion godt nok ikke under Kulturministeriet (som KU-museum hører vi under Videnskabsministeriet) — men det gør jo ikke kulturminister Carina Christensens udspil (se dagbladet Politiken idag) mindre interessant. Ministeren mener kort sagt at hvis folket ikke vil komme til museerne, så må museerne ud til folket. Kunsten og kulturarven skal ud på […]

At the last weekly staff lunch meeting we had a short discussion about the notions of ‘topical’ and ‘timely’ exhibitions. A ‘topical/timely’ (Danish: aktuel) exhibition is one that relates to current social or political events, like for example showing a climate exhibition here in 2009. One argument in the discussion was: Aren’t topical/timely exhibitions exactly what […]

Som de fleste sikkert allerede har hørt i radioen her i aften, har Medicinsk Museion, efter lange forhandlinger med en anonym giver i Køge, erhvervet en unik samling af glasampuller, indholdende oldgamle farmakologiske præparater. Samlingen, der betegnes som ‘alternativ’, består ifølge registranten af en række ekstremt væskedrivende naturlige (ikke kemiske!) stoffer og bør derfor indtages i meget, meget små mængder […]

… I just found a blogpost titled: Coffee, Sex, and Other Weird Ways to Not Get Sick. It lists seven weird ways for helping your immune system: 1. Kiss (and while you’re at it, have Sex)! 2. Listen to music. 3. Walk Really Fast, But Don’t Run! 4. Don’t Blow Your Nose. 5. Get Hot! […]

Det er muligvis et fjollet spørgsmål, men jeg har desværre ikke været i stand til at finde den etymologiske forklaring. Det tætteste jeg er kommet er nedenstående tekst: Leech saliva is also full of other important curative chemicals. One is called hirudin, which keeps blood from clotting. Scientists have devised a method to genetically engineer […]

I haven’t been around natural history museum DNA researchers for a while. So I didn’t know there is actually an -omics discipline called ‘museomics‘ — “the large-scale analysis of the DNA content of museum collections”. It’s not a joke, they (the Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics at The Pennsylvania State University and others) mean […]