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The Bio-Rad corporation has released a music video called “Scientists for better PCR” to promote their new 1000-series of thermal cyclers (PCR machines). It’s well done indeed. But I think MedGadget get it wrong when they write that “it does successfully fill the time between test tube changes”. The model for the Bio-Rad video is apparently the 1985 bestselling “We are the world” song by […]

Like many museums around the world, Medical Museion is owned by a university (University of Copenhagen); and like other university museums we are not only a player on the international academic arena but we also constitute a link between the university and the surrounding local and regional community. Our research projects are oriented towards an international audience, but our exhibitions are mainly visited […]

Apropos our perpetual interest in human remains (see earlier posts here and here) — Tiffany Jenkins is a writer and researcher (in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kent, Canterbury) who is exploring the cultural meanings of human remains in museums in her blog TiffanyJenkins — an interesting mix of medical history, archeology, art and museum thinking.

Today’s good news for this humble blog is that we’ve been nominated as one of the top-five in the category “Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog of 2007” — a contest organised by MedGadget: internet journal of emerging medical technologies. Our four competitors in this category (there are seven parallel categories altogether) are the following awesome blogs: Ves Dimov’s (Cleveland) Clinical Cases and Categories, […]

  I’ve just seen Wellcome Collection‘s wonderful new temporary exhibition Sleeping and Dreaming in their new house at 183 Euston Rd. We sleep for about one third of our lives. No wonder therefore that sleeping and dreaming have provoked so much scientific curiosity and inspired so much imaginative creativity throughout the ages.  Thus the Wellcome Collection […]

Our otherwise sensitive antennae seem to be prette insensitive right now — or why else did we miss the deadline for the interdisciplinary conference ‘Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice’ at the University of Washington, Seattle, 15-16 May? Here’s the brief for the meeting — organized by The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington: Museums […]

In a recent special issue of Archaeological Dialogues anthropologist Tim Ingold raises some very interesting issues about the recent theoretical emphasis on materiality. He takes as a starting point for his essay “Materials against materiality” the paradox that the ever-growing literature on materiality and material culture rarely has anything to say about materials, i.e. about […]

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions — here’s another way of integrating the two genres: In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY). Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes […]

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings. For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well? It’s also […]

Forget about subcellular and molecular animation movies being done for research purposes or as didactic tools. The real driving force in the future will be pharma advertising. Take a look at this demo reel from iMed Studios — a spin-off company from Engineering Animation Inc., now part of the Saatchi & Saatchi family — that “develops scientifically accurate, visually impactful, leading edge multimedia […]

In Wikio‘s last blog ranking Biomedicine on Display has reached rank #73 in the health blog category. Could be worse, I guess. My favourite daily-must-read blog, Medgadget is, not surprisingly, ranked as #1. But who cares about ranking anyway 🙂

I’ve been thinking further about what a loose intellectual movement around human enhancement and converging technologies may look like. Did some search and came across the Betterhumans website which seems to be one of the major on-line gathering places for the transhumanist crowd. One of the most prolific contributors to the discussion forum, Anne C., an electrical engineeer in California, expresses a rather […]