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Our panel proposal for next years SLSA conference, “Figurations of Knowledge”, which will be held in Berlin from the 2nd to the 8th of June, has been accepted. Here follows our general outline and individual abstracts. Recent biomedicine and vitality This panel addresses different emergences of ‘vitality’ in recent biomedicine. It brings together diverse case […]

Ever noticed that the URI for this blog is www.corporeality.net/museion? In fact, this is a badly chosen URI. Corporeality means (OED) “the quality or state of being corporeal; bodily form or nature; materiality”. Blogs (and other kinds of websites) are good for writing about and visualising concepts, ideas and things. But they cannot really convey the ‘thingness’ of material things. So, how can material […]

Last month, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford opened a new exhibition called “Small Worlds: the art of the invisible”. Made in collaboration with artist Heather Barnett and poet Will Holloway, the museum uses its collection of Victorian and Edwardian microscopical specimens to stage a display of images, animation and poetry. “Where else”, the Director, Jim […]

As far as I can remember, my academic life has been a constant oscillation between grant applications and research evaluations. Now again. Tuesday we had a four hour long meeting with the Novo Nordisk Foundation reference group who commented on a 22 page report of the “Biomedicine on Display” project (which took at least a week to complete). And now I’m working 18 hours […]

A recent post on this blog about the PRECARD risk assessment software sparked a number of comments on how to handle the problem of software in museum collections. Almost by default, software becomes outdated, and it will quickly become very expensive and time-consuming (or outright impossible) to maintain it in working order. Attitudes towards this […]

Most science, technology and medicine today originates in ‘Empire’, not in ‘Multitude‘. But there are interesting exceptions, for example The 2nd annual Maker Faire in the Bay Area in May, which seems to have been a feast for bottom-up inventive science and technology geeks — if you can trust this video (from Quest). Make-zine described the Maker Faire as a “science […]

More on transplantation: The release of Google Body — “a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet” — has just been announced. The new service is said to include “a fuzzy-logic ‘match my organ’ feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor […]

Apropos our own Søren Bak-Jensen‘s article “To share or not to share: institutional exchange of cadaver kidneys in Denmark” (forthcoming in Medical History in January) — there is also a more satirical side to the history of contemporary transplantation, as you can see on this recent Today Now! morning show in The Onion‘s online edition. Sometimes I’m in doubt whether The […]

I’m waiting for someone to write a Begriffsgeschichte of the contemporary biomedical discourse. The most recent Begriff-candidate on my list is ‘nanomedicine‘. The field’s pioneer, Robert A. Freitas, used the term ‘medical nanotechnology’ in a paper in 1998; a year later, the shorthand ‘nanomedicine’ appeared for the first time in a scientific article; and the same year (1999) Landes Bioscience started publishing a […]

At the Medical Museion, we have continuing discussion about how to handle the intangible (unhandable?) yet still material elements of recent biomedicine (genes, molecules, proteins, reagents etc.) in a museum setting. How to display what cannot be perceived? Sadly, my recent field trip to the Medica 2007 medical fair did not provide much in the […]

During the last two months, readers of The Scientist have nominated 60 life science laboratory web sites for the monthly magazine’s ‘Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards’. A group of judges have evaluated the nominated sites according to four criteria (design, usability, content and community) and shortlisted 10 of them. And now it’s the readers’ turn, again — to vote for the […]

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin announces two 2-year postdoctoral fellowships associated to the Research Network “History of Scientific Objects”, beginning May 2008. For more details, see http://scientificobjects.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de or contact Hannah Lund (hlund@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). Dead-line is 1 January 2008.