Blog

The National Institutes of Health has a pretty large medical history collection, but you can’t see anything of it in any designated exhibition area. However, parts of the collection is on display in showcases around the huge NIH campus.  Here, for example, is a Varian A-60 NMR machine which was used at NIH in the 1960s on display in the lobby of the Natcher Conference Center (I […]

I’m planning to join this workshop with professor Lisa Cartwright, San Diego, at University of Linköping, Sweden, 21’st of November 2007. Hope to bring home inspiration for the ‘visualisation’ string of the Biomedicine on Display exhibition and book project, particularly regarding visualisations of foetal/embryonic material. Announcement and programme says: Medical practices are in various ways based […]

The Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago, led by social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, is announcing a $2 million research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom: Once regarded as a subject worthy of the most rigorous inquiries in order to discern its nature and benefits, wisdom is currently overlooked as a topic for serious scholarly […]

Isabelle Dussauge from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (see earlier post here) and a former guest in our seminar series (see here) is presenting her almost finished phd-thesis in a paper titled “Anatomy Remediated: Aligning Recent and Older Technomedical Gazes” at the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, tomorrow, Thursday 25 October: This presentation explores the paradoxical […]

The third meeting of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN; see more about the network in an earlier post here) will take place in Barcelona, 30-31 May 2008, focusing on the contemporary history and public understanding of human genetics:

Some bioart leaves me quite indifferent, especially that which is perhaps better called ‘biocraftwork’. Take the exhibition ‘Crystal Structures: Viruses in Glass’ which opened last Thursday at the University of Idaho Commons Reflections Gallery. It contains a number of beaded ‘models’ of viruses — including this ‘Purple Haze’ that is said to represent the Microviridae family — skilfully made by Holly Wichman, a professor of […]

The Department of the History of Science at Harvard University is looking for a historian of 20th-century (and especially post-WWII) molecular biology, biotechnology, and/or the biomedical sciences. They are especially interested in candidates at earlier stages of their careers. Application deadline is December 1, 2007. More details here.

Had lunch yesterday with Lund historian of science Gustav Holmberg, author of the fine blog Det Perfekta Tomrummet (in Swedish). Gustav prefers to publish pics of things and other people (on another blog) but rarely of himself — so here at last are two portraits of Gustav, from Alfred’s pasta restaurant in Lund:

The abstracts of the two contemporary biomedicine-oriented talks at the conference ‘Re:place 2007: the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology’ in Berlin next month (see earlier post here) have now been put on the net, namely Michelle Barker‘s (School of Media Arts, University of New South Wales) paper “From Life to Cognition: Investigating the Role of […]

Mark Jackson, Director of the Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, is giving a lecture in London on Wednesday 21 November on “The Stress of Life: Hans Selye and the Search for Stability”. This is an exciting project because Selye (there is an unfinished short Wikipedia article about him) is one of the most interesting medical researchers in the 20th century, […]

One of my students wrote to me last week and said she was going to London and that she would take the opportunity to attend the event tomorrow evening arranged at the occasion of the publication of Jim Watson’s new book Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science at the Dana Centre, and also buy a signed copy in […]

Anthropologist Mark Auslander and philosopher Andreas Teuber at Brandeis University are convening a symposium called “Visualizing Science: Image-Making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge” (part of their fall 2007 meeting series, Mirrors of Science) on Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 3.40-7pm at the Rose Art Museum: