Blog

The previous post made me think about how we use the word ‘display’. I always use it as a synonym for visual display. But in principle, I guess, the display of medicine could involve any of the senses: auditory, olfactory, tactile etc.. My spontaneous ‘visualisation’ of the display category reflects, I suppose, what has been called the ‘hegemony of the visual’ in contemporary Western […]

The public understanding of biomedicine can be promoted in many forms and disguises. In the last issue of the online journal Genome Biology, Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H. Miller from the Department of Microbiology, UCLA, report the preliminary results of their search for a way to convert genomic sequences to piano music. Their purpose was both to widen the field of public […]

MedWorm! What a nice surprise discovery! MedWorm is a RSS feed provider which daily collects updates from (at the moment) over 3500 4000 medical data sources (medical blogs and web sites, medical journals).   You can then subscribe (e.g., by using Google Reader) to its outgoing RSS feeds which are conveniently diveded into a number of medical categories (see here for […]

There are already two museum sites for the display of contemporary objects (in a historical context) in the street of Bredgade in central Copenhagen: the Danish Museum for Art & Design (Kunstindustrimuseet) in Bredgade 68 and Medical Museion in Bredgade 62. A few months ago a third site — Drud & Køppe gallery contemporary objects — opened in Bredgade 66 (nr. […]

The Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA) are holding their next conference at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, 3-7 June, 2008. Here’s the call for papers: Recent and current research in Science Studies has devoted increasing attention to semantic transfers, translations, and changes of register between forms of knowledge. In terms of […]

Anybody still believing that biomed & biotech STS is something that only goes on in Europe and North America and that universities in South/Southeastern/Eastern Asia are shunning STS in favour of robust but mindless lab bench work? Think again! This job announcement from The National University of Singapore just came in through my mailbox. They are seeking applicants for open-range research & […]

Reminder:  Tuesday 8 May, Kyra Landzelius from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Göteborg University will give a seminar talk at Medical Museion with the title “The Genealogy of a Categorical Trickster: The Preterm Baby as Modernity’s Transcription”. Kyra Landzelius is a medical anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and since coming to Europe she […]

IT geeks come up with one great visualisation project after the other. They have whole websites for visualising data related to information and communication technologies. Even self-ironic ones like the webcomics site xkcd which just aired this Lord of the Rings lookalike representation of online communities of the world: (click here for a larger version) (from xkcd: A webcomic of […]

Most of us believe that high-tech biomedicine and biotechnology are the only roads to better medical therapies in the future. Yet low-tech treatments also flex their muscles now and then. For example, News(at)Nature reports how creepy crawling maggots can be used to treat wounds infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in diabetes patients: There are many other examples of succesful low-tech technologies. My […]

The Google Books project is perhaps not that relevant for our field because we almost only refer to recent (and thus copyrighted) books which are only available in truncated form. But otherwise the project is potentially fantastic. Imagine having all books online that have published in the 500 years from the dawn of printing to the […]

Trust is a key concept in science studies (cf. Ted Porter’s excellent book Trust in Numbers, 1995, just to take one example). Now the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science are organising a workshop on “Trust in Science” to take place at Toronto’s CBC Conference Centre 15-16 October. What’s interesting with this meeting is […]

Today’s big news in the Copenhagen health and life science community is the £55 mill. (600 mill. DKK) grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation to create a brand new center for protein research (proteomics, bioinformatics etc.) at the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, as it will be called, is planned to […]