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… and I also wish I could be in Oxford on Wednesday at 5pm to attend the Museum of History of Science’s seminar and listen to David Gooding from the Science Studies Centre @ University of Bath when he talks about “Visual Theories: Materials, Models and Methods”. Here’s his abstract which brings up some interesting problems of relevance for the “Biomedicine […]

Some ten years ago analysts at Gartner, an information and technology research and advisory company, suggested that the acceptance of new information technologies tend to follow a ‘hype cycle’. First comes a trigger phase with intitial curiosity, then a peak with wide-spread publicity and inflated expectations (the hype), followed by a phase of disillusionment when the new technology fails to meet the expectations. Then comes a slow recovery phase; […]

Wish I were in Cambridge today! At 1pm, Nick Hopwood will speak about “Anatomist holds model embryo: A marble portrait from 1900” at the Natural History Cabinet’s bag lunch: Embryo images have in the last few decades acquired extraordinary and controversial prominence in biomedicine and the wider culture. Yet an art work from a century ago can still […]

Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick (and sometime visitor to Copenhagen) is inviting everyone to participate in a cyberconference on the ‘emerging/converging technologies’ research agenda, i.e., the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science into a common interdisciplinary framework for the alleged betterment of the human condition. The cyberconference — which is sponsored by the […]

National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) History of Medicine Division has launched a new web exhibit called “Diseases of the Mind: Highlights of American Psychiatry Through 1900”. It covers the 18th and 19th centuries only and thus falls outside the period limit of his blog, but since web exhibits are always interesting to learn from I thought I would mention it anyway. […]

The Nordic Network for Visual Social Science arranges its second conference in Stockholm October 25-27, 2007 (please note, dates have been corrected by the committee). First announcement and call for papers and presentations (abstract submission before June 15) The conference will be held during three days with a program combining Presentations by and meetings with […]

In a chapter titled “Primary suspects: reflections on autobiography and life stories in the history of molecular biology”, Rena Selya, lecturer in the Dept of History, UCLA, describes some of the challenges of writing biographies of contemporary scientists who have “a strong received history, complete with heroes, occasional villains and victims”. The chapter appears in The History and […]

In the last issue of Nordisk Museologi (Journal of Nordic Museums and Museology), Kristian Hvidtfeldt Nielsen from the Steno Institute in Aarhus argues that science museums today are caught in a paradox. On the one hand museums wish to establish two-way interactions with the public about science and its relations with culture and society in a mode-2 fashion, á la […]

I think the three-day symposium on presence and meaning cultures in museums held at the Medical Museion last week worked quite well. Jens Hauser‘s seminar has already been reported here. Sepp Gumbrecht’s Wednesday guest lecture “Do Productions of Presence Yield a Presence Culture? A Retrospective” was attended by about 75 scholars and students who were treated with a 1hr45min impassioned tour-de-force […]

‘Systems biology‘ is the label of the new interdisciplinary field of study of organisms as integrated and interacting networks of genes, proteins and biochemical reactions. In an essay in the 8 February issue of Nature (vol 445, 2007), MIT historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller discussed the clash between a traditional physics and a traditional biology […]

Science Museum already has two educational websites: www.ingenious.org.uk and www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk. Now (as announced last Tuesday) they are going to build a new multimedia website based on their medical history collections aimed at high school and undergrad student (and the general public, of course). The goal is to place images (supplemented by a series of interactive tools) of around 4,000 “interesting, sometimes beautiful but also […]

Jens Hauser’s seminar last Tuesday (17 April) was a very inspiring overview of the field of bioart as wet art.  Based on a precirculated paper (‘Observations on an art of growing importance: Towards a phenomenological approach to art involving biotechnology’) Jens developed his idea that bioart as wet art is a phenomenon of increasing re-materialization […]