Blog

I’ve just bought Michael Crichton’s new bioengineering thriller Next — about venture capitalists and biotech companies. The flap promises a blend of “fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS”; a genetic world which is “fast, furious, and out of control”. I’m not a Crichton fan […]

In the last meeting of the “Towards a new materialism” reading group (at Medical Museion last Thursday) we discussed Sharon Macdonald’s Politics of Display. We touched upon several interesting topics, including the notion of democratising museums, and at one point in the (as usual very lively) discussion I wondered if anyone had thought about the possibility of a WikiMuseum. It turned out that nobody […]

Keith Miller reviews Simon Schama’s BBC2 series “Power of Art” in TLS (1 December). Four central quotes from the essay: “What Schama gives us on screen is a series of deft essays in what used to be called art appreciation” “What is under discussion is primarily the thing in itself” “Schama’s purpose is to enact […]

Google (who else?) have just launched the beta version of Patent Search. The database currently contains all approx. 7 million US patents from 1790s to mid-2006 — and will be continuously updated and expanded to cover a number of non-US patent offices as well. Read more about it here. Needless to say this is a potentially […]

Steven Shapin has written an excellent critical review (in London Review of Books, 30 November, pp. 31-33) of David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (2006). In Shapin’s reading, Wootton’s book is a crusade against “the grain of contemporary historical writing” epitomised by the late Roy Porter; Wootton’s aim is to resuscitate the traditional medical historical project […]

It’s only two weeks left before Medical Museion enters the centenary year 2007. Our earlier incarnation — the Medical History Museum — was established in 1906-1907. Strictly arithmetically speaking the centenary was in 2005-2006 — but like everyone celebrated the year 2000 as the Millenium year (and not 1999, which strictly speaking was the 2000th year after zero), […]

Will one of the unintended efffects of ‘translational medicine’ be that the traditional playfulness that characterizes the life science culture will become stymied by politically correct medical science committee people? The recent case of censoring gene names is an early warning sign. The Human Genome Organisation Gene Nomenclature Committee is about to rename a number of genes which […]

‘Translational medicine’ (or ‘from bench to bedside’) is one of recent popular notions in  biomedical research policy discourse. The idea is to strenghten the relations between basic life science research and clinical work: “Translational medicine facilitates the rapid, effective application of results in the research laboratory to patients in the clinic”, says one of Science magazine’s website editors. At first […]

I wonder how much we could do out of photo- and electronmicroscopic art in an exhibition context? The practice of turning microscopic scientifc objects into art objects goes all the way back to the beginning of light microscopy in seventeenth century, and since then generations of microscope users have alternated between taking a scientific and an […]

Evolutionary theory is one of those conceptual approaches that knocks on the door of recent biomedicine. What role might evolutionary thinking have on future medical practice? To answer this and similar questions we are organizing a symposium on “What and Why Medical Doctors Need to Know About Evolution”, Friday 15 December 9-12.30 at the Panum Institute, Blegdamsvej 3 […]

Every historian’s/curator’s wet dream is to find the door to a forgotten attic with all sorts of so far unseen historical documents and artefacts. This is what two former staff members at the Willard Psychiatric Center in New York State and a New York State Museum curator did in 1995 when they opened a hidden door to an […]

There has been some controversy in recent years about the possible beneficial vascular effects of drinking moderate amounts of red wine. Is it in the alcohol or in some other molecules in the complex wine soup? A report in this week’s issue of Nature confirms what we all thought — viz. that the effect can be correlated to […]