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After trying some of the free online English-English dictionaries on the net I’ve concluded that the one I like best is Free Dictionary. Maybe because you can hear many words in a ‘real’ (?) voice recording, an excellent feature for all of us who want to know how useful words like armamentarium and anthropomorphize are […]

How shall we relate to ‘reality’ of the recent biomedical past? Is there a ‘real’ past or a narratively constructed past? And which past is most ‘real’? Or is the concept ‘real’ out of of question here? Fredric Jameson indirectly makes a nice point with reference to Hegelian dialectics in his recent review (in the […]

A reading group/PhD course with the title “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine”, is starting next month in Copenhagen and Lund. The seminar is arranged by the History of Technology Division at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, […]

Remember Michael Crichton’s science fiction thriller Prey (2002)? In which the bad guys created swarms of nanorobots, and the good guy lost his wife (but saved his kids) in his struggle to counter the swarms that left their secret lab environment somewhere in the Nevada desert to start replicating in a Darwinian fashion and thus […]

(Denne post var oprindeligt publiceret den 16. august, men er genopslået, pga den debat som har udfoldet sig i mellemtiden, se kommentarerne) Invitation til stiftende generalforsamling i faglig forening for STS i Danmark, 16. november 2006. Tema: Bredden og synligheden i dansk STS Science and Technology Studies er et internationalt, multidisciplinært felt, som er i […]

Her er programmet for afholdte Museion-seminarer fra december 2005 og frem. Seminarer inkl. evt. abstracts og materiale flyttes til denne side, når de er afholdt. For abstracts, klik på side 2 (for tidligere seminarprogrammer, se her)

Contested categories, 2nd Annual Symposium of the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network, 14-17 January 2007, hosted by the Medical Museion, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen. The symposium will focus on how the recent biosciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: The social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries […]

The 1½ year old internet video clip broadcasting system YouTube (the moving pictures counterpart to flickr.com) is expanding rapidly. Much of it is private rubbish from the horizon of a mobile camera and the technical quality of most clips is still pretty mediocre. But the range of topics is astounding and with an acquisition rate […]

I’ve just finished reading (or rather struggling my way through) Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Possibility of an Island (originally published as La possibilité d’une île). It’s crafted as the autobiographical story of a few years in the life of a successful stand-up comedian David who, after being co-opted by a religious sect and disbandoned […]

Liv Carlé Mortensen, “The Amazone” (from Huskegruppen’s website) Medical Museion’s new exhibition, ‘The Face of Disease’ (‘Sygdommens Ansigt’), inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal, and now classical, essay Illness as Metaphor (1977) opens today, Thursday 24 August. The (uncensored) exhibition can be seen 24 hours a day in the 25 basement windows of Medical Museion at […]

Earlier today I went to the opening of Mette Bersang and Louise Bøgelund Saugmann’s exhibition “Suspended between breathing in and breathing out” in the subterranean passage between the Panum Institute and the Danish National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen (see announcement and flyer here). It’s a fairly small exhibition (only 14 pictures) of photos of interieurs […]

We tend to think of recent biomedical artefacts as more or less spectacular high-tech things, like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines or knock-out mice. But many vital artefacts in the biomedical laboratory or medical clinic are mundane things — like plastic gloves, ink markers and centrifuge tubes. They may not be so fancy, but […]