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A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides. (Blake Gopnik, “National Portrait Gallery bows to censors, withdraws Wojnarowicz video on gay love”, Washington Post, 30 November 30, 2010; thanks to Judy Chelnick for the link)

I torsdags fejrede vi åbningen af Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies (MeST) i Medicinsk Museion’s anatomiske teater med to interessante festtaler. Charis Thompson (professor i Gender & Women’s Studies ved UC Berkeley) talte om videnskabs- og teknologistudiers rolle som kritikere af og  entusiaster for forskning. Derpå talte Ken Arnold (leder af Wellcome Trusts Public Programmes team) om hvad kunst […]

After reading Fierce Biotech’s evaluation of the Top 10 Phase III Failures of 2010, I’m convinced that Phase III trials are more exciting than goose-pimple horror movies or the ups and downs of the NYSE. If a pharma company succeeds, there’s lots (lots!) of money in the waiting. But losses can be excruciatingly high too. Fierce Biotech’s list […]

Det er tid at planlægge eventuelle papers til den 23. nordiske medicinhistoriske kongress, som bliver afholdt på Nasjonalt medisinsk museum i Oslo, den 25. – 27. maj 2011 De vil gerne have indlæg om: * Studier av kunnskap innenfor ulike profesjoner på det helse- og medisinhistoriske området * Innsamling og bruk av muntlig kildemateriale innenfor […]

In the last session of the conference in September, Thomas Schnalke from Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum made an allegory on the situation of the medical museums today, suggesting that these kinds of museums might be conceived as patients suffering from a molecular medicine and virtual reality virus. He went on to put forward that art and artists, […]

Visiting Lotte residential care home is always an experience. The first thing you notice upon entering is there are no signs warning you of something or pictograms and ideograms giving instructions. The next thing you notice is the lack of plastic. No carers in wipe down aprons, no wipe clean table clothes, plastic beakers or […]

Hvis nogen derude går og undrer sig over, hvad det her Medicinsk Museion er for noget og ikke mindst, hvor det det er på vej hen, afholder Dansk Medicinsk-historiske Selskab næste onsdag 8. december 2010 kl. 19.30 et arrangement, der kan kaste lys over emnet. I Medicinsk Museions auditorium, Bredgade 62, København K vil professor […]

Remember Tom Cruise wawing hands in front of the imaginary screen in the movie Minority Report? Well, Hans Rosling (the famous visualiser-wizard of human demography) does it much better in this awesome presentation of changes in income and life expectance throughout the last 200 years. It’s a BBC production, and will certainly set new standards for […]

Some conference announcements are distributed a year in advance, others just come all too late. Like the workshop on ‘Tacit Knowing: Manual Knowledge in Art, Science and Technology’ which will be held 15-16 December at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The workshop will focus on Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowing’, i.e. the […]

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate). A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene. The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the […]

Du sidder i biografens mørke. Duften af popkorn og tilbageholdte åndedræt. En dyb stemme: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ6To5G3Os

We’ve just opened our new exhibition, ‘The Chemistry of Life’, in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (the Panum Building). For the record, here’s the talk I gave at the opening (for images from the opening, see here): The occasion for Medical Museion’s new exhibition, ’The Chemistry of […]