future medical science and technology

The Waag Society, Amsterdam, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, and University of Amsterdam, have released a call for applications for a 10 month project exploring the use of Bio-Art as a science communication strategy, potentially leading to a PhD project. The relation between art-science and strategies for public engagement raises some fascinating and underexplored questions about how […]

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare: * Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care * Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems * Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems * Clinical Data and Knowledge Management * Cloud Computing for Healthcare * Collaboration Technologies […]

Last Friday I visited Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition Superhuman: Exploring Human Enhancement from 600 BCE to 2050. Feeling rather less than superhuman after a sweaty bike ride from Tooting, I entered the delightfully air-conditioned exhibition space and an absorbing – if at times gut-wrenching – mosaic of objects, films, and texts, providing glimpses into the […]

It’s reasonably easy to imagine how some features of emerging biotechnologies can be turned into museum installations and exhibits. For example, enhancement technologies like nanoprosthetics and tissue engineering can rather easily be imagined as 3D installations. But other concepts are more difficult to translate from words to space. Like morality, for example. I came to […]

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab. Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. […]

Part of my summer reading has been N. Katherine Hayles very interesting and stimulating book, How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The book details the rise of the informational logic of life from the rise of the cybernetic paradigm in the late 1940s and onwards. Hayles writes the book […]

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’): COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture […]

On Thursday 2 December, a new Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen is inaugurated with talks by Sarah Franklin and Ken Arnold. Sarah Franklin will speak about “Life After the In Vitro Fertilisation: Biology Has Become a Technology?”. Sarah Franklin is well-known for his studies of in vitro fertilisation, cloning, embryo research and […]

Most medical museums live in the safe past. Exhibitions rooms are filled with beautiful 19th and 20th century medical instruments and scary pathological body parts in formaldehyde. The present and the future body and its instruments are hardly visible in medical museums. How, for example, shall medical museums handle the fusion of bodies and instruments made […]