new books, articles etc

Anastasia Filippoupoliti at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (afilipp@gmail.com) and Graeme Farnell at MuseumsEtc, UK (graeme@museumsetc.com) are soliciting papers for a forthcoming book that will explore: the processes involved in developing new science exhibitions in and for museums the issues involved in transforming scientific ideas or events into exhibitions the challenges faced by museums […]

The paper that Susanne and Jan Eric (who are both working in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project) presented at the third Surveillance & Society conference in Sheffield in April 2008 (see earlier blog post here) has just been published in the journal Surveillance & Society (vol. 6, 2009). Here’s the abstract: This article explores two instances of medical […]

A new issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science is out — with, among other things, a thematic section about science at the nanoscale edited by Isaac Record. For example, Joachim Schummer points out that science can be popularized by its ethics (engineering ethics is often propaganda for emerging technology); Joe Pitt explores the rhetorical and […]

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums: In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a […]

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology. “Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part […]

The journal Performance Research is planning a thematic issue (vol. 14, issue 4, 2009) on “notions and practices that correlate with ideas on the … formation of bodies, their somatic dimensions and constitution”. Issue guest editors Ric Allsop and Phillip Warnell are looking for contributions along the following lines: Guest/ host relationships; the possessed body – disguise […]

University Museums and Collections Journal is a new, peer-reviewed, on-line journal (ISSN 2071-7229) published by the International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC; part of ICOM). Editors are Sally MacDonald, University College London; Nathalie Nyst, Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Cornelia Weber, Humboldt University of Berlin. The journal website looks pretty raw at the moment, but it will probably improve soonish. UMCJ […]

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary […]

The journal Medical Humanities — one of the journals in the BMJ Group portfolio, started in the year 2000 as a twice-yearly special edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) — is on the outlook for new manuscripts. The incoming editor Deborah Franklin (who also has her own blog), says that the journal has the ambition to (continue to) be […]

Yesterday I wrote about my experience of visiting Le Laboratoire in Paris. In Chapter 6 of his recent book Artscience (2008) the founder, David Edwards, explains the background for his art-science center. The son of a chemist, David was trained as a chemical engineer, then continued to graduate school where he did theoretical fluid mechanics. After […]

Here are the books I brought for the summer vacation (they do fit together in my own mind, somehow): J. Craig Venter, A life decoded: my genome, my life (Viking, 2007) – see earlier post. David Edwards, Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008) – see post on Tuesday (I hope). Eric […]

Most autobiographies of scientists are terribly boring—soulless accumulations of facts of hardly any interest for others than the near family combined with humourless vindications of the author’s inflated ego—best used as temporary cures against insomnia. When I bought Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded (Viking 2007) more than half a year ago I didn’t have high […]