news

Tilli Tansey — historian of contemporary medicine, a specialist in oral history, and the prime mover behind the famous Wellcome Witness Seminar series — will give her inaugural lecture as newly appointed professor at UCL on Monday 9 March 2009 @ 6.30 pm (Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre, London). The lecture is titled ‘Models and Mechanisms: Aspects of Biomedicine at UCL in […]

Just received a reminder about nominations for this year’s Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits. The award was established in 1985 to recognize excellence in museums and museum exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry, and engineering to the general public. The jury pays special attention to good design and production, of course, but also to whether the […]

Over and over again I’ve praised Derek Lowe’s blog ‘In the Pipeline’ (see for example here). Derek delivers almost daily insights into the world of drug research, from chemical lab work routines to Big Pharma management and economics. Yesterday’s post (‘A cure for the common cold …’) is a fine comment on the problematic quality of pharma communication on the mass media. I quote […]

In today’s online issue of Computerworld, Mike Elgan makes a convincing argument for the break-through of the e-book. What will propel the so far failing e-book into a strong market position, he believes, is Amazon’s awaited release of the Kindle platform on mobiles. Elgan’s six arguments, especially that of the deepening recession and the mobile habits of youngsters, are compelling. […]

Artist Phillip Warnell (see earlier posts about his movie ‘The Girl With X-Ray Eyes’ and his pill camera installation) is just now visiting Medical Museion, where he is researching possibilities for a number of visually and conceptually driven projects. Firstly, Phillip is guest-editing an issue of The Performance Research Journal on the theme ‘Transplantations’ (see more here). As well as inviting contributions from an […]

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) invites submissions for its bi-annual meeting in Heidelberg, 3-6 September 2009. The general theme of the meeting — “Global Developments and Local Specificities in the History of Medicine and Health” — includes issues like: the impact of globalisation processes (political, economic, means of communication etc.) on local […]

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 […]

Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout’s website displays quite a few interesting works of interest for medical museum designers, like CasAnus (2007), a house which is (reasonably anatomically accurately) shaped like the human digestive system. It’s made to function as a small hotel, with bed- and bathroom. I thought it would be great to enter it through the inflated anus, but there seems to be a door behind the […]

‘An unbelievably romantic prize with beautiful colours’ [‘ett otroligt romantiskt pris med vackra färger’] — that’s how an inorganic chemist at the University of Gothenburg characterizes today’s news about the Nobel prize in chemistry. I’m not sure I understand what he means by ‘romantic’. I would rather call it a ‘medical’ prize in disguise, like most chemical Nobel prizes […]

A collection of videodocumentaries of art projects that implement contemporary technologies of artificial life, robotics, and bio- and genetic engineering has just opened in the Kaliningrad branch of the Russian National Centre for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition — curated by Dmitry Bulatov under the title ‘Evolution Haute Couture: Art and science in the post-biological age’ — contains a row of interesting works including, for […]