news

‘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 […]

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per […]

The program committee of the Society for the History of Technology 2008 Annual Meeting has kindly accepted my proposed paper on ‘Biomedicine, Aesthetics, History, and Garbage: Engagements with the materialities of recent medical technology’. The conference will take place in Lisbon on 10-14 October and marks the second and final leg of the celebrations of SHOT‘s fiftieth anniversary. […]

No, it’s not the final surgical cut I’m thinking of. But Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which came in the International Cut (same year) and Director’s Cut (ten years later), and now eventually the Final Cut (which Scott says is really the final one). The theatre version was out two months ago — today is DVD version […]

45 faculty members and about 20 PhD-students throughout the University of Aarhus (Denmark) have just started a new interdisciplinary network for science, technology and medicine studies. See their website at www.stm.au.dk for news about conferences, seminars, PhD-courses, etc.; send an e-mail to stm@au.dk if you want to subscribe to their newsletter or if you are interested in learning more […]

Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University College, Sweden, invites you to the symposium “Medical technologies and the life world: cultural and ethical perspectives” At Södertörn University College, Room MB505, 15-16 of November 2007.

At Medical Museion we have started collecting conference posters to study visual and cultural practices in biomedical research.  A conference poster is used to present new results that haven’t been published in articles or even completely verified. The poster resembles an academic article in the way it is constructed. It consists of a title, introduction, method, […]

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman and Christopher D. Green at York University’s psychology department have run a blog for the history of psychology for a couple of months now. Advances in the History of Psychology (are they really happy with that ‘Advances’ name?) contains the usual blog-style mix of news items, comments on the literature, job announcements etc from the […]

Philosopher Byron Kaldis at the The Hellenic Open University is asking for contributions to a special theme issue on “Religion and Biotechnology: The Challenge” for the journal The European Legacy (the journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas). The issue (planned for vol. 15, 2010) … will seek to delineate, analyze and discuss the current […]

If you happen to be in the Greater Washington area in late September, take the opportunity to attend a lecture by Richard A. Rettig titled “History-Telling and Innovation in Medicine, a Discussion of False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer”. It’s on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 12:00 in Building 50, room 1227-1233 in the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md.

I have to confess (blushingly) that I find this short, and very PIC, Onion News Network news item about the 100 year old neurosurgeon Carl Wainwright quite funny. Probably because it (somehow obliquely) reminds me of this summer’s much belated but nevertheless extraordinary reading experience — Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, in which the major protagonist is a perfect neurosurgeon in his prime. It […]