public outreach

“Why Proteins Have to Die So That We May Live”. This was the title of the talk given by Nobel Laureate Dr. Aaron Ciechanover at the international symposium entitled Protein Chemistry: Applications to Combat Diseases held at the University of Copenhagen earlier this week. Three days packed with talks from the world’s leading protein chemists and […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen. His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in […]

Another theme at the “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums”-conference was ‘investigating museum visitors’. Can visitors’ experiences help us make our museums better? Should an exhibition be guided by what the curator is passionate about or by what she thinks the visitor might find interesting? Or should we simply ask visitors to […]

This session at the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month circled around the concept of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, and how we might use techniques of curiosity and wonder to engage people with scientific and historical objects. Joanna Ebenstein —who writes the blog Morbid Anatomy— talked about […]

The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what […]

We’ve just set up the installation ‘An Ageing World’ in the main lobby of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen. The installation has been made to mark the IARU-conference on Ageing, Longevity and Health that takes place 5-7 October, organised by the Center for Healthy Ageing. The simple idea was to make a […]

Medicine and health are too important subjects to be left to scientists only. That is one of the main ideas behind the Wellcome Collection of London. All their exhibitions are medical, but they are never just medical. There is always something more. Like the ’War and Medicine’ exhibition which was accompanied by art video installations […]

I’m thinking of the Corpus Museum between Amsterdam and Den Haag — a 100 feet high building designed as the contours of the human body. The “museum” invites the visitors on a “journey through the human body” during which they can “see, feel and hear how the human body works and what roles healthy food, healthy life and […]

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion. When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that […]

Being invited to join a drawing workshop usually elicits one of two reactions. Either enthusiasm because the person likes to draw or they think the idea sounds interesting or different. The other response is to dismiss the idea completely. This reaction seems to be prompted by two main preconceptions about drawing. The first is that […]

Here’s another new example of a apparently fruitful collaboration between art and biomedicine – an opera called The Lion’s Face exploring Altzheimer’s disease and dementia. This time even with a public engagement with science twist. As Felicity Callard – who were involved in the production of the opera, and who just advertised it on the […]