recent biomed

I sidste uge blev verden beriget med hele tre publikationer om grisegenomer. Én i Nature, én i PNAS og en i Gigascience. Helt urelateret befandt jeg mig til et SHARE symposium, som handlede om grise – og så også lidt andre dyr. Nærmere bestemt “next-generation” dyremodeller. Og der blev skam også talt om grise. Især den […]

I et lille rum midt inde i Rigshospitalets enorme bygningskompleks sidder en ung mand, og sprinter på en uddateret motionscykel. Han er omgivet af andre mænd i grønne bukser og hvide T-shirts, som skiftevis tager blodprøver og hepper højlydt eftersom belastningen i pedalerne øges. I januar var jeg vidne til dette lettere surrealistiske optrin, da […]

Følger man Medicinsk Museion på Facebook, kan man i december måned dagligt blive opdateret på et lille biomedicinsk juleeventyr. Vi har ladet os inspirere af en anden kendt julefortælling, men skal for en god ordens skyld sige, at vores historie er fuldstændig opdigtet. Julemedikalenderen kan også åbnes dagligt på denne adresse: http://adventcalendr.com/julemedikalender/

Eventually, the final program for the annual Artefacts meeting (this year in Leiden), has just been sent out. Three of us here at Medical Museion (Louise Whiteley, Niels Vilstrup and myself) are going — here are Louise’s and my abstracts: Louise Whiteley: Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process Functional neuroimaging research […]

I have had a paper accepted for the annual joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy. Here is the abstract: Molecular being – philosophy between genes and proteins In this paper, I will attempt to connect the sparking wires of post-genomic molecular biology and new materialist philosophy, particularly the […]

Two weeks ago, friends and colleagues alerted me to Horace Freeland Judson’s recent death. I was amazed to hear he had already reached the age of 80. But then again, 20 years have gone since we first met in 1991-92. Horace had received a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to write a history of immunology, and advertised for postdocs […]

Sometimes I’m asked what ‘biomedicine’ means. It’s rarely medical people that ask, but people from the humanities often do. I use to answer that ‘biomedicine’ is the emerging amalgamation throughout the 20th century of the life sciences and medical research, but I haven’t had an authoritative history of the term to refer to. Now there […]

Actual and potential readers of this blog — that is, everyone with an interest in contemporary medical science and technology in museums — might be interested in this year’s meeting in the Artefacts series on the theme ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, to take place 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, […]

The installation Genomic Enlightenment, which was pre-showed last night for a specially invited scentific audience interested in “deep sequencing” , has involved a lot of work. This is a movie about the skills, joy and team-work that went into making and putting up the beautiful, glimmering wave of microarrays. [biomed]mo30XgOEjFw[/biomed] The installation can be seen in the entrance hall of Medical Museion […]

Like biography, autobiography has always been an important genre for science communication — like Francis Crick’s autobiography What Mad Pursuit (1988). A couple of decades ago, only a tiny scientific elite had, in practice, access to present themselves autobiographically in the form of book-length memoirs and interviews in newspaper and magazines. Science communication through self-presentation was thus largely restricted to […]

I had coffee and cake with our new PhD Adrian Bertoli the other day. Adrian is going to work with the relationship between type-2-diabetes and patient identity throughout the last 50 years, with Thomas as supervisor. Adrian’s project is financed by the cross-disciplinary Center for Healthy Ageing at Copenhagen University. Knowledge about an illness is traditionally communicated […]

The NIH Office of History has just announced a new batch of Stetten Fellowship for postdoctoral historical research on the biomedical sciences and technology since 1945. The stipends are ~$45,000 per year, include health insurance and office accommodation, computer and phone, and can be renewable to a maximum of 24 months. Application deadline is 31 December 2010. Full […]