recent biomed

In my humble opinion, transhumanism is one of the most interesting intellectual movements today. It attracts some philosophers; quite a few high-ranking people from the fields of nanotech, biotech, information tech and cognitive science; and some accomplished artists and writers as well, like Michel Houellebecq. It has also drawn some severe criticisms, for example from Francis Fukuyama (in Our Posthuman Future, 2002). Yet it […]

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 […]

Today The Scientist is presenting the winners of the first Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards. They started with 60 nominations (out of tens or hundreds of thousands of lab web sites on the net), then a select group of judges short-listed ten top sites — and now the winners have been chosen. The result is intriguing! […]

I’m nurturing a crush on lab-on-a-chip technology! I’m browsing issues of the journal Lab on a Chip,   (cover and inner cover of LOC, vol. 7 (9), 2007) reading about all possible kinds of technologies of miniaturization for chemistry, biology, medicine and bioengineering. My favourite topic is biomolecular motors, like bacterial flagellar motors (which cannot be used in vitro on a […]

I think it would be worthwhile to think a little more about ephemera in a contemporary biomedical context (cf. yesterday’s post + Jessica’s and Mike’s comments to it). The term ‘ephemera’ (n. pl. of ephêmeros = short-lived) is often used by collectors for documents that were produced for the moment and not for long shelf-life: posters, recipes, advertisements, […]

Yet another wish-I-were-there seminar organised by the History of Medicine Divsion at NLM (NIH), namely on 12 December, when Peter Keating (U Quebec, Montreal) shall speak about “Who’s Minding the Data? A History and Sociology of Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Cancer Trials”. Here’s Peter’s abstract: Modern biomedicine is based on a number of novel institutions and practices […]

Software collecting as part of curating recent science is controversial among museum curators. At the Medical Museion we have started collecting first software items such as epidemiological risk assessment tools. This raises the issue of how to classify and preserve these objects (s. previous post). Just 20 years from now, hardware availability will be critical in order to […]

Our panel proposal for next years SLSA conference, “Figurations of Knowledge”, which will be held in Berlin from the 2nd to the 8th of June, has been accepted. Here follows our general outline and individual abstracts. Recent biomedicine and vitality This panel addresses different emergences of ‘vitality’ in recent biomedicine. It brings together diverse case […]

Most science, technology and medicine today originates in ‘Empire’, not in ‘Multitude‘. But there are interesting exceptions, for example The 2nd annual Maker Faire in the Bay Area in May, which seems to have been a feast for bottom-up inventive science and technology geeks — if you can trust this video (from Quest). Make-zine described the Maker Faire as a “science […]

I’m waiting for someone to write a Begriffsgeschichte of the contemporary biomedical discourse. The most recent Begriff-candidate on my list is ‘nanomedicine‘. The field’s pioneer, Robert A. Freitas, used the term ‘medical nanotechnology’ in a paper in 1998; a year later, the shorthand ‘nanomedicine’ appeared for the first time in a scientific article; and the same year (1999) Landes Bioscience started publishing a […]

During the last two months, readers of The Scientist have nominated 60 life science laboratory web sites for the monthly magazine’s ‘Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards’. A group of judges have evaluated the nominated sites according to four criteria (design, usability, content and community) and shortlisted 10 of them. And now it’s the readers’ turn, again — to vote for the […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are looking for a full-time archivist in the Office of NIH History who shall maintain the documentary and artifact collections at the Office and the Stetten Museum, including more than 30,000 prints and photographs, 2,000 instruments and artifacts, 400 books, and 1,500 feet of documents and audiovisuals. Some of the collections are used in exhibits […]