recent biomed

In an earlier post I discussed the Silicon Valley web-based genetic information up-start company 23andMe as an example of converging technologies. 23andMe and its public-engagement-with-genetics based business idea is the subject of a long and interesting feature article by Thomas Goetz in today’s Wired Magazine. 23andMe is now offering customers to scan their DNA for just $999 (by SNP genotyping from individual saliva samples […]

Last January the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network held its second annual symposium (‘Contested Categories’) here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen. Now it’s time for the third symposium in the series: ‘Standardising objects, stabilising categories’, 12-15 June 2008 at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. Here’s the announcement:

If you happen to pass by Oxford (UK) early next week, use the occasion to attend the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine seminar on Monday 12 November, when Miguel Garcia-Sancho will speak about “Creating a genetic language: DNA sequencing and the emergence of the modern biological databases (1965-1985)” (47 Banbury Road at 2.15 pm). […]

Couldn’t sleep last night. Giorgio Agamben‘s books use to be the perfect over-the-counter remedy against insomnia, so I began reading his latest collection of essays (Profanations, Zone Books, 2007) and was just about to fall asleep when my eyes fell on this line (on p. 83): The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact. which […]

One of the recent acquisitions of the Medical Museion is this copy of the PRECARD Version 2.1 risk assessment software. The software is used by general practitioners to calculate the risk of cardiovascular disease in the patients. Distributed freely in the form seen below, it was used by around 30% of all Danish GPs in […]

Grab your mouse and click for a discount ticket to Prague later this week to see the 3rd International Festival for Arts, Sciences and Technologies (enter3), 8-11 November. Some of the works displayed seem to be very relevant for our biomedicine-on-display-project, for example Linda Čihářová‘s Streptomyces installation where “science methodology meets artistic creation in ‘performative’ photography’”: Says Linda Čihařová: I […]

I spent an hour last Wednesday at the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, DC. It’s not a museum in the usual sense of the word: they have not one single artefact (neither historical nor contemporary). But I understand why they don’t want to call themselves a Science Center, because that term smacks of a building with herds of school […]

Some medical (history) museums and exhibitions — like the Wellcome Collection in London — are easy to find and have a welcoming (!) attitude to visitors. Others are more of a challenge. Last Tuesday I went to the (US) National Museum of Health and Medicine for a visit behind the public area. Curator Alan Hawk guided me around their rich collections, and personally […]

Where else on earth would you, in a Metro station, find an ad like this (bacterial colonies in a petridish) for biomedical jobs? (Medical Center Metro station, Bethesda, 29 Oct ’07)

I’m planning to join this workshop with professor Lisa Cartwright, San Diego, at University of Linköping, Sweden, 21’st of November 2007. Hope to bring home inspiration for the ‘visualisation’ string of the Biomedicine on Display exhibition and book project, particularly regarding visualisations of foetal/embryonic material. Announcement and programme says: Medical practices are in various ways based […]

Isabelle Dussauge from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (see earlier post here) and a former guest in our seminar series (see here) is presenting her almost finished phd-thesis in a paper titled “Anatomy Remediated: Aligning Recent and Older Technomedical Gazes” at the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, tomorrow, Thursday 25 October: This presentation explores the paradoxical […]

The third meeting of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN; see more about the network in an earlier post here) will take place in Barcelona, 30-31 May 2008, focusing on the contemporary history and public understanding of human genetics: