recent biomed

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.

Yesterday’s very productive in-house seminar at the Medical Museion concerning future exhibitions related to the ‘Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005’-project brought up a whole range of suggestions as to the type of objects that might be brought in. Part of the discussion circled around ways in which to represent the complicated webs of interaction involved in the circulation of […]

On Friday 14 September William F. Crowley from the Massachusetts General Hospital will talk about “Changing Models of Biomedical Medical Research or Interregnums are Tough for Young Investigators” in the History of Biomedicine Lecture series at the NIH. He will address a basic phenomenon in biomedical policy in the postwar period: Over the past 60 years, biomedical research […]

The on-line Journal of Visualized Experiments (mentioned in an earlier post on this blog), was the first web-based service dedicated to visual demonstrations of experimental methods and protocols. It has been followed by others, for example, LabAction. Both were started by young lab people with little financial backing and both (especially LabAction) have a nice YouTube feel about them. […]

Just want to remind you all that we are arranging the public conference “Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body” here in Copenhagen on Monday 3 September, 10 am – 5 pm. Confirmed speakers include Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London James Elkins, The Art Institute of Chicago Ben Fry, MIT Media Lab Wolfgang Knapp, Universität der Künste, Berlin Steve Kurtz, SUNY-Buffalo […]

I love to discover new professional fields and knowledge-practices that I’ve never heard of before. Today Street Anatomy opened up the virtual door to one of them, viz., that of biocommunication and biovisualisation (formerly medical illustration). I believe what these professionals do is of great significance for what we are trying to achieve in medical museums, including this humble institution, especially exhibitionwise. Take for example […]

One of our new blog siblings is Street Anatomy: Medicine + Art + Design, created in December 2006 by Vanessa Ruiz,   a graduate student in the Biomedical Visualization programme at the University of Illinois (Chicago) — this is the largest medical illustration program in the US, with their own Virtual Reality in Medicine lab. A kind of ‘medicine on display’ programme. […]

Just found a short, but updated and quite useful bibliography of cellular and molecular imaging books and articles from a history of science and STS perspective, compiled by Maura C. Flannery, a St. John’s University professor, who’s major research interest is the visual aspects of biology and the aesthetics of science. Even better, Maura also has a page with […]

Medical blogs vary enormously with respect to quality, updating frequency, and aimed audience. Some are useful and interesting for medical museum curators. I believe Medgadget is one of them. Founded in December 2004 (same month as this humble blog was born) by San Francisco anesthesiologist Michael Ostrovsky, it was announced as “an independent on-line journal covering the latest medical gadgets and technologies, medical science, and […]

Genetics has become progressively important for medicine during the last 50 years — primarily for biomedical research, but also clinically. Consequently the history of genetics is bound to play an important role in the history of contemporary medicine, and historical studies of genetics in different varieties do in fact take up much of the shelf space in libraries of […]

Odile Crick — who drew the first image model of DNA for Jim Watson and Francis Crick’s original 1953 paper in Nature:    — has died at the age of 86, according to The New York Times today. In a “brief interview” (one can imagine his impatience with the journalist), Watson recalls why Crick’s wife was asked to […]

Danish news media have reported today about the results of this year’s university entrance competition. The top story on Danish TV2 was about a young woman whose wildest dream were now being fulfilled — she had been accepted to the molecular biomedicine programme at the University of Copenhagen. Are the news media about to change their attitude to the biomolecular stuff? Maybe it’s time to open […]