recent biomed

The Annual Report of Medical Museion (Årsskrift for Medicinsk Museion) has just been published and is about to be distributed. This post has been created for readers’ comments. You can choose to air your ire or stimulate our vanity receptors. (You can write in English or in any Scandinavian language.) If you are not on our snail mail distribution list (which […]

With respect to the PLUS (Public Learning and Understanding of Science) aspect of our work, we, as a public outreach-oriented university department and museum, are in constant competition with web-based media — so I guess it’s important for us to get an overview of what is happening out there. My general feeling is that the whole PLUS field is undergoing […]

The biosciences are not only in dialogue with the humanities and social sciences. Theologians and religious studies scholars are involved too. One of the major funding bodies for this kind of work is the John Templeton Foundation which generously supports research projects, conferences and lectures about different aspects of science and religion (read Christianity). One of their many sponsored events […]

Eventually, the Wellcome Collection has opened after almost two years heavy reconstruction of the Wellcome Trust‘s old headquarters on Euston Rd, London. The building now contains a conference center in the basement, a commendable eating place and a medical bookstore at the ground level, followed by a huge gallery space and the expanded Wellcome Library on the following floors; and finally offices […]

At the weekly staff meeting today we discussed our experiences from the ‘Archaeology-of-contemporary-biomedicine-garbage-day’ last Thursday (see earlier post with pics here). Here are some of the points that came up in the discussion: We were happily surprised by the interest and generosity that researchers and technicians at the medical faculty showed for the collection project; i.e., people were expecting us, they […]

For those who cannot live without their daily dosis of radiological (x-ray, CT, PET, or ultrasound) picture exposure I highly recommend Radiology Picture of the Day, a fusion blog that combines medical professionality with an apparent urge to display iconographically compelling material. Almost every day since November 2006, Laughlin Dawes, a radiology registrar at Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick outside Sydney, has […]

Yesterday’s ‘Great Clearance Day’ at the Medical Faculty was a great success. Not just for the faculty’s technical department staff who threw 11 metric tons of garbage into the huge containers. But also for us at Medical Museion who participated with an ‘archaeology-of-contemporary-biomedical-garbage’ agenda (see former post here). After five hours of hard work we had saved a couple of hundred artefacts (or clusters of artefacts) and some archival material for our […]

If you happen to be in Paris on Thursday 26 June you might consider attending a roundtable discussion at the Ensba-Paris Art School in 14 rue Bonaparte on the theme “The art-science-technology relations as seen through the Leonardo Book Series at MIT Press”, occasioned by the launch of a new book, Signs of Life: Bio Art […]

Ever wondered what Foucault, Agamben and other interesting philosophers meant by ‘biopolitics‘ and ‘biopower‘? Here’s a concrete case. The Danish Conservative politician Pia Christmas Møller suggests today (Berlingske Tidende, 4 June) that the right to acquire a driver’s license shall depend on whether the license candidate is willing to take a stand on the issue of organ donation or […]

The Faculty of Health Sciences at our university has a “Great Clearance Day” on Thursday 21 June. The purpose is to prepare for the big faculty building reallocation exercise that is going to take place in the summer and early autumn. The faculty’s technical dept writes: This will be the day when we will clear our shelves and the […]

Science studies scholars seem to have investigated almost all aspects of science in laboratories — except bodily gestures. Artists Herwig Turk and Günter Stöger are now exploring this neglected dimension of science in their installation “setting04_0006″ which is on display in the group exhibit “Say it isn’t so” in Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen until 16 September 2007. See a Youtube video of the installation here. “Gestures are […]

The recently announced marriage between Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki is not just an innocent piece of celebrity news (the circumstances of the Bahamas beach wedding last week are perfectly romantic though :-). It also signifies one of the basic tendencies in contemporary technoscience, viz. the web-based convergence between postgenomics and information technology. Sergey Brin doesn’t need much of an introduction. But Anne […]