recent biomed

Since 2004 Medical Museion has used a common commercial microarray (Affymetrix’s GeneChip®) as an icon for our collecting and display efforts. The GeneChip has many of the features that characterise the ongoing biomedical ‘revolution’: it symbolises molecularisation and digitalisation of medicine (at least in diagnostics) and it’s a fine example of the progressive miniaturisation of […]

I’m stunned by this picture which was recently published in the Danish medical weekly (Ugeskrift for Læger, 23 April 2007): (see original article here)  It’s not oyster shells — it’s the remains of artificial pacemakers found in the ovens of the crematorium of the city of Odense (Denmark) between October 2004 and July 2006. Heated to the high temperatures […]

The public understanding of biomedicine can be promoted in many forms and disguises. In the last issue of the online journal Genome Biology, Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H. Miller from the Department of Microbiology, UCLA, report the preliminary results of their search for a way to convert genomic sequences to piano music. Their purpose was both to widen the field of public […]

Anybody still believing that biomed & biotech STS is something that only goes on in Europe and North America and that universities in South/Southeastern/Eastern Asia are shunning STS in favour of robust but mindless lab bench work? Think again! This job announcement from The National University of Singapore just came in through my mailbox. They are seeking applicants for open-range research & […]

Reminder:  Tuesday 8 May, Kyra Landzelius from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Göteborg University will give a seminar talk at Medical Museion with the title “The Genealogy of a Categorical Trickster: The Preterm Baby as Modernity’s Transcription”. Kyra Landzelius is a medical anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and since coming to Europe she […]

Some ten years ago analysts at Gartner, an information and technology research and advisory company, suggested that the acceptance of new information technologies tend to follow a ‘hype cycle’. First comes a trigger phase with intitial curiosity, then a peak with wide-spread publicity and inflated expectations (the hype), followed by a phase of disillusionment when the new technology fails to meet the expectations. Then comes a slow recovery phase; […]

Wish I were in Cambridge today! At 1pm, Nick Hopwood will speak about “Anatomist holds model embryo: A marble portrait from 1900” at the Natural History Cabinet’s bag lunch: Embryo images have in the last few decades acquired extraordinary and controversial prominence in biomedicine and the wider culture. Yet an art work from a century ago can still […]

In a chapter titled “Primary suspects: reflections on autobiography and life stories in the history of molecular biology”, Rena Selya, lecturer in the Dept of History, UCLA, describes some of the challenges of writing biographies of contemporary scientists who have “a strong received history, complete with heroes, occasional villains and victims”. The chapter appears in The History and […]

‘Systems biology‘ is the label of the new interdisciplinary field of study of organisms as integrated and interacting networks of genes, proteins and biochemical reactions. In an essay in the 8 February issue of Nature (vol 445, 2007), MIT historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller discussed the clash between a traditional physics and a traditional biology […]

Heather Munro Prescott, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Harvard University Press, 1998), is conducting a survey about women’s experiences in using emergency contraception (e.g., ‘the morning-after pill’) — information she will use to strengthen the patient perspective in a forthcoming book on emergency contraception. She […]

The National Institutes of Health are ending their search for a new director of the Office of NIH History with a series of public seminars by the candidates for the position: Thu 29 March: Dr. Marcia Meldrum of the University of California, Los Angeles: “Measure for Measure: James Hardy and Henry Beecher on the Problem of Pain […]

The 5 March issue of the Danish medical weekly (Ugeskrift for Læger) reports the results from a qualitative study of pregnant women’s choice of prenatal ultrasound scanning. It turned out that rational risk assessment seems to be a less motivational factor than doctors had expected. Instead, women tended to get involved in the scanning procedures more […]