recent biomed

The Picker Merit low field magnetic resonance scanner represents a failed gamble in the history of MR-scanning in Danish public hospitals. Developed around 1990 by Instrumentarium in Finland , a company that was shortly after bought by Picker, the scanner was an attempt to go against the current trend at the time towards ever more […]

A five-day residential course in “Oral History in the History of Medicine” will be given at the University of Manchester 26-30 March 2007. The course is intended for postgraduates and others who are interested in using oral history to explore the history of medicine and offers a mix of theoretical perspectives and practical sessions. As well as a […]

There is an interesting grey area of linguistic units somewhere between icons, acronyms, short phrases and brands that function as goads to action in the field of science, technology and medicine. The best known and most over-exploited at the moment is probably ‘Web 2.0’, coined by O’Reilly Media to denote “perceived or proposed second generation of […]

This micro-well tray, a proto-type produced in the early 1970s by Nunc A/S, was recently added to the collections of the Medical Museion. The tray, referred to as the Kissmeyer-Nielsen tray, was developed by Flemming Kissmeyer-Nielsen, head of the Tissue Type Laboratory at Århus Kommunehospital (now Skejby Sygehus). Kissmeyer-Nielsen was the leading Danish figure in […]

The Office of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences and the University of Maryland are inviting to a virtual (sic!) meeting on “Visual Culture and Bioscience”, March 5-13, 2007. This international event will create a virtual meeting space for experts from many disciplines to discuss the intersections between visual culture and […]

On Monday 29 January 2007, we (the Medical Museion research group) will present our research project on the historiography and museology of contemporary biomedicine at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. Here’s the program: Thomas Söderqvist: Introduction: The Problem Søren Bak-Jensen: Out of Time: Collecting and Storing Kidneys for Transplantation. Hanne Jessen: What is a Laboratory Animal? A […]

Progress in biomedicine is not all about new methodologies, new empirical findings and new patents. It is also about new metaphors that guide and connect research efforts, technological innovation, investment activities, public opinion, and health political initiatives. Some metaphors are pushed over and over again, but never seem to take off — like the notion of “biosemiotics” which continuous […]

Google (who else?) have just launched the beta version of Patent Search. The database currently contains all approx. 7 million US patents from 1790s to mid-2006 — and will be continuously updated and expanded to cover a number of non-US patent offices as well. Read more about it here. Needless to say this is a potentially […]

Will one of the unintended efffects of ‘translational medicine’ be that the traditional playfulness that characterizes the life science culture will become stymied by politically correct medical science committee people? The recent case of censoring gene names is an early warning sign. The Human Genome Organisation Gene Nomenclature Committee is about to rename a number of genes which […]

‘Translational medicine’ (or ‘from bench to bedside’) is one of recent popular notions in  biomedical research policy discourse. The idea is to strenghten the relations between basic life science research and clinical work: “Translational medicine facilitates the rapid, effective application of results in the research laboratory to patients in the clinic”, says one of Science magazine’s website editors. At first […]

Take a look at the brand new Journal of Visualized Experiments which wants to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. The “YouTube for test tubes”, as news (at) nature writes. The editors’ explicit aim is to help researchers reproduce biomedical experimental procedures, but it certainly has museological applications as well. These videos is a reminder […]

Tonight I am going to bed in company with a month-old (26 October) issue of Nature which carries the article that reports on the sequence of the honeybee genome. There are about 50 different species genomes sequenced or in the process of sequencing at the moment, but this is clearly one of the more interesting because of […]