recent biomed

Here’s an interesting opportunity for bloggers specializing in medical and health communication. The NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research is organizing a three-day course on “Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research” in Bethesda next June — free registration, meals and lodging are provided (but you have to pay for your travel). There are only 50 spots and competition […]

Yesterday, December 9, I joined the 40th Anniversary Celebration of ‘Engelbart and The Dawn of Interactive Computing’ at Stanford University to celebrate what has been called the ‘mother of all demos’. On that day in 1968, 40 years ago, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart and his team in Stanford Research […]

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology. “Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part […]

Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) reports from a medical conference that he attended the other day. How, instead of listening to yet another lecture on laparoscopy, he walked around the industrial exhibition area scooping up a variety of freebies. “What is knowledge compared to all the free stuff I bagged from the pharmaceutical company stands?!”, he says. The foray resulted in an LED flashlight, a […]

This blog uses a microarray pattern as background wallpaper — as a symbol of the new postgenomic challenge to the public engagement with medicine in general and to medical history museums in particular. And so we take every opportunity to display microarray images. Like this pic which flew in my face this morning when I opened an […]

The acquisition of medical museum artifacts is usually seen as a job for specialists (curators) with historical training. To curate a collected artifact for later use in exhibitions, you are supposed to know where it came from, how it was produced and used, what meanings were attributed to it, what role it played in medical practice, how it related to other things, and so […]

Just an afterthought to the earlier post (of 29 September) about biomedical versus mundane personal identity in the neonatal clinic: What remains in my memory now, seven weeks later, is the strong presence of the surveillance monitor displays, especially in the night hours. During day hours, our embodied newborn and the monitor display competed with each other for my attention. It […]

It’s only one year ago that the first commercial personal genome services became available to ordinary customers, thus initiating what might become a new major postgenomic health industry. deCODEme was launched on 16 November, 2007, and 23andMe three days later. As Attila Csordás points out, the media (and blog) coverage of 23andMe has been far more intense than that of deCODEme. Why? The products are […]

Telemedicine has already been around for a while — especially in image-based diagnostics where specialists can, in principle, be located anywhere in the world when they interpret, say, photos of dermatological conditions or CT/MRI scanning images (and have flexible working hours and earn a lot of money). Telemedical practices thus sustain the general trend of out-sourcing and marketization of medicine in the […]

We all know how babies can be conceived in test-tubes, that we can clone eggs in petri dishes, and that embryos can be stored in the freezer. Old-fashioned sex is increasingly substituted with artificial conception. But what does a leading bio-artist and art historian think of all this? Suzanne Anker from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, gives a seminar in Cambridge on Tuesday (HPS […]

The emergence of evidence-based medicine is one of the most interesting issues in the history of contemporary medical history. Wish I were in Stockholm on Monday 3 November when Ingemar Bohlin from the STS Section at the University of Gothenburg will speak about evidence-based decision making in a science-based society and the origin, distribution and limits of the ‘evidence […]

On 11-12 December, the Postgraduate Forum on Genetics and Society — set up ten years ago to “bring together researchers interested in how biosciences and society(s) intersect” — organizes a colloquium at Lancaster University on the theme ‘Social and biosciences – a critical collaboration’. Keynote speech from Steve Sturdy (Genomics Forum Deputy Director), panel session with Richard Tutton (Lancaster), Niall Scott (Uclan) and Adam […]