recent biomed

‘An unbelievably romantic prize with beautiful colours’ [‘ett otroligt romantiskt pris med vackra färger’] — that’s how an inorganic chemist at the University of Gothenburg characterizes today’s news about the Nobel prize in chemistry. I’m not sure I understand what he means by ‘romantic’. I would rather call it a ‘medical’ prize in disguise, like most chemical Nobel prizes […]

A recent announcement for a lecture by Tim Hunt, joint winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain tomorrow, Thursday 9 October, reminded me of the problems with using scientists as sources for biographical stories. Tim Hunt will be talking about the inspirations behind his life in science. Says the announcement: […]

Today’s most interesting medical history news is not that Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier have been awarded half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus”. The interesting news is that Robert Gallo doesn’t share the prize, and that he is not even mentioned in the press release (only in […]

Camilla’s post about Robert Wilson’s recent lecture at Stanford reminded me of David Pantalony’s essay in the July issue of the History of Science Society Newsletter: Why does a control panel for a computer from 1950 attract several viewers in the architecture and design galleries of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, while similar objects rest unnoticed in storage […]

As I wrote in a previous post, our little newborn was transferred from the maternity ward to the neonatal clinic to keep her under observation for a couple of days (because of an infected thumb; never neglect small wounds in small children, they have a weak immune system!). To keep my paternal anxiety under control, I began to look around […]

We use to think of hospitals and clinics as almost history-free zones. But sometimes medical historical images, artefacts and records show up in the most unexpected medical spaces. Like last week, when I spent a couple of days with our daughter in the neonatal clinic at the Danish National Hospital, i.e., where they care for babies that are born too early (down […]

As several historians of the contemporary life sciences have pointed out, much of biological thinking is metaphorical. Not least in genomics. The race for the human genome in the 1990s and much of subsequent postgenomics has been guided by a series of metaphors that draw on linguistics, management science, and information and communication science. Accordingly, computer science […]

… check out these pics from the installation of the brand new 32 tons heavy 7 Tesla experimental whole-body MRI at the Charité Hospital in Berlin (via Medgadget). Note the caption to the third image: the only thing the blogpost-writer knows about the guy inside the magnet is that he didn’t wear his nipple rings that particular day […]

Back in 2006 we wrote enthusiastically about the first issue of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments — the aim of which is to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. A “YouTube for test tubes”, as it was then called. Since then JoVE has published more than 200 videos of laboratory procedures. Now (says Nature, 4 Sept, p […]

There are many ways of finding biomedical images on the web for exhibition use, and some are better the others. Getty Images, which is otherwise a fantastic online repository of professional high-quality images, is practically useless for a small museum like ours. Search ‘protein’, for example, and you get over a thousand images of eggs, tofu and pork meat […]

In an earlier post Thomas wrote that the CT scanner could seem anonymous for the superficial view. No immediate presence effects. But a closer look revealed that this was certainly not the case. The same could be said about the MRI scanner: ‘No immediate presence effects’. But also in this case a closer look will reveal that the MRI scanner has a lot […]

A collection of videodocumentaries of art projects that implement contemporary technologies of artificial life, robotics, and bio- and genetic engineering has just opened in the Kaliningrad branch of the Russian National Centre for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition — curated by Dmitry Bulatov under the title ‘Evolution Haute Couture: Art and science in the post-biological age’ — contains a row of interesting works including, for […]