recent biomed

One of the problems for museums that want to display contemporary medicine is that many medical devices are hopeless as museum artefacts because they are so damned anonymous. Take CT scanners for example: huge white or light blue plastic/metal boxes, that’s all. People who have been scanned for some serious condition may have strong personal feelings about such artefacts — but for […]

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful. The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we […]

More results of playing with Wordle: here are the 221 members of the History of Biomedical Research Interest Group (BRHIG) gathered for a ‘group picture’: A nice touch is that Wordle incidentally uses its one and only institutional member (because it has such a long name) as a ‘rope’ from which the rest of the group hangs. And […]

If you happen to be based in UK or Ireland you can now apply for one of Wellcome Trust’s Arts Awards — which are given to organisations or individuals for projects that engage the public with biomedical science through the arts. The general idea behind the scheme is that the Trust believes that art is a great mediator for the […]

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary […]

I very much like pipettes as mundane lab artefacts. And I’m wild with Eppendorf (see earlier posts here and here) because they produce these little ephemeral biomedical objects (like microcentrifuge tubes) which are museologically much more interesting than the fancy and first-time-ever stuff that is usually displayed in science, tech and medical museums. I’m also fascinated with biomedical […]

Now at least two companies (ScientificMatch and GenePartner) are providing dating services (down to $199 per single at GenePartner) based on the pretty solid scientific finding (Claus Wedekind and Dustin Penn, Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation, vol 15, 2000) that women are more attracted to men who express less similar HLA genes. Sensing and classifying the expression of the HLA genes is something we […]

“Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins” is the catchy title of an article in Genome Biology two months ago (vol. 9, issue 5, 2008; see online version here). The paper has received some attention in the blogosphere—not least because Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is one of the 23 co-authors of the paper. Celebrity aside, both the project […]

The regulation of public health data collection and display is an interesting field of research for historians of contemporary public health. Here’s how I came to think about it: On our way back to Copenhagen from three days of vacation on the island of Öland off the coast of SE Sweden with its beautiful and peculiar landscape (especially the […]

The BIOS Centre at the LSE is organizing a conference about the politics of the life sciences in an ‘age of biological control’, 16-18 September next year (i.e., 2009). The organisers are particularly interested in papers that

Last august, we invited the founder of Le Laboratorie in Paris, David Edwards, to our workhop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’. His presentation was short and (and at least to me) not very clear, so last time I was in Paris I took the opportunity to see his new art and science meeting […]

Most autobiographies of scientists are terribly boring—soulless accumulations of facts of hardly any interest for others than the near family combined with humourless vindications of the author’s inflated ego—best used as temporary cures against insomnia. When I bought Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded (Viking 2007) more than half a year ago I didn’t have high […]