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This session at the conference in September circled around the role of art in the museum, and how museums and artists can and should work together. The first speaker, Karen Ingham, emphasized that the concept of art in museums essentially refers to interdisciplinary happenings and should always be a product of dialogue. She talked about […]

Last winter, I was invited to contribute to a thematic issue (edited by Oren Harman) on scientific biography for the Journal of the History of Biology.  I decided to revisit and revise a genre analysis I had written a couple of years earlier and the result is an article titled ‘The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of bioi of contemporary […]

One of the sessions at last month’s conference on ‘Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums’ in Copenhagen focused on visual media in exhibitions. Ramunas Kondratas, formerly National Museum of American History (Smithsonian), presented the idea of using video footage to document biomedical machinery too large to collected or exhibited in the […]

In 2000, a group of university museum people around Europe founded UNIVERSEUM as a loose network for the preservation of the European academic heritage. So far it’s had an informal structure, which has been part of the charm of the organisation. But at the 2010 annual meeting in Uppsala last June, it was decided to organise it more formally with statutes, membership, […]

Luke Jerram has just finished a new glass sculpture of a Plasmodium falciparum merozoite just after it has entered a red blood cell. The artwork is to be auctioned in New York to raise money for the charity Malaria No More. See the sculpture in Jerram’s microbiology artworks collection and a YouTube clip of the newly completed sculpture. (From the Luke Jerram Newsletter, […]

If I were in Durham (UK) on the 15th of October, I would definitely take the opportunity to hear Andreas Musolff (UEA) speak about “Selfish genes, nasty parasites and helpful stem cells – metaphors in the public perception of genetic research” in the Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease’s seminar series. Here’s the abstract: […]

I always feel somewhat uneasy in mood when I’m together with medical scientists. They’re so serious. They see science as a contest for excellence and authority, rather than as a playground for grownup kids. I came to think about this when I read today’s news that the 2010 Nobel prize winner in physics, Andre Geim, “once published a scientific paper […]

Today, the wonderfully informative mailing list of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (which refuses to turn into blog format) reminded me about the fact that in some parts of the world the humanities are still subjects of love and devotion. Latin aficionados at the HPS department have a “a fun […]

One of my British colleagues just mailed me: I feel, sadly, that over here museological thought is constrained by narrow social and pedagogical objectives. Couldn’t agree more. Didactics is a death kiss to museums!

Cannot wait to see the new exhibition WeltWissen (World Knowledge) which opened yesterday at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Organised by the Humboldt University, the Charité Hospital, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences and Humanities and the Max Planck Society, it is announced as the highlight of the Berlin Year of Science with more than 3,200 square meters exhibition space containing 1,500 […]

We’ve just finished the three day conference on ‘Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums’ here at Medical Museion. See the Twitter session here: http://twitter.com/search?q=%23EAMHMS#search?q=%23EAMHMS. Unfortunately, the wifi only worked Thursday afternoon and Saturday afternoon (Friday and Saturday morning it was down),  but the link gives feeling of the discussions. We’ll follow up with a series of […]

I’ve been a fan of the online-based Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) — a hybrid of YouTube and scientific journal that epitomizes the very essence of the notion of ‘biomedicine on display’ — from the very beginning. JoVe has just published its 500th video-article with a splash of celebrity, because it (“Hi-C: A Method to Study the Three-dimensional Architecture of Genomes“) is co-authored […]