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One of the advantages of being a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University is the opportunity to get closer to another culture. Myriad of minor and major differences are emerging to the surface, in everyday rhetoric and actions. One interesting difference between American and Danish culture is, for example, the relationship to cosmetic surgery. The industry is […]

Same procedure as last year? Yes, same procedure as every year! In other words, also this year Medical Museion participates in the Night of Culture (Kulturnatten) in Copenhagen, when hundreds of museums, galleries and other institutions in the inner city area are open from 6pm until midnight. During the last eight years, we’ve had between 2,500 and 3,000 visitors passing through the doors in […]

I’m amazed nobody has thought of this before, viz., making a guessing contest about who will be awarded the Nobel prizes. But apparently Medgadget is the first to do so. The rules of their Guess-A-Nobel contest are easy: post your guess which scientist(s) or discovery(ies) will be awarded in their comment section here. You don’t need to motivate it further. You can take […]

Universities aren’t precisely drawback-free zones — yet I’ve been thinking about how privileged university-based blogs are when I see some of our science blogging peers who (have to, or feel they have to?) fill their blogs with banner ads and Google Adsense links. A university financed blog doesn’t have to think about blog ad networks, average payment per blog post, pay-per-clicks, pay-for-post marketing strategies, banner […]

Yes, if we shall believe the Aarhus Network for Science, Technology and Medicine Studies which is hosting a one-day conference in Aarhus, Denmark, 23 October, under the heading ‘Challenging hyperprofessionalism: The intradisciplinarity of science, technology and medicine studies’. To present “the richness of what is going on across the disciplines”, the organisers invite “research based […]

Following two succesful earlier meetings (in Stockholm in 2006 and in Gothenburg 2007), the Swedish medical history network organizes its third conference, again in Stockholm, on Thursday 29 January 2009. The main item on the meeting agenda is the planned project for writing the history of the Karolinska Institute, founded in 1810, and today one of the world’s leading medical […]

Last year, this blog participated in an online survey of medical blogs undertaken by Ivor Kovic, Ileana Lulic and Gordana Brumini at Rijeka University School of Medicine in Croatia. Now they have published the results in a paper titled “Examining the medical blogosphere: an online survey of medical bloggers” in the last issue of Journal of Medical Internet Research, one of […]

The 10th Lennart Nilsson Award for scientific photography has been given to Anders Persson, Director of the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV) at Linköping University in Sweden, for his techniques for capturing 3D images inside the human body. Persson and his colleagues at the CMIV produce the images by combining ultrasound, MRI- and PET-scanning images. The technique, […]

Although I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades writing biographies and reflecting on biography as a genre, I’ve always been very fond of auto-biographies, especially those of academics and professionals. The reason for this fondness is probably that autobiographies stimulate my fantasies about how my life trajectory could have been different. By engaging in an inner […]

Eager to train myself for the role of a future biocitizen, I’ve looked in vain for a guide to bars, cafés and restaurants with medical motifs. I mean, if Jessica hadn’t put this pic online, I wouldn’t have known that there is a Pharmacy Bar in Washington, DC, would I? Owned by a Latvian pharmacist’s grandson, it has table tops decorated with pills, mirrored medicine […]

Having an affection for scientific biography/autobiography, I was thinking of how I could possibly engage with the conference ‘Academic Autobiography, Intellectual History, and Cultural Memory in the 20th Century’ to be held 26-28 March, 2009 at Universidad de Navarra in Spain. The aim of the meeting is to engage with current discussions among historians, literary critics, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. about how intellectual history and cultural memory […]

When I hear the word ‘curator’ I usually think of museums. Museum curators are the sort of knowledge workers that take care of stuff in collections and make exhibition narratives possible. Now I’ve just learned about another — different yet similar — kind of curators. The background is the current enormous growth in the generation of data from life science research. Large-scale sequencing, high-throughput gene-expression analyses, and mass-spectroscopy projects produce huge amounts […]