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The National Institutes of Health has a pretty large medical history collection, but you can’t see anything of it in any designated exhibition area. However, parts of the collection is on display in showcases around the huge NIH campus.  Here, for example, is a Varian A-60 NMR machine which was used at NIH in the 1960s on display in the lobby of the Natcher Conference Center (I […]

The Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago, led by social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, is announcing a $2 million research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom: Once regarded as a subject worthy of the most rigorous inquiries in order to discern its nature and benefits, wisdom is currently overlooked as a topic for serious scholarly […]

Had lunch yesterday with Lund historian of science Gustav Holmberg, author of the fine blog Det Perfekta Tomrummet (in Swedish). Gustav prefers to publish pics of things and other people (on another blog) but rarely of himself — so here at last are two portraits of Gustav, from Alfred’s pasta restaurant in Lund:

The abstracts of the two contemporary biomedicine-oriented talks at the conference ‘Re:place 2007: the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology’ in Berlin next month (see earlier post here) have now been put on the net, namely Michelle Barker‘s (School of Media Arts, University of New South Wales) paper “From Life to Cognition: Investigating the Role of […]

The third annual ‘Science & the Public’ conference will be held at the University of Manchester, Saturday 21 – Sunday 22 June, 2008. As the organisers point out, science communication is a much more complex thing than scientific journals and scientific meetings: Today the´sciences are linked to society through many different channels of communication. The public interfaces with […]

Until recently blogs and blog posts have not been accepted as legitimate references in scientific writings. This state of affairs is seemingly about to change, however. The 2nd edition of the authoritative Citing Medicine: The National Library of Medicine Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers (2007) includes a new section (26C) with detailed instructions for how […]

In earlier posts (e.g., here, here and here) I’ve discussed new buzz-notions in contemporary biomedicine, like ‘translational medicine’. Another ubiquitous buzz-notion is ‘personalised medicine’ — i.e., “the use of detailed information about a patient’s genotype or level of gene expression and a patient’s clinical data in order to select a medication, therapy or preventative measure that is particularly […]

Last week, the Steno Museum at Aarhus University launched their most recent temporary exhibition. Named ‘ÆGløsninger‘, the display deals with reproduction, and especially with recent technologies aimed at either preventing or facilitating pregnancy. The exhibition is curated by Morten Skydsgaard and Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer. The exhibition is aimed at a wide audience, and it […]

Continuing on Søren’s post (and Adam’s comment) and further on last week’s post about the short paper that Jan Eric Olsén and I gave at the Artefacts XII meeting at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, 17-18 September: In the second part of the presentation we asked two participants to join us in a demonstration […]

Science Museum in London is re-advertising a position as exhibition curator for history of medical science and clinical medicine. Application dead-line is 12 October. Here’s the job description:

Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Paris), Daniel Kevles (Yale) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG, Berlin) are inviting abstracts for a workshop on “Living properties: Making knowledge and controlling ownership in the history of biology” to be held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 29-31 May 2008. Here’s their call for papers:

During a year as artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Karl Grimes has curated (or rather re-curated) a joint exhibition with the Gallery of Photography called “Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk” which opens tomorrow, September 27: In photographs, drawings, lightboxes, text and sound, Grimes’s re-interpretation of the Natural History Museum’s collections and Victorian museum practice […]