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The final conference of the EU project “Challenges of Biomedicine: Socio-Cultural Contexts, European Governance and Bioethics” will be held at the University of Vienna, June 14-16, 2007 under the title “Engineering European Bodies: When Biomedical Technologies Challenge European Governance, Bioethics and Identities”

Looks like our spam filter is too efficient — in other words, it also blocks bona fide comments. Since we get about a thousand spam comments a day, we cannot spend time on sorting out which are sham and which are authentic. [Added 27 Dec.: now we’ve manually moderated all bona fide comments: excuses to Isabelle Dussauge, Mette […]

In the last meeting of the “Towards a new materialism” reading group (at Medical Museion last Thursday) we discussed Sharon Macdonald’s Politics of Display. We touched upon several interesting topics, including the notion of democratising museums, and at one point in the (as usual very lively) discussion I wondered if anyone had thought about the possibility of a WikiMuseum. It turned out that nobody […]

Keith Miller reviews Simon Schama’s BBC2 series “Power of Art” in TLS (1 December). Four central quotes from the essay: “What Schama gives us on screen is a series of deft essays in what used to be called art appreciation” “What is under discussion is primarily the thing in itself” “Schama’s purpose is to enact […]

Steven Shapin has written an excellent critical review (in London Review of Books, 30 November, pp. 31-33) of David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (2006). In Shapin’s reading, Wootton’s book is a crusade against “the grain of contemporary historical writing” epitomised by the late Roy Porter; Wootton’s aim is to resuscitate the traditional medical historical project […]

I wonder how much we could do out of photo- and electronmicroscopic art in an exhibition context? The practice of turning microscopic scientifc objects into art objects goes all the way back to the beginning of light microscopy in seventeenth century, and since then generations of microscope users have alternated between taking a scientific and an […]

Evolutionary theory is one of those conceptual approaches that knocks on the door of recent biomedicine. What role might evolutionary thinking have on future medical practice? To answer this and similar questions we are organizing a symposium on “What and Why Medical Doctors Need to Know About Evolution”, Friday 15 December 9-12.30 at the Panum Institute, Blegdamsvej 3 […]

There has been some controversy in recent years about the possible beneficial vascular effects of drinking moderate amounts of red wine. Is it in the alcohol or in some other molecules in the complex wine soup? A report in this week’s issue of Nature confirms what we all thought — viz. that the effect can be correlated to […]

Another interesting aspect of multi-participant-generated scientific papers is that they will make it more difficult to retain traditional means (e.g.,co-authorship in articles in high impact peer-reviewed journals) for evaluating scientific research performance. As one report to the National Science Foundation said already six years ago: “the shift from multidisciplinary to integrated research … will require changes […]

The Office of NIH History has posted a job listing for their new Director. For more information go to www.usajobs.gov and search for vacancy #OD-07-146557-DE. The job closes on January 26, 2007, and is expected to be filled next spring. See also the new issue of their Newsletter.

Just got this from one of the organizers — looks like an interesting meeting to all of us who work on visualisation: Visualising Nature: Making Images and the Production of Biological Knowledge from Early Modern Natural History to Contemporary Life Sciences Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences Ischia, 3 July – 10 […]

The ultimate Google project is to turn all textual and numerical representations of the world – all books, manuscripts etc. – into searchable digital format. Great! But what is lost in the process? In a commentary in the 6 October issue of the TLS (“Such attics cleared of me: Saving writers’ manuscripts for the nation”, pp. […]