Uncategorized

Here is an announcement for a workshop that asks some new and interesting questions about the status of ‘biosociety futurology’. The “Futures of Life” workshop is organized by the graduate students and faculty of the Department of S&TS at Cornell University and will take place April 27-29, 2007.  

(originally published 11 October; updated 20 Oct because of new comments):  Today’s (i.e., 11 October) big public health news report is the article by a Johns Hopkins University research team published in The Lancet on-line edition on the number of war-related casualties in Iraq. “We estimate”, the authors conclude, “that as of July, 2006, there have […]

The following report of the annual meeting of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology (Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik, DGGMNT) and the Society for History of Science (Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, GWG) held in Braunschweig, 28 September -1 Oktober 2006 shows that the cultural history of science is flourishing in […]

Adam, here’s something for you:  Conference on “Body and Textuality. Telling Bodies: Practices, Discourses, Looks”, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, 26-30 March, 2007 The body in the 21st century is everything but a certainty, a condition which raises an infinite number of questions. This Conference intends thus to be an interdisciplinary meeting point for discussing the body […]

The journal EMBO Reports has a good review article (“Seeing is understanding: Improvements in computer software and hardware are revolutionizing three-dimensional imaging in biology”, Embo Reports, vol. 7, pp. 467-70) of the state-of-the-art of 3D-imaging in biomedical science — read it here. They refer, among other developments in the field, to a ribosome animation movie made by Said Sannuga, a molecular […]

Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour started their careers with the book Laboratory Life (1979). A child of the linguistic turn in the humanities — one of their theses was the laboratories are about inscriptions; a site were lab people constantly write and inscribe –it became one of the most cited books in the science studies literature. What they missed, […]

Now we’re up and running again. Nick has upgraded us to WordPress 2.0.4 and introduced a new and better spam filter. For better or for worse, this means that there are no more viagra or phentermine pills, mature babes, cheap boys or online poker games on sale in the comment section any more. Our in-house users/writers will also see a new […]

Medens vi går og venter på at fejre Rigshospitalets 250-årsjubilæum i 2007 — med jubilæumsbog af Anne Løkke, stor udstilling af Rikke Vindberg mm. — kan vi rette opmærksomheden mod et lidt mere ydmygt jubilæum. Direktionen for Hvidovre Hospital, et af Københavns regionale sygehuse, har fået lavet en film, “Hvidovre Hospital 30 år: bygget på […]

Since I began to follow the Boing Boing blog three years ago, I have seen thousands of pictures of peculiar gadgets and things in their posts. But only last week did I realise that this immensely popular blog is in fact subtitled “A Directory of Wonderful Things”! If Wikipedia is to be trusted, this has […]

Camilla has repeatedly pointed out in our discussions — see for example the minisymposium “Can today’s exhibitions learn from early-modern curiosity cabinets?” that we held with Camilla and Ken Arnold 27 September last year — that we can learn much from early modern museums when we are designing the Medical Museion — both collection- and […]

The Wikipedia history of medicine article is probably not something I would like to give to my students to read. The quality of the auxilliary articles are also quite uneven. Some of them are really bad, e.g., that on the history of anatomy or the “article” on the history of immunology (my own specialty!) which […]

What is blogging about? Is it just another form of web publishing? Letters to the editor by other means? An electronic speakers’ corner? Or what? The pre-announcement of Michael Keren, Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2007), suggests that it is a form of “terrorism”: