social criticism

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit’s essay on the distinction between discovery and understanding as two separate modes of scientific work, which, he suggested, are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course — young researchers are impatient to discover something new, whereas older scientists are more interested in getting insight, he suggested. Even more interesting, in […]

There is a strong disciplinary element in science, which university politicians, research foundations and science managers prefer to emphasise. What they usually don’t understand, but what most (younger) scientists know very well, is that there is also a strong playful and anarchistic dimension in scientific practice. Somewhat akin to the dichotomy between apollonian and dionysian. A feature article in the […]

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein’s presentation at the conference on “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month was about the politics of knowledge production, with medical museums as a case study. One of Roger’s arguments was that the museums, by placing their historical objects in new, global contexts, […]

Just saw the early spring Monday seminar program at UCL’s STS department. I like the nice British analytical touch to it. Much more interesting than the usual fashionable Latouresque ANTsemiotics and other STS’ese sociolects. For example: Jeremy Howick, ‘When can we trust the experts? Defending the Evidence Based Medicine stance’, 25 January David Healy, ‘They used to […]

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science. As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in […]

Last week, Computerworld carried an interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that in 30 or 40 years from now nanomachines will travel through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases: The full realization of nanobots will basically eliminate biological disease and aging. I think we’ll see widespread use in 20 years […]

In an interview for the Danish daily Information about his new book The Politics of Climate Change — which is scheduled for publication in May, with laudatory pre-blurbs by Martin Rees, Ulrich Bech and Bill Clinton on Amazon.com — British sociologist Anthony Giddens reminds us that Martin Luther King famously said ‘I have a dream’, not ‘I have a nightmare’. In […]