recent biomed

Attila Chordash (Pimm) reminds us that we spend many hundreds of hours a year looking at desktop background images. Maybe they are among the most looked-at images in our lives. What are scientists’ preferred desktop background images? I know some people who choose awesome images from the Hubble telescope, while others stare at scary creatures from the bottom of the ocean. Pimm prefers this one: from Bonnet […]

I’ve earlier (“The presentation of self in everyday laboratory web life”) written about my fascination with the new ways in which biomedical researchers present themselves on their websites and blogs. The public face of bioscience and biotech is, for better or for worse, becoming increasingly egocentric and self-presentational. So I was intrigued when I read about […]

Biomedicine is displayed in many ways. Science writer Carl Zimmer wondered last summer if scientists are making tattoos with images from the world of science. It turned out they have — and so yet another science blog (Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium) was born, filled with skin images of science motifs. Here, e.g., is a […]

Three reflections on the synthetic life conference in Roskilde in August. First, it would be great to bring the science/art perspective into the discussion. Art works inspired by the idea of synthetic/artificial life forms (like Reiner Matysik‘s) will probably contribute to the production and circulation of popular doxa in the field, which will in turn speed up funding of the research […]

I must admit I’ve never paid much attention to chemical compound packages. But, of course, when you think about it — there they are, lots of variegatedly coloured bottles and plastic containers stacked on the shelves behind more fancy and eye-catching instruments and displays. A pedestrian, infrastructural backdrop to the more sophisticated scenery on the bench. I thought about them, because one of […]

It looks like microarray patterns are gradually replacing the DNA double helix as the central icon for biomedicine and the life sciences. For example, the new Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen—funded for a ten-year period with 600 mill. DKK (~120 mill. USD) by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and fully operative some time in 2009—has just […]

Last year, Phillip Warnell (who made the pill camera installation which Jan Eric has reported about in an earlier post) went to Moscow to meet Natasha Demkina, one of the most famous contemporary medical clairvoyants and media darlings (aka The Girl with X-ray Eyes). Now Phillips’ film of her scrutinising his body with her purported extra-ordinary ability will be premiered at Warwick Arts Centre on […]

For more than a century, buttons (and badges and pins) have been carried to signal political or ideological allegiance. The appearance of a button tells us (to use Hegelian jargon) that a group of people an sich is becoming a movement or subculture für sich. If you have a political case to make, then produce a button. Here’s […]

I’ve promised to write a chapter with the provisional title ‘Biomedical curating and the participatory web’ for our planned joint project anthology with the (also provisional) title Curating Biomedicine: Collecting, writing and displaying contemporary medicine. Here’s the abstract of the chapter (to be included in the book proposal; we haven’t found a publisher yet): For more than a decade, […]

Susan Squier, Penn State University, will discuss work in progress for her new book in a seminar at Medical Museion on 29 May, 10:00-12:00. Her previous books include “Liminal lives: Imaginations of the Human in Biomedicine”, “Playing Dolly”, “Babies in Bottles”.  Location: Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, Fredericiagade 18, 1310 København. Everyone is welcome. For more information, please contact Susanne […]

It took the local university bookstore for ever to get my copy of famous molecular geneticist James D. Watson’s Avoid Boring People. Lessons from a Life in Science (Knopf 2007) ordered and shipped – so apologies for this late review. Like biographies, autobiographies are written and read for a multitude of purposes, from trying to settle priority […]

As announced in an earlier post, the third meeting of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN; see more about the network here) organized by pharmaceutical historian Toine Pieters at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam is taking place in sunny Barcelona on 30-31 May. The meeting is about all possible interesting aspects (historical, science studies, ethics, public understanding, etc.) of […]