Research

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to contribute to a workshop on interdisciplinarity and ageing research, organised by Lene Otto and the humanities section of the Center for Healthy Aging here in Copenhagen on Wednesday 14 December. Why interdisciplinarity? Well, the Center is pretty big — about 150 biomedical scientists, epidemiologists, health service researchers, ethnologists, etc., plus a few communication […]

Many of us here at Medical Museion are fascinated by containers, boxes, flasks etc. in biomedicine — all those kinds of packages that are used for keeping and transporting body parts, cell cultures, chemicals, biobank samples (like the 23andMe box), etc. Such containers are part of the vital infrastructure of both scientific and clinical practice, but […]

My idea for organizing the Sensuous Object workshop began over a year ago. It originated with my interest in (re) placing the object as central and focusing on the sensuous object, i.e. how we sense objects, come to know them, are affected by them and their presence, how objects can become outcomes of research, how […]

I have just had a paper accepted for a very interesting symposium called Representing the Contentious, organized in London 14 October by Bronwyn Parry, Ania Dabrowska and Wellcome Trust People Award. My presentation contains many images from my PhD Delineating Disease: a system for investigating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva that were not presented to the public for reasons I […]

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab. Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. […]

Part of my summer reading has been N. Katherine Hayles very interesting and stimulating book, How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The book details the rise of the informational logic of life from the rise of the cybernetic paradigm in the late 1940s and onwards. Hayles writes the book […]

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’): COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture […]

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit. Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read […]

These are some of the reasons to love museums found on twitter yesterday: Museums help you ask new questions. You get a little knowledge and crave more. Because they make me feel excited, like a child. They open up the world and expose the tiny little bubble we all live in. Museums are for EVERYONE. They […]

Some speak about the perfect storm. Here’s the perfect scientific journal: Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR). It’s all about rejection. The perfect rejection, i.e., universal rejection. In other words, the journal’s policy is to reject all submitted manuscripts, regardless of quality. Here’s their reasons for why you should send your manuscript to them: You can […]

On Thursday 2 December, a new Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen is inaugurated with talks by Sarah Franklin and Ken Arnold. Sarah Franklin will speak about “Life After the In Vitro Fertilisation: Biology Has Become a Technology?”. Sarah Franklin is well-known for his studies of in vitro fertilisation, cloning, embryo research and […]

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, […]