Metabolic Science in Culture

Metabolism is fundamental to life, to being a human organism in constant exchange with its environment. Metabolism is also the focus of several of the major public health concerns of the 21st century; from rising diagnoses of obesity and diabetes to the impact of consuming industrial diets on the body.

In the past few years, the social sciences and humanities have started to pay greater attention to metabolism, both as a key area of biomedical science to understand, and as a metaphor for contemporary attention to the body as a complex of interacting systems in dialogue with each other and the environment. Under the wider umbrella of medical humanities, this research area is developing a sustained focus on “metabolic humanities.”

Concrete research projects starting from 2018 include the following aims:

1. To investigate how microbiomes can be used as models for ecological thinking across art and science.
2. To elucidate how gut–brain–microbiome interaction research impacts understanding of wellbeing across science, culture, and individual experience.
3. To identify the key tools of metabolic research today, by integrating the insights of the Center scientists with perspectives from the history and philosophy of science.

The research area is coordinated by Associate Professor Adam Bencard, who has expertise in the philosophy of metabolism and the microbiome and museology, as well as an extensive curatorial practice.

Museums hold collections of historical objects for three main purposes: to preserve the heritage of particular fields of human knowledge and activity; to use those objects to communicate about those fields; and to better understand those fields by researching the use, properties, and theories of their objects.

Yet in the past few decades, museums of science and technology have struggled to know what, how, and why to collect from contemporary laboratories and clinics. The objects are not obviously “good for exhibitions,” are often either cheap and disposable or extremely valuable, and are rarely donated when they become obsolete. As the nature of science changes to become more international, interdisciplinary, and collaborative, it is also hard to use the theoretical frameworks of the past to organize “collections.”

Specific projects starting from 2018 include:

1. Delivering a novel picture of the material heritage of metabolic research, connecting museum, laboratory, and clinical objects to the materiality of everyday life with metabolic conditions.
2. In doing so, delivering new theoretical and practical knowledge about how “collections” in the area of biomedical research can be conceptualized.
3. Contributing to preserving the material heritage of Center research for the exhibitions of tomorrow, making new acquisitions in close collaboration with Center scientists.

The research area is coordinated by Curator Niels Christian Bech Vilstrup, who has extensive expertise in the curatorial and collection aspects of the program’s work.

This research area focuses on developing the communication activities of the program that situate metabolic science in a cultural context, primarily through a focus on the materiality of laboratory, clinic, and everyday life, and how objects from these different domains can be used in museum, event, and online communication.

The museum can thus also be seen as a kind of “laboratory,” which experiments with methods of communication that are effective for engaging public audiences and other stakeholders with the processes, objects, and materialities of scientific practice, to convey the uncertainties and aesthetic dimensions of science and relay the challenges and rewards of the search for knowledge.

Specific projects starting in 2018 aims:

1. To address why and how artists and scientists should be included as “co-curators” in developing exhibitions on biomedical science.
2. To explore how the literatures on interdisciplinarity and science communication can inform each other, and support practical strategies to facilitate communication in interdisciplinary scientific environments.
3. To assess how visitors respond to exhibits that highlight the processes of laboratory research, including their perceptions of the nature of research.
4. To determine how exhibitions can best be used to open up laboratory science to the public.

The research area is coordinated by Associate Professor Louise Whiteley, who has research expertise in science communication studies and the relationship between mind and body, as well as having planned and executed a wide array of public engagement activities and exhibitions.

Professor Whiteley also functions as the program’s deputy director.