Posts Tagged ‘medicine’
What enters us, what changes us
The state of science communication about the environment occupied us this month, through an unusual form of personal reflection on plastic particles that enter us and cloak themselves in dynamic coatings of biomolecules that can then interact with our bodies. Meanwhile, our other text took us into a curious laboratory of inquiry into matters cardiac,…
Read MoreParenting on planet health-science hellscape
Parental anxiety around the health of our children was at the forefront of this month’s workshop. This meeting was one of the most packed ones so far, and the quality of feedback given and received by the presenters was extraordinary—a testament to the dedication of the members of this group. Are citizens better science communicators…
Read MoreWho defines disease, and who gets money to study cures?
At our August meeting we workshopped two draft opinion essays that, from different angles but from within the same field, raised fundamental questions about how we should describe and nurture scientific progress—in this case, in medicine. In our first text, a surgeon began with an anecdote about her mother to interrogate how illness is defined…
Read MoreUnconventional science lessons in health
Embracing uncertainty This tends to be an unconventional public stance for scientists these days, which could be why our first draft text this month felt so fresh when it began by doing just that. The author described working in science for most of their adult life, and having believed, in the past, that after putting…
Read MoreMedicine meets literature
A talk organized by NeuWrite Nordic board member Jussi Valtonen: Time: 7 May (Wednesday), 16:00 / 4pm Place: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Common Room 3rd floor Fabianinkatu 24a Description: Narrative medicine brings healthcare into conversation with literature. It begins with a comparison between listening and reading, with the physician as the “reader” and interpreter…
Read MoreBringing opinion essays into being / The Chronic Migraine Chronicles
To welcome spring we kicked off an opinion-essay writing drive, then workshopped sections from a forthcoming memoir-and-science-guide for general readers about living with chronic migraines. Benefits of opinion-essay writing Opinion essays about science for the general public can appear in newspapers or blogs and have many advantages. Writing them forces us to clarify the social…
Read MoreDance first, think later
The number-one most-read article at the moment in the Finnish Medical Journal (Lääkärilehti) is a new column by NeuWrite Nordic board member Jussi Valtonen, award-winning novelist and a researcher in psychology at the University of Helsinki. Valtonen poses some very pointed questions for the medical establishment as he considers the results of a recent meta-analysis…
Read MoreSex, fads, and math
Scientists might use a term like “computed statistics of social synchrony” to refer to what normal people might call sex, fads, and math. Our two texts this month brought us together around these questions: Can mathematical models describe the mating rituals of fireflies, the love life of secret agents, and treatment trends in hospitals? Firefly…
Read MoreNew film about reverse aging hits theaters
We’re thrilled that the new film Palimpsest, aspects of which were workshopped at NeuWrite Nordic, hits theaters in Helsinki this Friday, 12 April. A special screening with English subtitles will be held in Punavuori on Monday, 22 April, at 17:00. Screenwriter and filmmaker Hanna Västinsalo, a NeuWrite Nordic adviser and regular participant, has a PhD…
Read MoreWould you want to live longer but get younger?
We had a fun challenge this month from Hanna Västinsalo, our celebrity filmmaker, who leverages her PhD in genetics to entertain audiences with unexpected science stories with a human perspective. We workshopped Hanna’s marketing strategy for her powerful new science-fiction film depicting the psychological experience of reverse aging, Palimpsest. To help with that task, we…
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