Prof. Dr. med. Cornelius Borck
Brain Research between Media Technology and Neurophilosophy
At the turn of the millennium, advances in functional neuroimaging caused an enormous international stir. In spectacular colorful images, activity in the living human brain could be visualized in unprecedented detail and it thus seemed as if thinking, feeling and acting could be observed directly. In Germany, a group of prominent brain researchers called for society to prepare for imminent changes in the conception of man, the social contract and, above all, criminal law, when all this was to be adapted to the supposedly proven impossibility of human freedom. For good reasons, society did not heed this call; on the contrary, the supposedly groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs proved to be premature. Despite intensive research and an almost unmanageable wealth of new findings, a neurophysiological theory of the cogito has not yet been developed. Hopes of objectively diagnosing psychiatric illnesses by means of ever more precise biological measurements have not been fulfilled either.
For the historian of science, it is rather striking how regularly the old dispute between brain and mind is repeated as soon as new research technologies enable spectacular findings: in the 1930s, for example, it seemed to become possible to record the electrical activity of the human mind and brain research was on the verge of a breakthrough. The device made it possible to track when the brain was concentrating on a mental activity and when it stopped doing so. Already back then the sensational success raised hopes that the physiological key to the human mind would soon be available in the form of electrical brain writing. In view of this astonishing historical resilience of the dispute about the brain, the thought arises that with every new step in knowledge, the problem itself becomes more complicated: The series of experimental set-ups from anatomical-pathological observations to early psychophysiology to current brain-computer interfaces allow the productivity of brain research to emerge above all as the unfolding of a zone of unrest with which the question of the connection between thinking, feeling, acting and neuronal activity, between brain and spirit, mind and matter is kept open.
Media, Medicine and Knowledge
In the 19th and 20th centuries, new media not only revolutionized medical and bioscientific research, but also gave rise to new forms of disseminating medical knowledge in the public sphere. Contemporary popular representations reflect this connection between media, medical and cultural history in a particularly "vivid" way. Authors and designers such as Fritz Kahn and Herbert Bayer developed a visual language specifically for the visualization of physiological functions by positioning the human body in the industrial modernity of the time. This pictorial program was just as successful in Germany during the Weimar Republic as it was in the USA, when Kahn and Bayer had to emigrate there. The visual language, oscillating between Neue Sachlichkeit, collage and photomontage, illustrates how human nature becomes a cultural construct in the hybridization of society and experimental science.
In a similar way, medicine, the market and the media are now intertwined in the project to combine all the information generated by medical diagnostic methods into a comprehensive digital, virtually navigable data set. The Human Genome Project, for a long time an overwhelmingly expensive large-scale research project, turned into a technology accelerator when it was completed much faster than expected and turned the entire research environment of the life sciences upside down. The Visible Human Project was initially conceived for medical training before the film industry discovered it for particularly realistic-looking animations; at the same time, the globally successful exhibition Body Worlds, displaying human organ transformed into plastic, continued the long tradition of anatomical exhibitions.
The new means of genetic sequencing inspired the project to optimize medical therapies directly in relation to to their specific manifestation and progression in individual cases, rather than with regard to abstract disease entities. This so-called precision medicine, which already has been implemented in oncology, has also revealed how crucial epigenetic transformations and complex interactions with the environment are for the development of diseases and their progression. As a consequence, genetic determinism along clearly describable pathways from a mutation to a clinically manifest disease has been replaced by data clouds of highly networked biological systems in which complex regulatory processes change dynamically. Along this transformation the old idea of concrete diseases that can be clearly recognized by pathological organ changes seems to be dissolving; in addition systems biology and microbiome research are putting established concepts such as cell and organism to the test, especially when precision medicine is applied to chronic diseases. And the new possibilities of artificial intelligence and big data are turning large IT companies into competitors for basic biomedical research.
Contemporary History of Medicine
Over the past two centuries, medicine has not only developed rapidly and changed fundamentally, it has also had an unprecedented impact on society. The history of medicine is therefore always also the political history, social history and cultural history. This applies above all to the period of National Socialism, when medicine and biology are allegedly provided a scientific basis for the racist state ideology. Meanwhile the years of National Socialism count among the most intensively researched periods in medical history. It is now time to examine the question of whether and to what extent 1945 marked a turning point and how medicine developed in the two German states afterwards.
These questions apply with particular urgency to psychiatry, where the institutions filled up again very quickly after the murder of more than 200,000 people with the euthanasia and where inhumane conditions prevailed, as the German Bundestag testified in an official report in 1975. Following investigations into the conditions of the psychiatric system of the former GDR, many asylums and institutions in West Germany have now also been investigated and the belated reforms of psychiatry in Germany has become the subject of research. This demonstrates how history of psychiatry is intertwined with society and the social political context and thus functions a focusing lens for contemporary history.
What social constellations and cultural contexts shaped medical knowledge and action in the post-war period? How did medical knowledge affect the social and cultural development of the early Federal Republic and the GDR? What role did democratization and the integration of science and politics into the West play for university medicine in the Federal Republic and the connection to the Soviet Union in the GDR? Which experimental-scientific and clinical-therapeutic cultures developed in medicine and what impact did important medical personalities have on the differentiation of clinical cultures? And finally, how did sensual concepts of the time such as cybernetics or stress play out in medical research? As this brief overview already suggests, a cultural history of the 1950s and 60s is incomplete and remains fragmentary, as long as it does not integrate the contemporary history of medicine.
Epistemology of the Unnoticeable in Science and Art
Scientific discoveries are obviously linked to the realization of something new. Innovative research must therefore be prepared for the unforeseeable and unnoticeable without being able to anticipate it. But how can something new be recognized as such and distinguished from the usual deviations that occur every day in laboratories in experimental work as disturbances? How does science become aware of deviations that can only be reconstructed in retrospect as moments of the emergence of something new? The philosophy of science refers here to methodology: science is the systematic examination and testing of hypotheses that have been formulated on the basis of random observations, intuitively or by systematically searching for deviations.
Recent history of science and science studies, however, have drawn particular attention to the material and social contexts in which scientific activity takes concrete shape, from material interactions with samples, instruments and machines in the laboratory to the social cooperation with colleagues, assistants or the public. What becomes a new scientific object literally materializes in or from these diverse, but in each individual case over-determined interactions, even before it can be objectified as such. In a similar way, such inconspicuousness of a non-objectifiable, but always already mediated something can also be at the center of aesthetic experiences, for example when new media are explored to unfold, decouple, disentangle or distort everyday events and perceptions, thereby turning into thus tools and strategies for investigating the unexpected.
Can an epistemology of experimentation be developed from here, in ways by which the alliance of science and art that is so often only claimed can actually be analyzed and brought together at the basis of their material and media practices? What conceptual coordinates would such an epistemology need in order to analyze experimental cultures in a truly transdisciplinary way?
