GETTING TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER – A SCIENTIST’S TRY

In the third of the Ten Books on Architecture, dedicated to the design of temples, in the second chapter, entitled “On Symmetry: In Temples and in the Human Body”, Vitruvius incorporates a small, niche-like cavity wherein huddles a being about which we know no more than the proportions of its body parts to one another. The being cannot simply be; it is planned, engineered, “so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth.” And so on, until all the proportions have been defined, but no size as yet.

Thus begins the cycle, some 2000 years before our time – the cycle of human bodies quantified, designed, constructed and planned: in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights circa 1500, the phantasmagorical precursors of Constant’s New Babylon; in 1924, Vertov’s “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it”; in 1951, Corbusier’s Modulor; in 1961, Lem’s Solaris, an intelligent being that breaks the human mould, shapeless and boundless, a swaying mass, an ocean capable of materializing deceptively real-seeming reflections of people from human beings’ traces of memory; in 1968, a woman and a man set on a blanket by Ray and Charles Eames; in 1984, A Cyborg Manifesto by Haraway; in 1993, Kwinter’s Figure in Time; in 1999, MAKEHUMAN – a software; in 2000 L’Intrus by Nancy; in 2003, From Cyborgs to Companion Species, Haraway again; in 2012, The Building of Bodies by Alex Schweder La.

WHAT BEINGS ARE WE, curated by Christina Jauernik and Wolfgang Tschapeller, is a lecture series that chronicles the nature of our bodies circa 2018. After WORLD, VERSION 1 + 2 (2004), HANDS HAVE NO TEARS TO FLOW (2012) and INTRASPACE (2014/2017), WHAT BEINGS ARE WE is the fourth project that experiments with the substances, constructions and manifestations of our bodies in a near future.

Getting to the heart of the matter – a scientist’s try
Johann Wojta (PhD, Department of Internal Medicine II and Core Facilities, Medical University of Vienna)
Chair: Eva Horn (Institute for German Studies, University Vienna)

The lecture will present at the beginning a historic overview of the heart as an organ as it was seen anatomically. The function and anatomy of the heart have been extensively studied since approximately 5500 years. Egyptian, Chinese and Indian concepts will be discussed as well as the development of science during the Hippocratic, the post-Hippocratic, the Alexandrian, Roman, Medieval Islamic, and European eras that lead to the discipline of cardiac anatomy. Subsequently these anatomical concepts and findings will be put into perspective with our current understanding of the evolutionary and ontogenic development of the heart and its physiological consequences. The third and concluding part of the lecture will be devoted to major breakthroughs made in cardiology of the last decades leading from the invention of electrocardiography to that of echocardiography and the development of catheterization and stents. A special emphasis thereby will be laid on the recent concept of regeneration of a diseased heart.

Johann Wojta, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medical Physiology, Head of Research at the Division of Cardiology and Head of Core Facilities at the Medical University of Vienna, and he is the Co-ordinator of the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Cluster for Cardiovascular Research. He obtained his PhD in Zoology in 1986 at the University of Vienna and since then has done research in the area of cardiovascular biology with a focus on atherosclerosis. During his postdoctoral career Johann Wojta worked from 1986 to 1988 at the Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA and from 1991 to 1993 at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He has published more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, among which are publications in Blood, Circulation and The FASEB Journal. He has a Hirsh-index of 56. Johann Wojta regularly serves as a reviewer for scientific journals and for national and international grant providing agencies. He also holds positions on various national and international scientific boards, e.g. he is currently an affiliated Nucleus Member of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Working Group on Thrombosis and he is Secretary of the ESC Council on Basic Cardiovascular Science.

Eva Horn is Professor of Modern German Literature in the Department of German at the University of Vienna. She studied Germanic Languages and Literatures, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Philosophy in Bielefeld, Konstanz and Paris, followed by her PhD „Writing Mourning: The Dead in the Text of Goethe’s Era“ at the University of Konstanz in 1996. From 2002-2003 Eva Horn held the Feodor Lynen Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the German Department of the New York University. In 2004 Eva Horn presented her habilitation „The Secret War: Treason, Spying, and Modern Fiction” at the Faculty of Cultural Sciences of the European University Viadrina. From 2005-2008 Eva Horn was Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Basel. Among her publications are „Der Untergang als Experimentalraum. Zukunftsfiktionen vom Ende des Menschen“, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 2012; „Überlebensgemeinschaften. Zur Biopolitik der Katastrophe“, in: Merkur 10/11, 2013; „Klima“, in: Benjamin Bühler/Stefan Willer (Hg.): Futurologien. Ordnungen des Zukunftswissens, 2015; „Temperierte Luft. Der Traum von einer Welt ohne Klima“, in: Bella Triste. Zeitschrift für junge Literatur, 2015.