Not to be cited or quoted without the author’s permission

Museum professionals know well that much of the material culture of recent and contemporary science and technology (S&T) is at grave risk of being lost to posterity. The reason for this is simply stated: There are relatively few specialist museums of S&T around the world; and only a small sub-set among these specialist museums have made or are currently making serious efforts to collect recent and contemporary material. To the combined efforts of this handful of museums must be added the important work of a number of other public and private institutions (e.g., Government military and civil R&D organizations; and science-based corporations), together with the activities of private collectors; however, the collecting activities of organizations such as these tend to be highly selective and to exclude major areas of civil R&D (including, e.g., most or all of contemporary bio-medical science).

Nobody really knows the true extent (nationally, and internationally) of the combined collecting effort in the field of recent and contemporary S&T. However, it is abundantly clear that there is a serious mismatch between the scale and significance of contemporary S&T, on the one hand, and the scale and significance of the collecting activity that is currently attempting to preserve a material record of this activity, on the other. To be blunt: with only a few notable exceptions – including aerospace and computing, but not (I would suggest) most bio-medical science – much recent and contemporary S&T is being collected either inadequately or not at all. As a result, both Europe and the United States (not to speak of other world regions) are in serious danger of losing major parts of their cultural heritage.

There is a double price to be paid for this failure to preserve an adequate record of the material culture of recent and contemporary S&T: now, and into the future. Now, the efforts of museums in the larger field of public engagement with S&T are hampered by lack of a sufficiently strong set of working relationships with current S&T research; and into the future, there is the gloomy prospect that future generations may lack some of the key resources required for an adequate historical understanding of what is by any meaningful measure a truly extraordinary period of scientific and technological innovation. Awareness of this collective failure weighs on those of us who work in specialist museums of S&T like a professional guilty conscience.

At first sight, the challenge of confronting this failure seems dauntingly large. As Thomas Soderqvist has observed, “[N]ot even giants like Deutsches Museum, Science Museum in London, or the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., have the staff, time, and money to embark on a systematic (or even a systematically selective) acquisition program that covers all of contemporary science, technology, and medicine.” In response to this challenge, Soderqvist urges “that we should, as a rule, say ‘Yes, please’ when we get a chance to collect visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms.”

More radically, he argues for a radical redefinition of the roles of both the museum (through the notion of “museum 2.0”) and the curator (through his concept of “distributed curatorial expertise”). Also, he recommends a more cooperative approach among museums. “Except for occasional collaborative projects at the interpersonal level”, he observes, “museums of science, technology, and medicine do not have a tradition of working closely together. Museums act as if they are international competitors rather than collaborators and as if each is in principle responsible for the preservation of the entire scientific, technological, and medical heritage. And because this is in practice impossible…the failure to live up to the principle leads to…defeatism”.

I agree wholeheartedly with Soderqvist’s observations. Indeed, I offer this paper on the challenge of collecting the material culture of recent and contemporary bio-medical science as a constructive response to his challenge to the museum community to do better in this area. The starting-point for my comments here is the need to get beyond what might be termed globalized lamentation to some sort of realistic plan of action. Globally speaking, as we’ve seen, the problem of creating an adequate record of recent and contemporary S&T is immense: clearly, it greatly exceeds the capacity of even the largest individual institution acting alone; indeed, it may even exceed the capacity of all the specialist museums of science and technology in the world combined. Considered generally and in the abstract, then, it’s perfectly possible that the problem is literally insurmountable. But this, of course, shouldn’t deter us from doing what we can where can. Here, as elsewhere in life, the best should not be allowed to become the enemy of the merely good.

I suggest, therefore, that in this area we resist counsels of perfection, and with them all general schemes that involve mobilizing the museum community en masse in some kind of Soviet-style curatorial Five Year Plan. Such plans, I believe, are doomed to failure; and failure is not what we need. Instead, I believe we should start where we are and look about to see what we’re already relatively well placed to do. By “we” here, I mean museums that hold (and acquire) S&T collections. This subset of institutions includes a few very large national museums (e.g., the Deutsches Museum in Munich, and the Science Museum in London), rather more medium-large regional museums (e.g., the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry), and a lot of (generally smaller) regional and local museums of all kinds. Among the generally smaller museums are many university museums, and these are of particular interest to me – not merely because I happen to work in one, but because by virtue of their institutional location university museums often have close connectivity into the worlds of contemporary S&T.

Connectivity with the scientific and engineering communities is critical to the success of any serious contemporary collecting policy. The MIT Museum may be taken as a case in point. The mission of the Museum is “Making research and innovation accessible to all”. This mission is pursued by collecting across the wide range of MIT’s research and teaching interests, and by organizing exhibitions and public programs for key target audiences. The collecting role involves the Museum in cultivating precisely the kind of “distributed curatorial expertise” that is advocated by Soderqvist: simply put, it would be impossible for us to do our job without engaging a wide range of MIT faculty and staff in the process of identifying material suitable for collection and display; and – tantalizingly – we live with an abundance of potential riches that generally far exceeds our handling capacity. As a result, and notwithstanding our admittedly limited resources – a senior curatorial staff of just 3, and a total Museum staff of around 25 – we benefit from a steady flow of new acquisitions, including – occasionally – material representative of contemporary or near-contemporary science.

The inclusion of the word “occasionally” in the last sentence is intended to point up one of the real problems we face, particularly in the area of the biomedical sciences: many scientists and engineers have a more or less intuitive understanding of the importance of public outreach (and thus are willing to cooperate with us, at least so far as exhibitions and educational programs are concerned); but in my experience, at least, far fewer of them recognize the potential significance of their work from a curatorial point of view. So far as I can tell, many bio-medical scientists simply don’t think much about the heritage value of their own material culture. Of course, they’re keenly aware of the need to publish the results of their work; and they’re equally jealous of their professional reputations. But very often they fail to see anything beyond immediate utility in the physical resources – the experimental apparatus and equipment, the images, traces and recordings, the laboratory notebooks, the analytical and computational hardware and software, etc. – that are constitutive parts of their professional work.

An anecdote will perhaps serve to make this point. Shortly after I joined the MIT Museum in 2005, I received a phone call from an engineering consultant who had been involved in genomics research at MIT in the 1990s, but who had subsequently lost touch with the field. “Whatever happened”, he asked, “to the Genomatron?” Unable to answer his question, I called a senior scientific administrator at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who I happened to know, and put the consultant’s question to him: “Alan, whatever happened to the Genomatron?” There was a long pause, and then Alan said something like: “Oh, that thing…it filled a whole room, and it was taken to pieces long ago; but I think we may have a piece or two of it lying around somewhere…. Why on earth do you want to know about it? It never really worked!” For a brief period during the late-1990s, the Genomatron represented the state of the art in gene sequencing technologies. But quite soon newer, smaller and faster sequencers were introduced; and immediately, the Genomatron ceased to be of any interest. Preoccupied with the next stages in their fast-paced and furiously competitive investigations, busy genomics researchers simply brushed the Genomatron aside and moved on to the next new thing.

There is good reason to suppose that this anecdotal experience is reflective of wider attitudes, not least among bio-medical scientists (I’m reminded here of the fact that the single most important artifact in the history of molecular biology – Crick and Watson’s famous double helical model of DNA – was not preserved for posterity ); and this being so, there is an obvious difficulty associated with Soderqvist’s injunction to us to adopt a “Yes, please!” policy in the area of contemporary collecting: we may find that there are not too many offers around for us to gratefully accept! If scientists don’t recognize that the material culture of their professional lives is of potential value to posterity, then they’re unlikely to come forward of their own accord with candidate artifacts from their laboratories for our museums to acquire. This is definitely an issue at MIT. So far as I can tell, many of the life science and technology objects that we should probably be collecting are at risk of moving straight from the laboratory bench to the waste disposal unit. If we’re lucky, key objects may simply be left to gather dust in cupboards and storage facilities; but either way, there’s not much of a queue of eager scientists outside my office door waiting to donate choice artifacts to the Museum.

All of this points to the need for us to adopt a pro-active contemporary collecting strategy. By a pro-active collecting strategy, I mean a strategy that commits us to going out and actively searching for collectable material, as well as one that actively publicizes itself within the relevant research communities, with a view to raising awareness among researchers themselves of the heritage significance of their work. Proactive collecting requires the cultivation of effective working relationships with scientists and engineers, and the willingness to “take a bet” on the relative value of particular research and/or researchers. It may also, as I shall suggest below, require us to find creative ways of discreetly incentivizing busy researchers to collaborate with us in securing a meaningful record of their work for posterity. One powerful way of being proactive is to work with scientists and engineers on outreach projects, and another is to collaborate in larger, multi-site collecting initiatives.

One example of a pro-active collecting initiative is the MIT Museum’s current collaboration with the Koch Institute (KI) of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. The KI is a new institute, currently under construction, that brings together cancer biologists and biological engineers with a view to undertaking clinically relevant research. Part of the ground floor of the KI is to be a gallery showcasing the work of the Institute to the general public, and the MIT Museum is working with the KI to create this gallery. In the course of researching the gallery contents, we’ve been impressed by the potential for creating an exhibition of contemporary bio-medical research images. Images created by cell and molecular biologists can be eloquent, evocative and even startlingly beautiful. The Wellcome Image Awards is a well-established initiative that incentivizes researchers to submit images created in the course of their research to an archival database by offering the opportunity for submitted images to be considered for inclusion in an annual exhibition in central London.

We’ve decided to develop an image gallery as part of the KI Gallery. By collaborating with the Wellcome Trust in both the collection and the display of bio-medical images, we hope to engage an expanding circle of bio-medical researchers in an initiative that will greatly extend both the range of image collecting and the reach of exhibited images – in the UK, in the USA and (in due course, we hope) elsewhere. To be frank, one of our aims in creating an image gallery as part of the KI gallery is to use this initiative as a way of incentivizing MIT life scientists and technologists to collaborate with us in a simultaneous collecting and outreach initiative. Though these are early days in the life of this particular project, it seems that some MIT researchers whose work involves the creation of bio-medical images are genuinely interested in the possibility that their images might be prominently displayed in a public gallery; and of course collaboration with the Wellcome Image Awards in London brings with it the possibility for international exposure of their work.

“Born digital” images are, I believe, an important ingredient in an effective collecting policy for contemporary life sciences and technology. However, it is also important that we find ways of collecting conventional artifacts that bear witness to key themes in contemporary bio-medical science. Here, I am interested in exploring the possibilities for other kinds of collaboration – not least, between university museums with overlapping collecting interests. For example, through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was perhaps the largest collaborative research program to date in biology. MIT contributed importantly to this project, notably through the work of Eric Lander at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Human Genomics (created in 1990). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Lander and his colleagues worked collaboratively – through the US National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health, and internationally through the coordinating efforts of the Human Genome Organization.

As I’ve already indicated, the HGP depended crucially on the development of ever more sophisticated sequencing technologies, as well as on the burgeoning field of bioinformatics. Here, I suggest, is an immediate and important challenge for our community: can we secure a meaningful record of archives and artifacts from this signal – and signally important – project? In thinking about this challenge from the point of view of MIT, it seems obvious to me that if we’re to have any chance of success here we must mimic the project whose history we seek to preserve by collaborating both nationally and internationally. Having originally trained in Cambridge England, home to the Sanger Institute (the UK hub for human genomics), and now working in Cambridge Massachusetts, home to the Whitehead and the Broad Institutes (the US hub for human genomics), I find it tantalizing to contemplate the prospect of a transatlantic collaboration among archiving and collecting institutions, to capture and preserve key materials from the field of genomics research, past and present. Who knows, but perhaps an effort along these lines might even capture the imaginations (and hence the support) of busy genomics researchers internationally?

In summary: to be true to their fundamental purposes, museums of science and technology must embrace recent and contemporary science as well as with the science of previous periods. I do not pretend that this is an easy task. It will be made at least bearable if we abandon perfectionism, and concentrate on doing what we can where we can. For those of us who work in university museums, this must mean starting with our own university research communities. We need to reach out to our scientific colleagues, and to persuade them (if they need it – and they do!) that their work deserves to be preserved not only through the formal publishing process but also through appropriate archiving and collecting. In seeking to engage our scientific colleagues as partners in such efforts, we should take advantage of natural synergies between collecting and outreach wherever they may exist; and we should also take a leaf out of the book of the scientists themselves, by cultivating the kinds of collaborative networks amongst museums that are suited to the purpose of preserving the more signal accomplishments of global science.

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