Time warp

Science is a search for new knowledge. Science museums, however, are usually repositories of the past: fossils, old artifacts, vintage instruments. For museums casting themselves as places of education, the gap between science's collectible past and its ever-changing present is a problem. Are visitors learning the right things about science if a museum's exhibits are, effectively, antiques?

The question matters today because important research frequently stems from areas traditionally absent from exhibition halls, like molecular biology, neuroscience, and nanotechnology.

"Scientific institutions have a social responsibility to tell the public about the science that's happening now," said Bang Wong, creative director at the Broad Institute, the joint MIT/Harvard center for biomedical research in Cambridge. "But there are not enough venues to tell those stories."

That is changing around Boston, where university science museums in particular are having a moment of evolution. The Broad Institute's own museum is opening this spring; the MIT Museum will unveil an expansion in mid-2007 that will involve more-contemporary science; and in December, a Harvard committee released a report proposing that the university's venerable science museums move to its Allston campus.

"Just because people are good scientists, it doesn't follow that they're good communicators to the public," said Christopher Stubbs, an astrophysicist at Harvard and cochair of the university committee that issued the report. "But museums can be their translation mechanism."

In theory, that is.

"I don't think museums of science and technology worldwide are doing a particularly good job of recording recent science and technology," said John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, home to a relatively small collection, unaltered in recent years except for the addition of a robotics exhibit.

In trying to adjust to a changing science environment, MIT and Harvard offer different ideas about the role of the university science museum. In East Cambridge, MIT's exhibits represent a portal into the university.

"We are trying to connect people with what's exciting at MIT today," Durant said. This year's expansion within its building will give the museum more visibility -- facing Massachusetts Avenue -- and more room. Durant said he hopes the museum can relocate by 2011 to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse building on Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street.

New MIT exhibits for its 2007 expansion include one on oceanography and deep-sea exploration, another on futuristic automobiles from the university's Media Lab, and a third involving biologist Nancy Hopkins's cancer research. More biomedical exhibits may follow.

"There are areas where frankly we have a lot of catching up to do," said Durant, who joined the institution in 2005. "The MIT Museum has not historically been very active in the life sciences and brain sciences." Longtime museum staples include artifacts about MIT's advances in radar, from the 1940s, and Harold Edgerton's innovative photos (picture the crown-shaped splash of a milk drop), mostly from the 1930s through the 1960s.

If the MIT Museum's greatest hits are 20th-century objects, the nearby Broad Institute, founded in 2003, is a wholly 21st-century enterprise: Its museum will be entirely digital, featuring a curling, 76-screen interactive display of science news in its lobby. But the aim is similar: to "put a face on the research that's going on inside," said Wong, who directs the project and is creating additional videos of scientists describing their work.

Meanwhile, Harvard's Museum of Natural History must leap forward from the 19th century. "The university museum has two major functions," said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, the provost of Harvard and a neuroscientist who has helped create exhibits for museums. "One is to support research, and the other is education." Unlike many science museums, Harvard has both a curatorial staff and affiliated researchers who use its collection of millions of zoological specimens.

That collection, founded by naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1859, includes stunning fossils and preserved animals, which help make it Harvard's leading paid attraction. But the cramped quarters leave little room for new science.

A move to Allston would add space but subtract historical significance. "The Museum of Natural History is also a museum of museums," noted Hyman. "It was the first collection to be displayed like that for public consumption."

The new Harvard report suggests that a move would help the museum's educational side, perhaps through a new "Museum of Evolution" combining different elements of the university's collection. "In the Allston era, we'll have an opportunity to invigorate the museum component of the university," said Stubbs.

For now, the Museum of Natural History's director, Elisabeth Werby, whose tenure began in July, wants to bring evolution and genetics to the current halls, where mention of DNA is limited to one placard about a stuffed mountain lion.

"What's interesting for us is not a special show about genomics but integrating that into other shows rich in specimens," Werby said. "That's what the public comes to us for. People are tied to these 19th-century displays, and I understand that, but I'm hoping we can do 21st-century displays with the same sense of wonder."

Having examined the holdings with Harvard biologists, Werby suggests that shows about animal locomotion or biogeography -- the distribution of species -- could reveal evolution in action using small slices of the collection. To that curators might add computer displays, DNA models, or a gene sequencer, a biology tool.

Few museums want to forsake their present artifacts; the problem is identifying important modern ones before they disappear. "The curator stands rather perilously between the lab bench and the trash," Durant said, adding that his three curators "don't have the eyes and ears and hours in the day to monitor everything."

Nanotechnology -- tiny applications in engineering, medicine, and computing -- presents similar problems, which the Museum of Science, among local institutions, is analyzing through a $20 million, five-year National Science Foundation grant it received in 2005 to develop exhibits. The museum will decide this year which nano-subjects need addressing.

"We're talking about a field where new inventions are being developed and new science is being discovered," said Larry Bell , a vice president at Boston's Museum of Science. "How do you keep exhibits up to date?"

And how do museums interest visitors in objects so small they can make a single strand of hair look bigger than a T. Rex?

"Historically in the science museum world, things that are directly perceptible have been most successful," Bell said. "But now we're grappling with modern technology and science, where so much happens at the atomic and molecular scales."

Currently the museum addresses nanotechnology through educational talks. One recent afternoon, staffer Tim Miller mounted a stage in the technology wing and delivered an engaging 15-minute lecture to an audience of 20, aided by images of futuristic concepts, like a "space elevator" of carbon nanotubes stretching miles above earth.

Seeing Miller hold his audience's attention served as a reminder. Today's scientists could use museums to translate their work, but whatever other tools they use, museums still need scientists to do the translating.