You’d be hard pressed to find a 19th century scientist more despised than Richard Owen. For all his qualities as an anatomist (at a time when the profession was so esteemed) he seemed to lack anything so unbecoming as integrity or decency. Not for nothing has he been cast as the villain in the story of Darwin’s life and the development of evolution, to say nothing of his role as the supervillian in the tragic life of Gregory Mantell. But as Bill Bryson notes, he did make one great contribution to the world (beyond his anatomical contributions of course), his reconceptualisation of museums from places only of research to places of research and public entertainment and education.
Today however I can’t help wondering if Owen’s insight hasn’t in fact started to destroy the very institutions he sought to build. Museums are increasingly seen solely in terms of visitor attractions, managed in ways that focus on getting visitors through the doors. Curators are considered less important than designers trying to pull in the punters.
This line of thought was started in me today with the horrifying news about the Monroe Museum of Natural History’s ultimatum from the University of Louisiana. To quote from their Facebook post:
It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection. They find no value in the collections and no value of the collections to the university. The College was given 48 hours to suggest an alternate location for the collections on campus so that Brown Stadium can be renovated for the track team.
This isn’t just a case of some business orientated universities having contempt for the natural sciences (although no doubt that plays a part). Disinterest in the importance of museum collections crosses over political beliefs and can be found anywhere. It can even be found, in an eye-popping display of scientific illiteracy, on this very website.
Make no mistake, museum collections are essential and irreplaceable tools to advance science. Studies into taxonomy, pollution, evolution, natural history, climate change, distribution, and that’s just the biological sciences. Splits and lumps made to birds you see every day are made using data, morphological and genetic, from museums. Data from museums helps the IUCN make decisions about threatened species. It helps scientists understand how climate change is changing species. It flagged up the dangers of DDT and chytrid fungus infection. It is the collections, which any scientist can go back to a check, that underpin so much about what we know of the natural world, which now more than ever we need to use and understand if we any to have any hope of saving our threatened home.
Header image: Melampitta lugubris (Lesser Melampitta) from the collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden. (Creative Commons)
Totally agree with you. I grew up with access to study skins and have written about other artists who use such skins for their contemporary work–Liz Clayton Fuller, Alex Warnick and Shae Warnick. All three are women in their 20s who count on access to museum collections and revere the existence for their professional trajectories as artists. We lose more than scientific knowledge with destruction of such collections–we lose culture as well.
It’s sad that collections need defending in the first place! They are absolutely vital to our understanding of biogeography, taxonomy and even ecology.
This story isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, really so much about the (undisputed) value of scientific collections as it is about appropriate housing and access. The web page of the University of Louisiana at Monroe is, as usual for a lesser state school, a thicket of administrative junk with precious little academic information available, but I note that they seem to offer only one course in ichthyology, the collection’s apparent strength, so it seems unlikely that those specimens are extensively used by the university community. Doesn’t it make better sense, then, to have them housed at a larger institution where they would be valued and where they would be more conveniently available to serious researchers? It’s obvious that this university cares not a whit about its natural history holdings, so it is far better to get them to a place where their true value will be appreciated and their scientific potential fully exploited. The incorporation of smaller, entirely unappreciated and unused research collections into larger ones doesn’t always seem like such a bad idea nowadays. If you’re a scholar of fish, isn’t it better to have to go just to Baton Rouge or Lawrencevile or Washington or New York rather than to bounce around the countryside to assemble your specimen material? The articles I’ve been reading about this situation suggest pretty strongly that the transfer of the collections is underway or soon to be underway, and while ULM is losing a treasure, at least the treasure won’t be lost to science.
PS: I wrote “Lawrenceville” when I obviously meant Lawrence; sorry.
Thanks for the comment Rick. I think the story has developed slightly, but initially (as in before any outcry) the decision was made quickly, with 48 hours to come up with an alternative solution, with a terrifying deadline of July lest the collection be destroyed. To move thousands of jars of formaldehyde.
I wouldn’t read to much into the number of ichthyology classes (beyond the admin allowing a decline in such classes), museums don’t and shouldn’t exist just to serve one segment, and remember fishes are just one part of the collection. The entire collection was threatened. All to expand a running track.
Also, incorproration of smaller collections into larger ones has costs in terms of time and money taken into doing the merge, and as for travelling to access collections, that’s one of the few perks of working with museum specimens (speaking from experience)!
“Also, incorporation of smaller collections into larger ones has costs in terms of time and money” — and of space, too, above all. It’s never guaranteed that you can just ship a smallish collection off to a big museum and assume that they’ll have room for, say, another 4.5 million wet specimens.
The course list has shrunk dramatically since these two men (R. Dale Thomas and Neil Douglas) were there. They, together with other teachers and many students, built these the herbarium and the fish collection over decades, and there once was a much broader list of classes, including graduate programs. I’m one of Dr. Thomas’s kids, and I literally took my first steps on a plant collecting trip. It wasall he did. Dr. Douglas was like that with fish.
Four years ago, the specimens were part of the ULM Museum of Natural History, which was open to the public and which allowed research access to the collections. The university then kicked the museum out of its building and only after another fight did it offer a room out at the old athletic field for the collections to be ‘temporarily’ housed. That room is unsuitable, especially in the Louisiana climate, and it severely restricted access to the collections. Now the university disingenously says that they want to get rid of the collections because, among other reasons, not many people have used them for 3 or 4 years.
The Associated Press article yesterday is the first time that the university has said that the collections absolutely will not be destroyed – the previous day Dr. Pani was quoted reaffirming the July destruction risk — so I think the media attention has had good effect.
I agree with you that it makes much more sense for the collections to be moved in their entirety to a larger institution, one is capable of maintaining and keeping them, and opening them back up for researchers again.
Thanks for that information!