agglutinations.com

Displaying the Genome: The “Genomic Revolution” Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History

by Robert LaSalle

In January of 2000, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City decided that the sequencing of the human genome – perhaps one of the most significant advances of our lifetime -- would make an interesting and compelling story for the general public. As a genome scientist working at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), this interest in making the science of the genome available to the general public both excited and alarmed me. Most of the exhibitions here are soundly and rigidly based on sample specimens: diamonds, pearls, amber, body art, dinosaurs and a host of other subjects that have been treated in temporary exhibitions over the past decade. However, the social and ethical ramifications of these other subjects pale in comparison to those raised by genomics. To ignore these issues in an exhibition on the subject, however, would have been a huge mistake.

As the lead scientist involved in developing the genome exhibition for the general public, I decided that we needed to address first the incredibly basic question of what the public really knows. Consequently, the AMNH and Harris Polls International conducted a poll to understand the general public’s knowledge of the science involved in the sequencing of the human genome and the understanding of the implications of the information that would come from sequencing our genome. The results of this poll were enlightening and an important starting point for the AMNH in developing the exhibition.

The polls taught us for one that the general public’s understanding of the human genome was rudimentary at best. We also discovered that people were more interested in the medical, ethical, and legal ramifications of the subject than any other single issue. However, it was clear from the poll that the opinions of the general public about the genome were tainted by a general misunderstanding of the science involved.

Our task was huge – we had to develop an exhibition that could educate the general public about the science, but it was clear to us that we also needed to tie the visitor to the exhibition by playing off of their interest in the medical, legal and ethical ramifications. We decided to find ways of incorporating the visitor into the exhibition and address the social issues involved.

This focus on social issues and ethics complicated our task, because such topics are by their nature abstract and lack artifacts that make exhibit development easier. A wide range of design elements were developed by the AMNH Exhibitions Department, under the direction of David Harvey. As a scientist responsible for the content of the exhibition, it was my job to communicate the science to the model makers, graphics artists, editors, diorama makers, computer programmers, animators, and film makers.

The relationship that I developed with these very talented and creative people was a special and enduring one. We started with a crash courses on the genome and its social and ethical implications. Once the general information was absorbed by the exhibitions developers, we started the hard work of developing visuals, a consistent graphics display method, and a consistent editorial style.

We started by focusing on four things that we thought the public needed to absorb from the exhibition: namely, that we have genomes; that our genomes control many aspects of our biology; that we are developing the ability to use the genome information to do many novel things; and that we need to think hard about the things that we can change in nature and in society as a result of having information about our genomes.

All four of these important points were incorporated into the exhibition that opened at the AMNH in April 2001 and ran through January 1, 2002. The exhibition focused on the visitor and the impact these four points had on their lives.

We realized early on that the visitor needed a strong focal point to engage them as they viewed the exhibition. We decided that there was no better artifact for display than the visitors themselves. After all, it is the visitors’ genomes we are exhibiting, and it is the impact on the visitor that we want to make clear in the exhibit. Consequently, as the visitor walks through the exhibition, he or she learned more and more about their genomes (emphasis: we wanted to make it clear that it was their genetic make-up that was being talked about). This encouraged people to address the sticky questions facing them because of advances in technology. We also set up polling stations which allowed visitors to voice their knowledge and concerns about the human genome as a whole.

As examples of what the AMNH featured, I want to describe three exhibits in particular. Each captured images of the visitor and used these images to bring the visitor into the realm of the exhibition space. In “We Are All Alike,” an exhibit informs the visitor as to the number of genes they share with other organisms (e.g., 34% of a fly’s genes occur in humans; 15% of a plant’s genes occur in humans; most surprisingly, 90% and 98% of the genes of mice and chimps, respectively, also occur in humans). To accomplish the effect, used a video camera to capture the visitor’s real-time image. We then placed their image next to the organism of interest.

In “99.9%,” an exhibit used to detail the degree of similarity of all humans (any randomly chosen human being is no more than 0.1% different from the next, unless, of course, you are genetically related), we used an art piece by John Kalymnos where slowly rotating mirrors drew the images of the visitors onto a wall of mirrors and amplified and mixed facial images of all viewing the piece.

And in a concluding provocative piece to get the visitor to question the role of genes in their future, we used an art piece called “Drawing from Life, 2001” by Camille Utterback. Here, the visitor’s real-time image is processed through a computer program and his or her silhouette is filled with hundreds of tiny G’s A’s T’s and C’s (the alphabet of the DNA). Using the visitor themselves as artifacts on display helped us overcome our initial shortage of exhibition materials.

The exhibition of the difficult subjects concerning ethics and social issues was accomplished by maintaining a focus on the visitor. By using very clear descriptions of ethical problems, we were able to describe the problems inherent in the advancing technology with respect to gene therapy, genetic testing, genetically modified foods, reproductive technology and cloning, eugenics, and privacy issues. As an example, the ramifications of the technology with respect to genetically modified foods was discussed reportage-style, wherein both sides of the issue explained and discussed their views, with very provocatively designed exhibits of genetically modified organisms as a backdrop for their presentations.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of doing an exhibition on sort was making sure that the information on controversial subjects was even-handed and clear. Many of the ramifications of the technology are controversial, and the tendency to over-interpret or cheerlead is one that needs to be checked at every step. A good sign that some semblance of even-handedness was accomplished with this exhibition is the fact that for some of the more controversial areas of the exhibition, such as genetically modified foods and gene therapy, advocacy groups from both extremes were critical of the presentations we made. For instance, some agro-tech companies questioned why we would even discuss some of the issues we did, such as the impact of genetically modified foods on the environment. Anti-GM advocacy groups, on the other hand, questioned why we would even describe the technology in as much detail as we did.

How we view the developments that will certainly follow the sequencing of the human is directly tied to how well we, as scientists and citizens, understand the science and the social ramifications of our work. The Genomic Revolution provided a first look at this important and socially relevant issue, and our exhibition tried to help make this information accessible. How we as humans respond to the challenges raised by the sequencing of genomes relies entirely on our understanding of the issues and the science involved.



Robert LaSalle was head curator of The Genomic Revolution exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, which took place between May 26, 2001 and January 1, 2002. He presently co-directs the museum’s Molecular Systematics Laboratories and curates its Division of Invertebrate Zoology.

Boundaries of Scientific Work: An interview with Biologist Robert Pollack

The first thing that struck me upon meeting Robert Pollack was his modesty. Talking about himself and his work doesn’t come naturally for him. He seems almost uncomfortable with it. And that’s strange (though admirable) coming from someone as accomplished as he: a former colleague and understudy of James Watson (that’s right, the discoverer of the structure of DNA), Pollack’s specialty as a biologist is his cancer research, which helped build his reputation as a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. But more recently, he’s been director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion, which he runs from inside the Union Theological Seminary in New York. What follows is a transcript of my interview with him.

Q: You were trained as a molecular biologist, but right now your offices are located in the Union Theological Seminary. Why?

A: Well, first of all, this interview is going to go on in the context of work that is more important than what I’m going to say. I am a scientist, and I am a tenured professor, and so I take my job to be to attempt to understand questions that I think I can reasonably expect to understand. Those deal with questions about nature, but also include inquiries about the boundary between what is understandable and what is not, or whether there is such a boundary in the first place.

The most recent book I wrote (i.e., The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Order, Meaning and Free Will in Modern Science (2000)), is about the possibility of a boundary beyond which things are intrinsically not understandable; the possibility that all of science works within boundaries and that science does help explain nature but does not cross the line. I argue that to believe that there is no such boundary [between what can be understood and what cannot be understood] is a religious conviction since there is no proof that has shown otherwise. And the people holding the conviction that science has no boundaries are scientists who adhere to the religion of science. I am a scientist but do not have the religion of science. Accepting the possibility that some things cannot be understood by science or rationality, I am drawn to those people whose work and whose skills lie in understanding things besides understanding, or experiences things in other ways besides understanding. Such people ordinarily fall into the rubric of being religious people. So the President of the Union Theological Seminary interpreted me to be a person who brings science to this institution, and I interpreted him to be someone who could provide us with a place that was safe for questions that did not get answered through science. So here we are.

Q: What can you tell us about the Center for the Study of Science and Religion? You started it in 1999. Has it allowed you to develop a vocabulary for exploring your ideas about science and its limits?

A: Interesting question. I don’t deal in such a level of abstraction. If you look at the programs we offer, that is our vocabulary. It is a vocabulary of action. I think it is important to have good intentions, and it is important to be effective. It is possible to be effective without knowing one’s intentions, but there is the risk of being effective in a bad way. The trick is to make manifest one’s good intentions by acts that in retrospect turn out to be good. And that is not easy. But it is not a vocabulary question, it is a question about what you do. Not what you say, but what you do.

My colleague at the Center for the Study of Science and Religion Andrea Villanti, for example, is setting up a course of programs and lectures with people at the Union Theological Seminary. She is preparing a seminar on bio-terrorism and bio-terrorism preparedness. I will be teaching this fall an undergraduate course [at Columbia College] on science and religion east and west, co-taught with Robert Thurman, a highly regarded priest in Tibetan Buddhism as well as a writer, and Joe Loizzo, an M.D. psychiatrist with a Ph.D. in Religion. We will try to lay out what one means by science in the Eastern world, that is to say, in an inward or mental or contemplative context, rather than an experimental one.

Q: Have you had experience before working with people outside your immediate area of academic expertise?

A: No, not really. However, this is not something done at a distance. [The course] is really the extension of a conversation rather than the emergence of something new. My colleagues [Robert Thurman, Joseph Loizzo], and I are all polymaths to a certain extent and our overlap is just a manifestation of our being interested in things beyond our areas of expertise.

Q: But aren’t polymaths frowned upon in a university context?

A: I don’t know. Those kind of questions have the sentence structure that lacks a subject. That is to say, frowned upon by whom? The passive presumption is that there is a spiritual genie of the university that makes judgments. But there is not. There is a condominium of individual faculty, students, and the tenured version of students – alumni. Those of us committed to stay within the university are defined by what we do. It is a false Platonic ideal to imagine there is “the university” against which you measure your actions. The actions in sum become what the university is. So what I am doing is what a university professor does, by definition, of who I am. I do not sense that there is an ideal university against which I measure myself, in the same way that there is not an ideal “human being” against which I measure myself.

What I am doing is normative. It is not new. It is not a revolution. In the university, we are supposed to find the next subject. I work with a guy named James Watson. I would say that what he has done in educational terms is almost as important as his discovery [of the structure of DNA]. In the writing of a book called The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965), he created a textbook out of which came the subject of molecular biology, departments of molecular biology, recombinant DNA, and the genetic revolution. All of that came from his personal writing style and his ability to write a textbook with declarative statements.

Q: What is the perception of the work you are doing within the scientific community?

A: I don’t know. You see, it’s the second example of the same structure. I don’t know that there are “scientists.” There are individual scientists, but in my forty plus years I never met with “scientists”. I always met with a group of people. In other words, you may think scientists have “an” opinion, but scientists have opinions. Among the people who know me, some think I am wasting my time, some think that what I am doing is interesting, and there is a small number who wish to work with me. But I am not in this to impress people. In other words, a price to pay for your own convictions is to be alone with them sometimes…. And that is not a big deal, as long as the people you are with are nice. And the Center for the Study of Science and Religion has been an experiment in being effective and nice. We are not competing, we are not looking to win, we want to help people and be nice. It an academic operation in a way that professionalized academia cannot be.

Q: In your book Signs of Life: The Language and Meaning of DNA (1994), you talk about the idea of looking at DNA as text. Does this bear any relation to your professional pursuits?

A: Yes. The book has enabled me to remain interested in DNA, that is, if I fancy myself as someone who writes books, I am not therefore necessarily someone who ceases to be interested in [scientific] data. You can take that metaphor and cut it the other way. Text includes DNA. That is to say, if you are interested in writing, you should also be interested in DNA, the text that makes your own body and mind. The book stakes out the position that it is possible to be a writer and not give up being a scientist. I do not have a lab, but I have not left the question of what scientific data “means”. In DNA terms, scientific data asks the question, “What does this text mean?” The book has helped me understand my work in that it says that as there is no final meaning to a text, there is no final meaning to a person through his or her DNA-based inheritance. Put another way, cultural context dominates our understanding of anything important about a healthy person.

Data in a scientific context are different from anything else in the rest of the world. The scientific process sets up a clear field in which it is possible to attach a single apparent meaning to a text. You look at an experimental manipulation of DNA, you have a very clear interpretation of what you see. But when you ask about DNA as it exists in nature, it is not so clear at all. That difference between the clarity of meaning of a text in a scientific context and the non-clarity of a text in any other context makes science different from other cultural pursuits. I lived a long time inside science thinking the rest of the world was intrinsically unclear. But I think that unclarity in the rest of the world includes unclarity in my own mind about other questions which I think are important, and I have learned to accept unclarity as part of the condition of life.

Q: What projects are you working on at the moment?

A: I’m trying to decide whether to write a book about optimal ways of doing science as distinct from the easiest way of doing science. Is there a better way to do science than the more efficient way? The better way would be to think in a context that allows you to think about the long-term consequences of your work. To think about data with a social consciousness is a novel idea to most of my colleagues.