There was a lengthy, captious review by reporter Hank Burchard in the "Weekend" section of the May 6 Washington Post of the new "Science in American Life" exhibit at the Smithsonian's American History Museum. I not seen the exhibit, but the review may be of interest, and I quote it in its entirety. The essay is entitled "Thinking Big About Science." WARNING: I told you it was lengthy. ****************************************************************************** "Big science is making a big splash at the National Museum of American History, courtesy of a sprawling new exhibit underwritten by a bigger-than-ever grant from the world's biggest chemical society. Not surprisingly, big science emerges from the exhibit standing fairly tall and looking pretty good. `Every citizen is faced with issues that require at least some scientific literacy,' says chief curator Arthur P. Molella, head of a 75-person team that spent four years on the project. `This exhibit is about science and technology and the making of modern America. Every aspect of our social, cultural and ethical life has ben affected.' `About 20 years ago we became concerned about public misinformation,' says Ned Heindel, president of the American Chemical Society, `and we began to invest heavily in public outreach.' The society is the continuing sponsor of the permanent exhibit, to the tune so far of $5.3 million, the largest grant the Smithsonian has ever received for a single exhibit. The show takes as its starting point 1876, the year America's first university research laboratory was opened at Johns Hopkins University, and in some ways the starting point is the high point. The scenario features ill-mannered mannequins representing chemistry professor Ira Remsen (1846-1927), a high priest of pure science, and his onetime pupil, Constantin Fahlberg (1850-1910), a practical guy with an eye for a buck. Fahlberg discovered saccharin under Remsen's direction, and went on to patent a process for making lots of it, cheap. Fahlberg got rich, and Remsen got snippy over his old pupil's crass commercialism and lack of deference in the matter of scientific credit. Their snide and bitter repartee is both substantive and funny, and it's the very stuff of science. Similar exhanges echo to this day from many a laboratory and symposium rostrum. From infighting and backbiting we pass to a section reminding us how much potential has been wasted through denial of parity -- or often even entry -- to women and minorities in whole broad fields of science. Uplifting examples of outsiders who wouldn't take no for an answer and shouldered their way into science anyway include pioneer Pawnee Indian ethnographer James R. Murie (1862-1927) of Hampton Institute and Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911), the first woman to win a science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At first Richards wasn't allowed to attend classes with the men, but was, she said, `shut up in a private laboratory much as a dangerous animal might have been.' Richards went on to become a trailblazer in environmental chemistry and public health. Big science -- large, well-financed laboratories owned by or affiliated with powerful corporations -- began to come into its own late in the 19th century. The dream of the alchemists was achieved when chemists found the molecular equivalent of the philosopher's stone: the benzene ring, a stubbornly stable molecule upon which it is possible to build literally no end of remarkable compounds. The wonders and benefits of applied science made demigods of scientists by the early 20th century. That era of good feeling is effectively evoked by a reprise of the 1939 World's Fair, whose trylon and perisphere symbolized the bright future toward which science would lead us. Former junior scientists of a certain age may be overcome with nostalgia by the sight of vintage Gilbert and Lionel kiddie science sets (and will happily note that the Smithsonian now sells such sets under its own rubric.) But when they unlocked the benzene ring scientists also opened Pandora's box, because byproducts of dye production were easily converted into TNT, head of a whole new family of explosives that vastly increased the lethality of bombs and artillery. Other fallout from the petrochemical industry continues to rain down on us, including pesticides and seemingly harmless compounds that have turned out to be personal and/or planetary poisons. This phenomenon of good science making bad things happen recurs repeatedly in the latter half of the exhibit. The bad news comes so fast that the exhibit has had to be repeatedly revised on the fly. Space had to be made in the atomic energy section for Albuquerque Tribune reporter Eileen Welsome's Pulitzer Prize-winning revelations about government doctors pumping radiation into unwitting patients. The section already had been a downer, what with nuclear refinery pollution, slipshod bomb testing and the collapse of the commercial nuclear power industry. One happy note is a 1960s bomb shelter that had been installed in the front yard of a Fort Wayne, Ind., family; the present owner decided he had no use for it. There also was the verdict of Congress on the Superconducting Super Collider, the biggest single science experiment in history and prospective centerpiece of the exhibit. Priced at $11 billion and counting, the collider was shot down on the Hill and died before opening night. A cross-section of the collider remains in the exhibit, but the text has been rewritten to address the question, `Has Big Science become too big?' Another question is whether the exhibit itself is too big. At 12,000 square feet it's quite a trek, and by trying to touch on just about everything, it doesn't get a solid grip on much of anything. And while the extended consideration of the risks as well as the benefits of science is admirable, one wonders whether big chemistry gets its fair share of the lumps. Rachel Carson, the quiet, clear-eyed, won't-quit woman who forever altered our perception of mankind's place in the chain of life, and taught us to fear our Promethian powers (and, especially, the chemical industry), doesn't command that much more space than Ellen Swallow Richards. One comes away from the section with the vague impression that the vast and continuing problems of chemical pollution, pesticide poisioning of the environment and toxic waste generated by the chemical industry have largely been solved. The intimacy of the influence of that industry upon the shape and content of the exhibit may be indicated by the language used by chemical society president Heindel during the exhibit preview as he commented to colleagues on a section devoted to the birth-control pill: `This is our fifth or sixth iteration of "The Pill" exhibit," he told them. `We had to continually redo it to get across the idea that progesterone [the active ingredient] is a natural substance.' That doesn't sound like a sponsor talking, it sounds like a boss. The final section of the exhibit is devoted to genetic engineering, perhaps the biggest question big science has ever raised for mankind, promising godlike power to produce (and patent!) new life forms, and possibly to re-create ourselves. Visitors get beautifully conceived explanations of how gene manipulation works, including a droll video take in which film critics Siskel & Ebert use the Marx Brothers movie `A Night at the Opera' to explain how spliced genes are expressed. Visitors are invited to do some gene-shuffling of their own, using interactive video, and to register their opinions about the role and future of science. But the `experiments' are not truly interactive because there are no real choices. All you get to do is touch the video screen to make a program keep on doing what it was going to do anyway. The choices on the opinion survey are similarly unsatisfying. We're asked to agree or disagree with such vapid statements as `Scientific discoveries have had more harmful than beneficial effects' and `Science can effectively solve most of our problems.' That's begging the big science questions big time." END *************************************************************************** Those questions don't seem vapid to me, but I haven't had the benefit of seeing the exhibit. Perhaps others have. ======================================================================= Glenn Porter * Hagley Museum & Library * Self-knowledge is always Box 3630 * bad news. Wilmington, DE 19807 * =======================================================================