Here in the Eternal City, where the fine arts are highlighted and every day brings us to at least one museum with paintings, statues, mosaics, or frescoes, there are posters everywhere advertising a show about science: DNA from Mendel to Genomics, at the Palazzo delle Exposizioni. Who can resist? Certainly not someone teaching a course about the culture and communication of science at Macaulay Honors College!
But the scene when I arrived (admittedly on a weekday, during school hours) was not electric. The exhibits are housed in several large rooms, and during my visit there were never more than a couple of people in any room. Some interesting items were on display—Rosalind Franklin’s most important Xray film (photograph 51) showing the helical structure of the B form of DNA, the skull of a Neanderthal man, the bones of Dolly (the cloned sheep)—but they were not conveniently labeled. And the explanations on the walls were too wordy, albeit accurate in general, with too many names of scientists that most people won’t care about. The brochure noted that many prominent scientists were advisors on the project (and they are a distinguished group), but none of them is shown in videos explaining what they do or what the displayed items mean. A missed opportunity!
One way to enliven the exhibit would have been to invite (or even to hire) science students to be on hand in each room to explain what was on display. About twenty-five years ago, some colleagues and I organized a multiday event at UC San Francisco, called Winding Your Way Through DNA, and we persuaded our graduate students to serve as guides to people, especially school children, who visited the exhibitions at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Something like that is sorely needed in Rome.
Among the things I was pleased to see were the brilliant cartoons showing DNA replication and gene expression by the Australian illustrator, Drew Berry, at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. Some years ago, I began to use these movies in a show called Genes and Jazz that my son Jacob (a jazz trumpet player) and I performed on several occasions. I urge you to look at Drew’s creations, which can be found on YouTube and elsewhere.
Of course, no show of this kind in a place like Rome would be complete without a moment or two of national pride. There is a mention of Renato Dulbecco, an Italian Nobel Prize winner for his studies of DNA tumor viruses, who proposed the Human Genome Project. An Italian clone of a championship brown cow is called Galileo. Most instructive for me was an introduction to Nazarino Strampelli (1866-1942), an Italian agronomist who used genetic methods to generate as many as a million variants of wheat to improve Italian food production in the 1930’s. His relationship with Mussolini was also interesting: he was forced to accept the title of Senator for Life but viewed himself as a citizen of the world, not happy with the fascist state that honored him.
Some movies are being shown in conjunction with the exhibit. One of these is GATTACA, which we will be viewing in MHC360 in a few weeks.
Harold Varmus
- A couple of other notes:
–I hope everyone is getting ready for Vicki Sato’s class next Monday.
–I still have not heard from several of you about your plans for a research paper. I hope you are at least thinking about this; it will be an essential part of the course.
–This morning I was sent a link to a new article in The Atlantic about the proposed March for Science. Although I haven’t yet read it closely, the essay seems to lay out some of the questions that have arisen about the March; I hope to discuss the pros and cons at the beginning of one of our upcoming classes. Some of you might find this a possible starting point for that required essay!
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