Chris Rapley, head of the British Antarctic Survey until a few weeks ago, takes Directorship of the London Science Museum.
Tristan Farrow
It’s all change at London’s Science Museum. Last week, the museum put a new man into the director’s seat. No doubt the board of trustees pondered long and hard before settling on former vice president Al Gore’s adviser in Britain, Prof Chris Rapley.
Image from the Science Museum.
Rapley moves to Kensington from the British Antarctic Survey, which he’s headed for the past nine years.
His new job comes with a caution: mind the gap. The museum is arguably an institution that holds its own with the world’s finest. But that claim has been slipping over the past few years amid media accusations of mismanagement, inertia and dumbing down.
Prof Rapley says he took the new job partly “to ensure a proper balance between the historical collection and contemporary issues such as climate change, genetically modified food and others”.
Passionate about truth
At the British Antarctic Survey, he was no stranger to the media spotlight, nor was he prepared to duck controversies about climate change. He condemned Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘reckless’ attitude to motoring and joined the melee provoked by the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle aired last March.
Prof Rapley’s reputation as a man who speaks from the hip – and his heart – has stuck: a recent article in the Observer portrays him as someone who relishes a battle. But he argues such caricatures are untrue. “I am not here to advocate any polices. What I am passionate about is presenting the truth and facilitating the debate.”
“Apart from one or two sceptics, there is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community on climate change. There is a gap which needs to be addressed between the scientists’ understanding of the subject and that of the public”, he says.
Teaching the public how scientists work
He is planning a cutting edge gallery to raise awareness of the scientific method. “It is particularly important that [the gallery] answers the questions: how do we know that the climate is changing, and how do scientists go about their daily work to find out?” He hopes a public armed with solid information will be able to decide for itself where it stands on the issue.
Actually Prof Rapley aims for much more than that. His brief at the museum is to make the institution ‘the most admired in the world’. It seems neither he nor the trustees yet know into what embodiment that vision will morph, but one possible take on it is “to make the museum a beacon for rational debate”, he says.
But high ambitions at a museum are costly. The exhibits on display at Kensington are a small fraction of the museum’s entire collection, of which 92% is economically mothballed on an old RAF base in Swindon. Readers keen to see some of those exhibits wheeled out can vote for the Science Museum in a forthcoming television show, where competing conservation projects vie for National Lottery money.
Modernisation is top of Prof Rapley’s agenda. With the help of text messaging, he hopes to save visitors time waiting their turn at touch screens by the exhibits. “Mobile phone texting also opens up the possibility of tailoring the message from the 6 year old neophyte to the 60 year old”. Podcasts, mp3s and internet tours are very much part of the vocabulary at the museum nowadays. All change indeed.