MIT Museum director John Durant talks about his plans to take the museum—and science in general—to the streets of Cambridge and to build the world’s largest model of the human genome.
Corie Lok
You’ve probably walked past the MIT Museum on Massachusetts Avenue and never noticed it there. Tucked away on the second floor in a grey, nondescript building near Central Square, the museum has a few exhibits, including one on robots developed at MIT, holography, and the history of MIT. But these exhibits are several years old, a reflection of an institution in need of some new life.
So last year, MIT imported John Durant from the United Kingdom to be the museum’s new director. With more than 10 years of experience in science museums, Durant has come up with a plan to revamp the museum’s mission and look. He got approval last month to move ahead with the new five-year plan, which includes an expansion onto the first floor of the current building by next summer. The aim is to make the museum more visible to passersby and to make room for new exhibits, such as one devoted to oceanography and underwater exploration, featuring real underwater vehicles. Also in the works is a wall of interactive flat-panel displays that will serve up a daily dose of MIT science news and provide a live link to MIT labs.
By 2011, Durant hopes to move the museum into a bigger building closer to the MIT campus and double the number of visitors.
A key part of the plan is to organize the first annual Cambridge Science Festival, a weeklong event in April 2007, celebrating science throughout the city of Cambridge. He recently spoke with Nature Network Boston about his vision for the future of the museum and the festival.
What do you hope to achieve with the new MIT Museum?
Our job is to open up MIT to the wider community. We want to be more representative of current MIT research. And through that, I hope to make the world of 21st-century research and innovation more approachable and understandable to the general public and to give the public a chance to engage with it more effectively and productively.
The life sciences haven’t been featured much in the museum before but will be part of the new museum. What will those exhibits look like?
For the first time, I’m glad to say, in the history of the MIT Museum, there will be exhibitions squarely to do with the life sciences at MIT. We’re going to feature three areas: molecular genetics, especially as it begins to converge with certain areas of biological engineering, with a focus on how this might lead to a better understanding of cancer and the development of new treatments for cancer. We will also focus on biotechnology and neuroscience. I can’t give more details because there’s a lot of work in progress.
How did the idea for the Cambridge Science Festival come about?
In the U.K. today, there are—I don’t know the exact number—probably 10 different festivals of science in 10 different cities, and many have become quite successful. Many are in places of far less scientific significance than Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I got to Cambridge, MA, thinking: this is science city!
And yet, if you don’t happen to work in one of the universities or research institutes, you wouldn’t necessarily be aware of it all because it often happens behind what are often anonymous doors. So I started floating the idea: why don’t we try and open this all up and celebrate what Cambridge is famous for once a year?
Who will the festival be aimed at?
The main audience will be the wider community, from school students right through to the senior citizen community. I hope there will be lots of opportunities for the scientific community to join in by being on the stage as well as in the audience. We’d like scientists to show off their research during the festival.
What sorts of events will take place?
It will be very broad. It will include everything from fun science activities for kids to serious public debates and forums about leading-edge issues. There will be a wide range of activities, because Cambridge is a very diverse community. It’s a city where world-class research institutions are on one side of the street and public housing on the other. There’s a big gap in between. I suppose the festival will make a little bit of a contribution to closing that gap.
I see you have a map of Cambridge on your wall, with dots drawn in along Mass Ave. Does this have anything to do with the festival planning?
We want to create the world’s largest model of the human genome, because this is also genome city. Our idea is to take a long stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and turn it into a model of that enormous string of three billion bases. The obvious way to do it, we think, is to have a couple of banners on the street that represent each of the 23 pairs of chromosomes. So you’ll have pairs of banners marking the beginning of the chromosomes, with the distances between the banners representing the relative lengths of the chromosomes. We’re going to create a “genome trail.” One thing we might do is set up some simple microscopes in stores and cafes along Massachusetts Ave. The idea is to raise awareness that Cambridge is a world-class center for genomics.