When we visit a science museum, we participate in a cultural ritual. We see objects celebrated as icons of progress. We are given an object lesson in the progress of civilization. Indeed, science museums promote a ‘public understanding’ that our future is already being secured through further discoveries about the nature of things.
In recent years, science museums have exhibited controversial subjects and have even provoked further controversy. Although art museums have done so too, the stakes are higher for science museums, given that they lend a special authority to representations of ‘objective’ reality. In one notable case, for example, a critical exhibition came under attack for supposedly exceeding the proper boundaries of ‘science’ (Gieryn, 1996).
While some exhibitions overtly take sides in a controversy, generally they would claim to portray it. For example, they seek to devise a ‘balanced presentation’ which encompasses all viewpoints from the controversy. More ambitiously, they could try to map the debate conceptually, by analysing the disputes within science (Rogers, 1997).
In practice, the choices are far more complex than a ‘partisan versus neutral’ role. The ‘balance’ metaphor presumes that a controversy has only two sides. Yet there are many possible ways to portray the disagreements; the metaphorical pivot depends upon which ones are emphasized. Indeed, there is no neutral way to portray a controversy. A museum display can frame the controversy in a partisan manner, simply by pre-empting or trivializing some issues.
There are many reasons for a museum to display controversial themes — e.g. to attract visitors, to help educate them as informed citizens, to accommodate sponsors, etc. Recently, commercial sponsorship has become central to cultural production. Such financial dependence influences how museums portray controversial issues, though in ways which may not be obvious. Let us examine how all the above features — cultural icons, framing, and sponsorship — have converged at London’s Science Museum, especially its biotechnology exhibition.
Upset at ‘Future Foods’
‘Museum upsets Greenpeace’, ran the headline in the newspaper report on ‘Future Foods: An Exhibition Looking at Genetically Modified Food’. The reverse was also true: biotechnology critics upset the Science Museum. Just before the opening ceremony was to begin, an activist jumped up onto the lectern and gave a five- minute speech denouncing biotechnology. Greenpeace criticized the exhibition as ‘awful’, for failing to reflect people’s concerns (Carroll, 1997).
Perhaps such an outcome is unsurprising, given that the exhibition was sponsored by organizations which emphasize the benefits of biotechnology.1 Yet the museum curators had consulted some NGOs beforehand on how to design the exhibition. They sought to accommodate both promoters and critics of biotechnology, while also attracting the attention of visitors. How, then, is the exhibition designed to do all this?
Visitors encounter a playful, reassuring atmosphere which associates biotechnology with familiar images and devices. Interactive game-displays put visitors in the vicarious role of genetic engineers solving the world’s agricultural problems. The panels have large, colourful, repetitive motifs of familiar foods - - cheese, wheat sheafs, beer mugs, etc.
These features provide a friendly ambience for the panel text, which in turn promotes industry claims — namely, that biotechnology is a modest extension of traditional agriculture; that gm food aims to benefit people and the environment; that safety regulation is strict, but that regulatory controls should not require segregation nor encompass the agrochemical implications. Let us examine further how these messages are conveyed.
The exhibition begins with a display of ‘future foods’ which are designed to benefit consumers, such as ‘natural decaffinated coffee’, slow-ripening fruits, and broccoli with an anti-cancer agent. Such prominence implies that these benefits are central to the R&D investment; yet such products remain marginal, and some are designed mainly to cheapen the processing costs for industry. In a panel about ‘Playing with nature?’, we are invited to push buttons which change traits of flowers, and then we are reassured that ‘Changing the genes of plants is nothing new.’ Engineering security?
‘Battle for the Cornfields’ is an interactive display akin to a Space Invaders game. Visitors are invited to ‘save your corn from caterpillars and beat today’s high score’. The display simulates the micro-biolistic technique of shooting genes into the cell nucleus. When we insert a poison-producing gene and plant an entire field of such corn, all the plants survive a caterpillar attack. This game is presumably based on Bt crops yet ignores its problematic aspects. From the exhibition alone, we would not know that Bt cotton failed to provide protection in some parts of the USA, that Bt crops in general may generate resistant insects, and that EU safety regulation has regarded Bt-resistant insects as an acceptable effect.
‘Feeding the world’, another interactive display, emphasizes the growing world population, which supposedly requires an increase in food supplies through higher productivity. Visitors are invited to ‘design your crop’ — to push buttons which simulate genetic modification, e.g. for a gene which protects cassava from virus attack. Again, this display depicts a real innovation, though in a partisan manner (e.g. Walgate, 1990: 66). Viral susceptibility arises from genetic uniformity and monocultures, so farmers minimize virus attack by intercropping (Hobbelink, 1991: 139-40). Ignoring this solution, the exhibition attributes the virus problem to a genetic deficiency. We are invited to save Third World farmers by giving them a magic bullet — which would increase genetic uniformity.
A display entitled ‘A potent mixture’ contains soya beans, some of them genetically modified, though we are not told why. (The crop has an inserted gene conferring resistance to a herbicide — both of which are sold by the same company.) We are told that most soya in processed food comes from the USA, in ‘an inseparable mixture of genetically modified and unmodified soya beans’. Yet unmodified beans are separable; indeed, unmodified soya has been kept separate by specialist suppliers to some European food companies. The display of visually similar beans, captioned as ‘inseparable’, forecloses the issue of segregation, thus adopting the stance of the biotechnology companies.
Unintended effects
Under the heading ‘Technological fix?’, we are told that genetic modification can produce weedkiller-resistant crops, ‘thus reducing the amount of chemicals required’. Yet there is ongoing public controversy about how such crops might affect agrochemical usage. This display reports recent research showing that the weedkiller- resistance gene may spread to some weeds through hybridization. Then we are told ‘the moral of the story’: that ‘vigilance is needed in crop management’. In other words, the weed-control implications should be the responsibility of farmers alone, rather than be included within safety regulation. Thus the exhibition adopts the stance of the EU, the UK government and the biotechnology industry, while ignoring the criticism from some EU member states and environmental NGOs.
Finally, near the end, the exhibition acknowledges safety concerns about biotechnology. A panel depicts a Greenpeace protestor wearing an ‘X’, symbolizing unknown effects. Adjacent is a mannequin papered over with regulatory documents and large-size key words (e.g. ‘human data’, even though such data are rare in risk-assessment documents). We are reassured that ‘risk assessments examine all the potential effects’. This is a misleading account, given that EU safety approvals have depended upon judgements that some undesirable effects would be acceptable, despite protests from some member states (Levidow et al., 1996: 149-50).
While downplaying problems from predictable effects, the exhibition includes an interactive display entitled ‘Unpredictable effects’. Visitors drop a metal disc into a set of moving shelves, which symbolize the difficulty in predicting ‘knock-on effects’ — literally, in this case, as the discs knock into each other and eventually fall to the bottom. Thus the ecological uncertainties are symbolically converted into a mechanical model; the ‘unpredictable’ is made to appear reassuringly familiar.
Adjacent to the exhibition is the ‘Ingenious Food’ show, whose backdrop includes an enormous tomato and fish, along with colourful playground-type ladder. After a potted history of agriculture, the ‘explainer’ invites volunteers (generally, children) to symbolically transfer genes across species. Other volunteers are invited to perform a blind-test of genetically modified and conventional tomato paste. After all, it’s a matter of personal preference: you can find out which type you prefer ‘only by trying them’. We hear the message that our basic role in the controversy is to make consumer choices in the free market.
In short, the ‘Future Foods’ exhibition imaginatively promotes the views of its sponsors. It serves to domesticate and naturalize biotechnology, while making some gestures towards public concerns. It ignores some fundamental sources of our agricultural and food problems — the intensive monocultural methods which attract pests, the further commodification of crops as interchangeable raw materials, and the appropriation of the best land for cash crops (many of them not even for human food). Instead the exhibition implies that our problems arise from genetic deficiencies which must be corrected by precise, familiar techniques for inserting designer genes. And it presents a one-sided account of biotechnology as environmentally-friendly, despite a long-standing public debate over what this means (e.g. Levidow and Tait, 1991).
Ordering things
In promoting industry views, biotechnology is no exceptional case for London’s Science Museum. In the early 1980s it opened a ‘Nuclear Physics & Power’ exhibition. Although sponsored by the entire nuclear industry, it promoted the more specific views of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. For example, the exhibition sanitized nuclear weapons, glorified the Pressurized Water Reactor, and naturalized nuclear power as if the technology were derived from the natural order. The Museum staff had sought to encompass wider views, but they were constrained by management diktat and were ultimately threatened with disciplinary proceedings for publicizing their disagreements. The exhibition design was also constrained by the ‘object-centred’ approach, which emphasizes description of objects on display, while leaving little scope to analyse power relations (Levidow and Young, 1984).
As another example, in 1989 the Science Museum opened ‘Food for Thought’, sponsored by the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain, as part of ‘Farming and Museums Year’. This exhibition departed from the didactic, object-centred style of earlier ones. It exemplified the new paradigm of ‘consumer orientation’, whereby museums self- consciously compete for customers with other entertainments, e.g. through interactive displays. In ‘Food for Thought’, visitors were constructed as prospective consumers who can indulge in pleasurable, sensory delights of diverse foods and thus freely choose their preferred products. By downplaying industry decisions about food production, the emphasis on consumer choice evaded issues about where the ‘choices’ come from (Macdonald, 1995).
In all these exhibitions, the Science Museum has apparently followed the old saying, ‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune.’ Of course, the relationship is more complex than sponsors giving orders. Museum staff may resist such pressure (e.g. Gieryn, 1996). We on the outside may not readily know about internal conflicts, especially given the self-censorship endemic to commercial sponsorship (e.g. Levidow and Young, 1984).
On the other hand, curators devise new ways to promote a worldview as if it were simply the order of things. For example, exhibitions are designed to involve visitors as vicarious consumers or technologists. Without overtly taking sides, science museums may still lend authority to a partisan account; they may relegate some concerns to non-issues, simply by trivializing or ignoring them. When a museum frames a controversy in such ways, sponsors buy cultural legitimacy for their account of reality,
Thus we should ask: Rather than domesticate a controversial technology, how can science museums educate visitors for citizens’ participation in the controversy? How can such a role be reconciled with commercial sponsorship?
Notes
The sponsors are: the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and the Food & Drink Federation (FDF).
The exhibition faithfully promotes the biotechnology industry stance, though this cannot be said of one sponsor’s related booklet, Food for Our Future, for which Science Museum staff served as advisors. The booklet mentions environmental concerns that herbicide-resistance genes could transfer to weeds, and that herbicide-resistant crops could lead to increased herbicide usage. It then claims: ‘Supporters of biotechnology argue that stringent rules exist to safeguard against these possibilities…’ (FDF, 1997: 20; see similar claim in its Web pages, http://www.foodfuture.org.uk). On the contrary, biotechnology supporters do not argue that safety regulation safeguards against such possibilities — nor even that it should do so. In practice, herbicide-resistant crops have been granted safety approval on the basis that such effects are either acceptable or irrelevant. We may well ask why the food industry exaggerates the remit of safety regulation.
References
Carroll, R (1997) ‘Museum upsets Greenpeace’, The Guardian, 21 November: 8.
FDF (1997) Food for Our Future: Food and Biotechnology. London: Food & Drink Federation.
Gieryn, T. (1996) ‘Policing STS: a boundary-work souvenir from the Smithsonian exhibition on “Science in Everyday Life”’, Science, Technology and Human Values 21(1): 100-115.
Hobbelink, H. (1991) Biotechnology and the Future of World Agriculture. London: Zed.
Levidow, L. and Tait, J. (1991) The greening of biotechnology: GMOs as environment- friendly products, Science & Public Policy 18 (5): 271-80; reprinted in Shiva and Moser, eds, Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology, pp.121- 38. London: Zed.
Levidow, L., Carr, S., von Schomberg, R., Wield, D. (1996) Regulating agricultural biotechnology in Europe: harmonization difficulties, opportunities, dilemmas, Science & Public Policy 23 (3): 135-57 (email page@scipol.demon.co.uk).
Levidow, L. and Young, Robert M. (1984) ‘Exhibiting nuclear power: The Science Museum cover-up’, in No Clear Reason: Nuclear Power Politics/Radical Science Journal 14, pp.53-79. London: Free Association Books.
Macdonald, S. (1995) ‘Supermarket science?’, Science as Culture 5(1): 106-23.
Rogers, R. (1997) ‘An STS meets the Academy of Museum Studies at the Science & Technology Center’, EASST Review 16(4): 13-16.
Walgate, R. (1990) Miracle or Menace? Biotechnology and the Third World. London: Panos.
author’s address: l.levidow@open.ac.uk