Like any museum the Sedgwick Museum had its large, dramatic display pieces. It also had collected items crammed into every conceivable space and drawer (like the fossils of sea urchins in the slide show). There was always too much to take in everything with a single visit. So, each trip involved new discoveries, depending on which cases we chose to explore, which was part of the reason it was a fantastic place to bring our kids over and over again.
What’s in a name? Well, if it’s the same name as a treatment with nearly $1 billion in sales per year in the U.S., a retraction. A “mind numbingly boring one,” that is. Here’s the Twin Research and Human Genetics notice for “EpiPen: An R Package to Investigate Two-Locus Epistatic Models”: The paper ‘EpiPen: An R […]
The British Journal of Nutrition has retracted a 2013 paper by a group of researchers from Taiwan after learning that the authors had studied the wrong strain of microbe. The article was titled “Oral Lactobacillus reuteri GMN-32 treatment reduces blood glucose concentrations and promotes cardiac function in rats with streptozotocin-induced diabetes mellitus.” According to the abstract: […]
We’ve written before about retractions for cell lines that turn out not to be what researchers thought they were. In a few cases, that has involved contamination by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks. Today, we note the retraction of a paper whose authors, from Taiwan, thought they were using human muscle cells that line […]
The museum is hidden in a densely built courtyard, behind lecture halls and other buildings. You know you’ve found it when you spot the whale skeleton.
Inside, the museum has more skeletons, but these are a bit smaller than the whale outside.
This one is still big!
The hippo is much smaller, though. Aww.
Besides skeletons, the museum also has a large collection of shells. (I asked Twitter whether I could call those exoskeletons, but the people there said no. Anyway, skeletons and shells.)
The shell on the right looks like math.
The museum also has a collection of specimens that were collected by Darwin, like these barnacles:
The zoological museum is part of the department of Zoology, just like the Sedgwick museum belongs to the department of Earth Sciences. There are several other Cambridge museums that are part of the university. I visited the museum of anthropology just before I left, and sadly never made it to the museum of history of science, but will keep that in mind as future destination.
The journal Animal has retracted a 2010 paper on cloning pig embryos after it became clear that there were “close similarities” between it and a 2009 paper by some of the same authors. Here’s the notice:
The manuscript ‘Development of cloned embryos from porcine neural stem cells and amniotic fluid-derived stem cells’ by X. E. Zhao and Y. M. Zheng was submitted to animal on 06 December 2008. After peer review and revision, it was accepted for publication on 24 December 2009 and published online on 03 February 2010 (Zhao and Zheng, 2010).
Recently, we have been alerted to a similar publication originally published in Reproduction (Zheng et al., 2009). Comparison of the two papers revealed close similarities in parts of the text and in some of the Figures, including different labelling of some parts of Figures. The Reproduction paper was submitted on 11 November 2008 and published online on 04 March 2009. There is no reference to the article by Zheng et al. in the animal paper.
Based on the results of our investigations and the duplication of text and Figures, we have decided to retract the article.
The study has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Most of the science museums in Cambridge are like the Sedgwick museum I wrote about a few weeks ago: very interesting, and full of things to look at, but mainly historic and academic. They celebrate science as things that have been done before. What Cambridge doesn’t have is a more educational and hands-on museum about science. But not for long: on February 8, the Cambridge Science Centre will open a small exhibition space, filled with interactive displays, in a temporary location in the centre of Cambridge. It’s the birth of a new science museum.
Ultimately, the Cambridge Science Centre hopes to find a larger, more permanent space, but for the next few years they’ve taken over the space of a former shop with levers, pulleys, buttons, sounds and lights.
I’d never really considered how new science museums are formed until I met the team behind the Cambridge Science Centre last year. They didn’t have a space at the time, but they had movable exhibit tables, each with a different theme, and they took them around to show people what they were planning to build. They took a few of the exhibits to SciBarCamb, an event for the Cambridge science and science communication community that I co-organised, and let the other attendees play around with it to see what we thought of it.
Cambridge Science Centre tables at SciBarCamb last year.
Over the past months, the science centre team didn’t just show the exhibits to other science communication people, but also to potential funders, to researchers who might want to collaborate with the museum, and to children, parents, and educators. Part of this trial run of exhibits was to get feedback on the displays: is the message clear, is it easy to use, is it fun? Another part was to demonstrate to stakeholders what the goal of the museum would be.
Promo video for the museum, shot at the Cambridge Science Festival in 2012, where the same transportable displays were used to demonstrate the concept of the museum.
With this approach, they have now secured a small space for a few years, where the exhibits will be on display full-time. It’s a proper science museum, on boutique scale.
I got a sneak peek of the new space a few weeks ago, when volunteers were still busy setting everything up. Some of the exhibit tables were not set up yet, and all the walls looked bare. In the middle of the room was a table full of boxes and papers, and further down was a table with drinks and snacks for the volunteers.
Birth of a museum
But in between the chaos, I could clearly see a budding museum. There was a display on how to build a bridge and another one that showed what eyes are made of, but on a larger scale the whole room was an example of how to build a science centre!
I recognized some of the exhibits from my first encounter with them at SciBarCamb, and it already felt like my second visit, even though the museum wasn’t even officially open yet. I’ll try to pop in before I leave Cambridge, or else on my next visit to town, to see what the next growth stage of a science centre looks like.
