¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

Sir Hugh Leggatt, Museums and Galleries Commission.

‘Dear Sir Hugh,

‘This letter is to express my dismay and deep concern with regard to
proposed reductions and even the elimination of many research programmes
at the Natural History Museum. The Draconian measures that are being contemplated,
added to many cuts in staff and programmes already made, will, I feel, reduce
the museum to an institution of minor rank, quite unsuitable to the status
it has had in the past and should have now and in the future as the primary
museum of its kind in the British Commonwealth.’

Edwin H. Colbert, Curator emeritus, The American Museum of National
History, New York, Honorary Curator, the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff,
Arizona.

EVER SINCE the Natural History Museum announced plans last month for
a sweeping overhaul of its functions and goals, such messages of protest
against what some see as an attempt to turn an international centre of scientific
excellence into a ‘Mickey Mouse’ entertainment palace have been flooding
into South Kensington from across the world.

The scale of the opposition to the plans reflects the worldwide reputation
that the museum has built up in the 109 years that it has been open. It
is recognised not only as one of the leading natural history museums in
the world, but also as a centre of scientific excellence with an international
reputation in the fields of taxonomy – the identification and classification
of living things – and palaeontology.

The museum’s trustees argue that the Natural History Museum needs to
move with the times. Since government-imposed budgetary constraints mean
the museum can no longer afford to maintain all its scientific programmes
at their previous levels, they argue, decisions are necessary to ensure
that support for research is concentrated on those fields felt to be most
relevant to contemporary concerns – for example, the natural environment
and human health.

But many scientists now fear that in the long term, the museum’s scientific
reputation is in danger of being sacrificed in its adherence to a free-market
ideology. As evidence of the new philosophy, critics point out that 16 representatives
of the museum’s management visited Disneyland in the US earlier this year.
It was after this trip that the currently unpublished – but leaked – corporate
plan was drawn up, prescribing a new future for the museum (This Week, 28
April).

The plan suggests ways of increasing the appeal of exhibits in order
to attract more visitors. But it also seeks to concentrate scientific research
at the museum on six particular areas: biodiversity; environmental quality;
living resources; mineral resources; human health; and human origins.

According to Walter Bodmer, director of research at the Imperial Cancer
Research Fund and chairman of the museum trustees, the choice is intended
to emphasise ‘the particular contribution of the museum’s collections and
taxonomic experience can make to contemporary concerns’.

But the result is that existing research in areas for which it has acquired
a sound international scientific reputation, will now be deliberately abandoned.

Up to 100 posts will vanish if the trustees’ plans are accepted. All
research on fossil mammals (other than primates) and fossil birds in the
museum will cease. In all, the museum’s department of palaeontology will
shed 10 research jobs, including two out of three posts devoted to work
on fossil plants.

The departments of botany and zoology would each shed seven jobs. Entomology,
the study of insects, will lose 17 jobs, while mineralogy loses nine. A
further 26 posts will disappear in other services, chiefly in contracting
out exhibitions and model-making and taxidermy.

Disclosures about the plan have attracted a torrent of criticism both
in Britain and internationally by those who claim that the reputation of
the museum can only suffer as a result of the reforms. Wolf-Ernst Reis,
of the Institute and Museum for Geology and Palaeontology at the University
of Tubingen in West Germany, said that the cuts would have ‘an immediate
effect on the work of scientists using the museum’s collections for research,
and have far reaching consequences for other biological sciences’.

According to Reis, the action reflects an international trend to diminish
the importance of taxonomy. The museum’s actions send a signal that will
cause the trend to intensify, he says. ‘Taxonomy is the basis for all biology.
We must identify organisms. Without scientists tracing the diminishing of
the species’ spectrum, we will never know what we have done to the globe.’

Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, professor of palaeontology at the Palaeontology
Museum of Oslo in Norway, and a former member of the Polish Academy of Science,
agrees with Reis. ‘There’s an opinion that systematic zoology and palaeontology
are not modern sciences any more, but one cannot do anything in genetics,
biochemistry or in other disciplines without them. One cannot cut away that
which is the basis for other disciplines,’ she says.

Reis, Kielan-Jaworowska and Peter Wellnhofer, the chief curator and
vice-director of the Institute of Geology in Munich, all express concern
that a lack of expertise at the museum would affect the work being done
in their own countries. ‘To be a curator is not just numbering and naming
specimens. The people working with them must have scientific experience,’
says Kielan-Jaworowska, criticising the museum’s decision to replace scientists
in some departments with technical staff.

Reis fears that problems will arise in working with staff with no research
background. ‘When you use a collection, it’s important that the scientists
be curators and the curators scientists because you don’t only need access
to material, you need (background) data (as well),’ he says.

As the letter from Colbert, one of the world’s leading authorities on
dinosaurs, quoted above makes clear, feelings are equally strong among some
scientists on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘Routine taxonomy is not the
most glamorous subject, but it’s the core of the interpretation of the plant
and animal kingdoms,’ says John Harris, an expatriate Briton who, for the
past decade, has worked in the earth sciences division of the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles County in California.

Abandoning such functions ‘not only handicaps basic research, but the
collection in London is one of the most important collections (in the world)
and without people to take care of it, it will suffer,’ says Harris. ‘You
cannot just turn it over to some caretakers to dust from time to time.’

Also, he says, a scientist is unlikely to take a specimen to the museum
if it’s not going to be looked after. He might sell it instead. He notes
that recently, an amateur Scottish fossil collector put an important find
up for sale, a trend which could be exacerbated by events at the museum.

Elizabeth Wheeler, professor of wood and paper science at North Carolina
State University, recently returned from a conference on palaeontology in
Frankfurt. Of the scientists there from the Eastern Bloc, many of whom have
rarely, if ever, been West until recently, she said: ‘They were absolutely
dumbfounded about the situation at the museum.’

Interest in the fate of the museum stretches to the far side of the
world. Des Griffin, the head of the Australian Museum in Sydney, says he
does not agree with all the criticisms being advanced in Britain, claiming
that some represent ‘abuse from single interest groups who wish to brand
everything about management as a fascist plot’.

In a letter submitted to Nature, Griffin criticises groups that campaign
on what he calls ‘single-issue’ agendas such as taxonomy and the ‘undesirability’
of changing direction. ‘Reading some of the draft letters circulating, one
would imagine that the only problem resulting from reductions in the museum’s
funding was the loss of knowledge of sponges or crustaceans,’ writes Griffin.
‘Of course, this is important. But it is the existence of the museum which
is at risk.’

The kind of arguments advanced from overseas echo some of the most recent
expressions of disapproval at home. Bob Savage, professor of the department
of geology at the University of Bristol, is one of those who has already
seen the corporate plan. ‘Its sales brochure approach is destined to hasten
the demise of the museum as a scientific research centre and replace it
with a new Disneyworld,’ he says. ‘How the trustees could accept it surpasses
my understanding.’

Savage says that he favours an approach modelled on that in New York
where the American Museum has direct research links with Columbia University.
He thinks that the best way to save the scientific functions of the museum
is to open up negotiations along these lines with the University of London.
In that way, he says, the scientific prestige of the museum would outlast
any transient changes.

Savage suggests that the museum’s budgeting should be placed on a sound
and realistic footing, not by firing 20 per cent of its research staff,
but by creating new areas of income growth. ‘The museum has a responsibility
to the international scientific community,’ says Savage. ‘We cannot allow
ourselves to see it trampled into oblivion by Whitehall pundits.’

* * *

Museum’s research ‘must be more selective’

NEIL CHALMERS, the director of the Natural History Museum, said last
week that natural history museums throughout the world must co-operate more
closely to decide which of them will specialise in providing scientific
back-up in particular fields of taxonomic research.

‘We cannot carry on doing research on all the areas represented in our
collections,’ said Chalmers, who joined the museum in 1988 after spending
three years as dean of science at the Open University. ‘We have to be more
²õ±ð±ô±ð³¦³Ù¾±±¹±ð.’

Chalmers was responding to criticism that, as a combined result of a
shortfall in government support and a conscious decision to focus the museum’s
scientific research around six identifiable areas – each corresponding to
a particular field of current interest – some research in other fields is
to be abandoned.

According to Chalmers, the main difficulty with government funding arises
from the fact that the museum’s grant-in-aid, currently set at a level of
Pounds sterling 25.2 million a year, is only planned to increase at 4 per
cent a year over the next five years. In contrast, costs of salaries – which
currently take up 72 per cent of the museum’s total expenditure – are expected
to increase by an average of 6.0 per cent over this period.

‘This is the kind of problem we face; over five years, we have calculated
that this would lead to a shortfall of Pounds sterling 4.4 million in our
running costs,’ Chalmers told a meeting of scientists which the museum had
organised to explain the thinking behind its latest corporate plan. Last
year, aware of the growing diffi culty in obtaining financing from public
sources, the museum launched a development appeal aimed at raising money
from the private sector. The goal of the appeal was to raise Pounds sterling
5 million by this means, and so far commitments have come to almost Pounds
sterling 4 million. But this money will only be spent on its exhibitions,
not on research.

‘It is easier to raise money (from private sources) for the exhibitions
side rather than for the science side, especially from large companies,
for which exhibitions are more tangible evidence’ of their involvement,
says Chalmers. He adds that some are now being approached to see if they
would be prepared to support its research as well.

But the trustees of the museum have now decided that the shortfall in
funding requires a restructuring of its research efforts. And that this
not only means reducing the total number of scientists working at the museum,
but also reorganising those that remain around clearly defined themes.

‘We shall be maintaining a curatorial and advisory service across all
of our collections,’ says Chalmers. But in the research side, he adds, ‘there
is a danger of spreading ourselves too thinly; we need to concentrate on
those areas where we feel the science we do is the most important, and also
the human applications are the most important.

‘No great natural history museum in the world has sufficient resources
to cover all areas of research,’ said Chalmers. However, when asked how
much effort was being made to convince political leaders of the need for
greater financial support for the museum’s research activities, he admitted:
‘not enough’.

Reporting by Mick Hamer and Andy Coghlan in London, Taryn Toro in Berlin,
Christopher Joyce in Washington DC and Ian Anderson in Melbourne.