From Asimov Press, December 8, 2024:
Inside Job: Secret Histories in the National Museum
October 2, 1962
The United States Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland, have asked that I submit a proposal for the study of the distribution, ecology, and migrations of Pacific birds and mammals …
— Philip S. Humphrey Curator of the Division of Birds National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
Adapted from This Is Not An Artifact: Selections from the Center for PostNatural History (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023), pp. 186-205.
Caption: Pests in the Smithsonian. Collection NMNH. Credit: Pell
“Where would you like your home base to be?” came the question from my liaison at the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. It was 2010, and I had been awarded the extraordinary privilege of having 60 non-consecutive days to rummage through the collections of one of the world’s largest museums. Because the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History operates out of several different buildings, each with its own research staff, I had to choose where to situate myself. I decided to go with something I had known since my childhood.
“I want to be in the one with the big elephant,” I replied. “Okay. That is the building housing the Rodent Range. How does that sound?” “Perfect.”
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History houses one of the preeminent natural history collections in the world. As the name indicates, it forms part of the National Museum of the United States, which has been acquiring specimens since 1846 and is now home to over 126 million biological specimens in total. It has the reputation of being “God’s attic,” but as I would soon discover, it’s more like Uncle Sam’s storage unit. Little did I know, at the start of my fellowship, that I’d find not only model organisms — like mice and flies — collected from around the world, but also declassified photographs of a top-secret bioweapons test from 1965, called Operation Shady Grove.
According to the mission statement, “The museum’s collections … are a record of human interaction with the environment and one another.” This sounded ideal for my purposes, since I was in the process of opening a museum, called the Center for PostNatural History, dedicated to cataloging living organisms that have been altered by people through domestication, breeding, or engineering. I hoped to use this famously large natural history collection to investigate the origins of the organisms scientists study in the lab, the subset of plants and animals that biologists refer to as “model organisms.”
Scientists have chosen certain species to serve as models of much larger branches of the evolutionary tree. They inbreed a population of such species to be as identical as possible, with the goal that scientists all over the world can then share data on them and feel reasonably sure that all researchers are starting from the same baseline. Some of these models might be familiar: the fruit fly (from which chromosomes were first isolated), white mouse (the first non-human animal to express a human gene), E. coli bacteria (the first genetically modified organism), or brewer’s yeast (the first living organism to be patented), while others are less well-known outside of the lab.
I imagined my search for all the model organisms was a sufficiently scientific goal so as not to threaten the stately sensibilities of the curators; it also felt like a reasonably doable project. Armed with their scientific names, I would simply comb through the Smithsonian database. If I found a match, I would request to see it and make an appointment with the curator of its respective section of the museum, hauling my camera gear along to capture it for posterity.
I quickly learned that there was nothing special about being able to search their database. In fact, it’s all online.1 Literally anyone can dive in for whatever they want, starting with places, dates, or keywords. For instance, I learned that searching for words like “accidental” might yield a specimen or two that met peculiar ends....
....MUCH MORE
