Are natural history museums going extinct?

The country’s oldest natural history museum, in Philadelphia, has closed its doors to visitors. Will other museums follow?

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm Flora Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday. Earlier this week, the oldest natural history museum in the country, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, closed its doors to the public. Museum leaders said attendance never came back after COVID and it's too expensive to keep the doors open for visitors. There's also rumors that the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas, may be mothballed soon, according to the local paper, The Hays Post. What is going on? How can natural history museums stay relevant when there's a lot of competition for our attention? And what happens to the collections when a museum shuts down?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Will the dinosaur bones be going the way of the dinosaurs? Here to talk about it are my guests. Dr. Jason Cryon is the Executive Director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr. Barbara Tears is the former Director of the Herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. Thanks to you both for talking to me today.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Glad to be here.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Thanks, Flora.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Jason, you run a museum. Does this news send a shiver down your spine?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  It does, and it's such a troubling and challenging idea to lose these resources from our communities. I think natural history museums and science museums are under challenges that really have not been before seen or felt. You know, with the prevalence of these traveling exhibitions of AI and AR-generated experiences, along with the economy, which is challenging and expensive for people, the competition for discretionary dollars and families is heightened. And so, natural history museums, science museums, need to really refocus on being societally relevant,

• 1:54Speaker 02

  on being engaging, being welcoming, and being community service organizations.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  How is that different from what they were doing before?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think the traditional view of a natural history museum is rather static exhibits showing taxidermied animals and habitats from both local and far away.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  I love the dioramas, though.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  And you know, a lot of people do. And we all grew up with these dioramas. And they do have a special place in our hearts. But to be totally fair, I think that those are rather anachronistic experiences. And I think that we need to be much more experiential, much more relevant, much more engaging, certainly welcoming to our communities.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  So there's been a trend to make museums more inclusive, more outreach to the community. It's been a major focus of the American Alliance for Museums and other organizations. And a tremendous amount has been done. But the problem is always that these programs that one adds to be extra engaging add on to the budget and they don't at least immediately reap a reward. They put more pressure on the staff. They put more pressure on resources. And the problem with museum funding is that it has been going down now for quite a long time. In the course of my career, I saw a continual downturn in the budgets that were available for the work that we do.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  So there, at this point, when things are really critical, there's nothing much to give up. And you could do more, but you have to figure out how to pay for that more because the staff, most likely in most museums, are already doing more in a week than they are paid for, maybe sometimes 20% more.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Well, let's talk about funding. I mean, where does the money come from to keep museums open? And how have those funding streams changed?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  So there are many models. And I think that, you know, depending on the model, depending on how the museum is associated with the university or the direct government, or whether it's state or federal or private 501(c)(3), there are many different models. And there, as Barbara had mentioned, there are some significant changes in many of those revenue streams. Currently, the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, IMLS, the federal institute, which traditionally has provided great funding for organizations such as ours, their budgets have been slashed and their opportunities for funding are fewer and farther between.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  And the problem is that, you know, there's short-term funding, such as grants, which are wonderful. National Science Foundation for Collections, Support, Renovation, even for the adoption of orphan collections. I think I had maybe 15 or 20 grants related to that during the course of my career, and the IMLS, too. The problem is that those are grants with a term. They last two to four years, maybe. But finding sustaining funding, funding for the operational budget, the one that pays the janitors and the preparators and the lights and so forth, is much harder to get. And private donors, named galleries and so forth,

• 5:17Speaker 01

  often are a great source of support. But there has been a concern in the private funding world for some time that perhaps the next generation of private funders are looking elsewhere to put their money, not necessarily in the traditional cultural institutions that their parents and grandparents supported.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  That the new people in philanthropy don't want their name on a building at a natural history museum anymore?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  You know, they have other priorities. And I wouldn't say they're not doing it, of course. But I don't think it's a given that just because a family for generations has supported something, the next generation will do so as well.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  What about politics? How does that play a role in your funding streams and whether these museums stay open?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Museums are generally, have been averse to political, getting too deeply involved in political issues. It's as if the issues that they were supporting, which are often about sustainability, about preserving culture, about diversity, conservation of nature, those issues became, have become political around them. They weren't, they didn't used to be considered all that controversial, but now they are. And I suspect, although I don't have any direct evidence, that museums are trying to use different words to convey their message, words that are not going to be triggering. And so, politics are entering the realm of what we do, although I am quite sure that no responsible

• 6:47Speaker 01

  natural history museum is turning away from their core mission, which is about preserving the diversity of the planet.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Jason?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  I agree with Barbara 100%. I think what Barbara just said is entirely correct. We are finding ways to repackage some of the core strengths, some of the fundamental activities that museums do. So we serve, you know, K through gray, as some people say, the full lifetime of experience and education. And yet, we, in doing so, we can, in kind of current lingo, emphasize the fact that we are teaching valuable workforce skills and preparing, helping to prepare the next generation of STEM workers, who, many of whom have gotten their start

• 7:40Speaker 02

  in museums and cultural institutions like ours.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Have you lost grant money?

• 7:45Speaker 02

  We have, we have. And there was one particular grant that dealt with climate change and public education. And that was an unfortunate circumstance for the investigator who had that grant. But we continue to do the work. And in doing so, we believe that we're serving society.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  I have to take a break, but when we come back, we have to talk about the collections. Are you up for that?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Let's do that.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Okay, don't go away.

• 8:24Speaker 00

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• 10:16Speaker 00

  Okay, Barbara, what happens when a museum closes? I mean, will we see fossils for sale on eBay?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Well, that would be a horrible outcome. And, you know, I, depending on the state and depending on the funding and under which those collections were made, all sorts of things, it could be illegal. It could certainly affect the tax status of the museum if they sell off their artifacts. Because once you begin to sell things, it could be that then all of your holdings will be considered taxable items. So it has real implications. It's very unethical to sell museum collections, but I wouldn't say it couldn't happen. What typically happens is that the museums are, the collections are given elsewhere.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  There are other museums that may take, if not an entire collection. In the case, say, of Sternberg, perhaps the fossils would go one place, the herpetological collections somewhere else, the fish somewhere else. And in the past, that has been routine. In fact, that has been a practice that goes back to the earliest days of museums. There were often small museums that maintained a collection, but then when the interested staff left, the collections were given elsewhere. That's nothing new. And generally, most collections so absorbed have been well cared for and made available for study, just as they would have been originally.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  When we start talking about collections of the magnitude of the Academy of Natural Sciences with 19 million objects, probably no other museum is prepared, space-wise, funding-wise, to take on collections of that magnitude.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Barbara, how hard is it to relocate a collection? What does that even entail?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's never easy, put it that way. My experience was mostly with plant collections, which may be among the easiest, because they're flat and glued to paper sheets, and they can be bundled and put in boxes. It gets far more complicated when you start talking about things like insects, which are very delicate and are pinned in place. And then, of course, huge complications when we start talking about dinosaurs, large collections of specimens preserved in fluids. So I, a couple of years ago, I did a little test to see if I could figure out what would be an average cost per specimen for moving.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  So I went back over 25 years of NSF funding of collection movement, and I found that it's never less than a dollar a specimen. It could range as high as $5 or even $10, depending on the size and scope. So the numbers get high immediately. There's the packing of the specimens, there's the actual transport, there's the unloading, and then there's the incorporation, which can take years. And if the specimens have been catalogued electronically, all of those records have to be changed as well. So it's a very lengthy and sort of painstaking operation.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Well, and then presumably, like, you can't just stick them in any storage unit, right? They can't just go in the basement, like my storage.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Hopefully not.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Give me the details of what that, what is involved.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  So you will always have to have a room with climate control, and of course, no leakage. It has to have a very strong floor if you're going to put a lot of heavy cabinets on it. But older buildings often do not have the floor capacity, so you may need a reinforced floor. You will need to have an air handling system that moves the air quickly out to take dust and insect particles. And you have to have cabinetry that is airtight and that will not allow pests or water, anything else, to get in them. You need to have a security system to make sure that there, especially when we're talking

• 14:31Speaker 01

  about things that can be sold, and, you know, to make sure that there isn't theft. You need the right kind of lighting that will be sufficient for study, but not so much to damage the specimens. There are a million requirements, and it is very expensive to retrofit a space to be adequate for museum collections.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  So in addition to all of those factors that Barbara rightly has just described, those are really more for traditional collections and very critical to all of those collections. But kind of more modern methods of preservation, too, are ultra-cold freezers to preserve the genetic material in these specimens and tissues in perpetuity for genetic work, for genomic work. In addition, all of the infrastructure related to digitization and imaging and scanning and making these available, these collections and their data and their images available on these collective global, you know, digital interfaces.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  These are resources for global scientific endeavors that impact environmental studies and medical, human medicine, and just really everything that you can think of. And so these are vital collections that are used. They are growing, they're preserved to maintain this incredible treasure of information.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  You know, in a world where everything can be digitized, and now you have machines that can analyze data more quickly than we ever could, what's the reason for keeping the paper copy?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Flora, to get to your question, the electronic, the digital aspect of these collections is critical to keeping museums relevant. However, keeping the originals, keeping those authentic objects, will always be important. Because even though a museum worker or a researcher from around the world with an internet access can search through our collections, oftentimes, it's necessary to go back to the original source and verify and study further.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, you know, you can't get DNA out of a picture.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Increasingly, over the years, at my time at the New York Botanical Garden, many of the people who came to study were requesting a small amount of money for DNA sequencing. And now, in the plant community, in the herbarium community, the new thing is spectral imaging, doing image, you can use herbarium specimens to detect all sorts of things about how a plant grew and what traits it had to survive in its habitat. Those are all things that you can't get from the image, although the image can be useful to help you focus a project like that.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Barbara, what do we lose if we lose museums?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  We lose our past. We lose an understanding of the way that our environments have developed, and we also lose a really important clue as to where they're going. We have, through our museums, we have a record of past life on Earth, and with the kinds of techniques we have available to us today to analyze the data, we get a very clear picture of where we might be going and what we may lose or gain in the future in terms of biodiversity.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  We also lose places, critical places, where so many of us become inspired. We become engaged with our natural and cultural environment, we become connected to nature, we become connected to others in our community. These are places where I think, where so many people find inspiration and their curiosity, their innate curiosity is stimulated. You know, these are the, these are the future generations of STEM workers, of doctors, of politicians and decision-makers. And if we don't give them these opportunities to connect with their own world, then we lose so much.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Dr. Jason Cryan is the Executive Director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr. Barbara Tears is the former Director of the Herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. Thank you both for taking the time to talk to me today.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  You're welcome. Thank you.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  My pleasure, Flora. Thank you.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  This episode was produced by Annette Heist. If you like the show, please rate and review it. It really does help other people find us. And if you're out there dusting a diorama or, you know, deep in the stacks of an herbarium, I just want to say we see you and thank you. And thanks for listening. I'm Flora Lichten.