* Caitlin D. Wylie is an associate professor at the University of Virginia, where she holds appointments in the School of Data Science and School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is also a long-time friend of the blog, having contributed a guest essay wayyy back in 2016. Her recent book, Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes, is available open access through MIT Press Direct. Her topic today is glass-walled museum laboratories…
An adult and a child peer out from the shadowy gloom of a dinosaur exhibit hall and glance up at a brightly-lit glass-walled room, where people sit hunched over tables crowded with microscopes, dental tools, and ambiguous rocky shapes. “Look!” the adult cries, pointing with great excitement at the room, which glows like a stage among the spot-lit dinosaur skeletons. “People making fossils!”
Inside the glass-walled fossil preparation lab at Chicago’s Field Museum, a volunteer preparator removes rock from a fossil under a microscope while a child watches through the window. (All photographs by author)
Some museums have adopted a literally transparent approach to portraying science as a process for the public: glass-walled research spaces. A few of these displays look like offices, some look like stages on which a human demonstrates a scientific phenomenon or process, some look like very tidy storage spaces (e.g., for specimens), and the most interesting ones look like laboratories. All of them reflect a broader cultural trend toward opening up scientific knowledge and work to people who are not credentialed professional scientists. (Compare this to the open science movement, which calls for open-access publications, open-source software, etc.) And all of them are invitations to peer into spaces where outsiders are not usually welcome.
Here I highlight these glass-walled research spaces as a fascinating area for philosophers to study, as microcosms of science in society. As an ethnographer and scholar of science and technology studies, I have written about these “fishbowl” labs as simultaneous spaces of performance and knowledge production, albeit limited ones (Wylie 2019). I have written about display as a powerful indicator of priorities for scientists and scientific institutions, specifically concerning how they decide which fossils to share with the public, how to mount them, how to explain them, and how to preserve them for research despite being mounted and on display (Wylie 2021, Chapter 5). This trend extends beyond fossils (e.g., to include various kinds of labs (also see Rössig and Jahn 2019; Heimlich 2013), as well as museum storage, art, and even cuisine), and promises important insights into the processes of producing knowledge for scientists and the rest of us.
Staff and volunteers work on various fossil preparation, conservation, and storage projects inside a glass-walled lab, with me as a participant observer (in green jacket). Notice the whiteboard-written signs that explain each project to viewers.
Scenes of people doing science raise many questions for philosophers of science. For example:
· Who are these people?
· What are they doing, and why?
· How did they learn to do this work?
· Do others do this work the same way?
· Is this the best way to do science?
· What makes this work science?
· What makes this work good/true/reliable?
· What things do people use to do this work?
· What do we learn about the world from these people and their work?
Scenes of people watching people do science, however, raise additional, slightly different, less well-studied, and more socially relevant questions for philosophers. Here are just a few:
· Who is watching? Why?
· How do the watchers understand what they’re seeing?
· How do the workers intend for the watchers to understand them and their work?
· Why do we show science to non-scientists? Should we?
· How is scientific work on display different from scientific work behind the scenes?
· How is knowledge for the public different from knowledge for experts?
· What might watchers and workers learn from each other?
In summary, we need to look closer at what’s happening in glass-walled labs as spaces of compromise between research and display. This ongoing, dynamic need for compromise makes these labs an excellent site to study social and ethical values about access to scientific specimens and knowledge.
Several features of glass-walled labs warrant highlighting. First, scientists and preparators face the question of how to make a fossil into a specimen that serves multiple purposes. To optimize the fossil’s capacity to serve as data for research, it should be fully visible and thus all its surrounding rock matrix should be prepared away. However, that approach weakens the fossil physically and exposes it to risk of damage from preparation tools. On the other hand, to optimize the fossil’s conservation (i.e., to preserve its physical state as long as possible), the fossil should be left inside its rock matrix. But that makes it very difficult to study. Typically, scientists and preparators walk a middle path by consulting one another about each specimen to figure out how much rock to remove, whether to reconstruct missing pieces of a bone, what kinds of glues to use, etc. Balancing specimen conservation with specimen access—for scientists and for the rest of us—is an ongoing and everyday problem for museums (Wylie 2021).
After a specimen has been prepared, further difficult decisions arise about what information can be shared and what should stay secret until publication. Typically, paleontologists store promising fossils in labs or collections until they have published a formal description. This practice makes them easier to access for the institution’s scientists, and also prevents other scientists from seeing the fossils until the institution’s scientists are ready to share them. It also protects fossils from the risk of damage on display, such as being mounted, touched by curious visitors, and exposed to light and air conditions that weaken fragile bones and glues. (These risks are why the most scientifically valuable fossils, such as type specimens, are rarely put on display at all.)
So much for sharing information among scientists and institutions. Now, what responsibility do scientists and institutions have to share fossil evidence and knowledge with the public? Scientific research relies on public funding, as do many museums and universities. Many fossils are collected on public lands. So doesn’t the public deserve to see scientifically valuable fossils? One place this issue crops up is in institutions’ decisions about whether to mount “real” fossils, which risks damaging the bones and makes them harder to study, or plaster casts, which are copies of other specimens.
A related set of questions concerns how institutions should inform viewers about which parts of a specimen are fossil and which are not. After all, basically no fossil specimens are complete. They all have some areas of reconstruction or repair, if they are not full reproductions. A common approach to this problem is the “six-foot/six-inch rule”: repairs and reconstructions should be invisible when viewed from six feet away, so as not to distract a museum visitor from the completeness of a skeleton, and visibly obvious from six inches away, so that a researcher studying a specimen up close won’t be misled about what is real. This rule raises fascinating questions about assumptions of access, as well as what someone should focus on when viewing a fossil on display—should the focus be on the shape of the complete skeleton, which anyone can visualize as an animal, or on its bone surface texture, which only an expert can soundly interpret?
And how interpretable should these displays of fossil-based knowledge be? Is it enough to display a specimen by itself, or should specimens include text panels with detailed scientific information? Or should someone select only some information that they think might interest non-experts, with or without a specimen beside it? Philosophers of science can help scientists and institutions weigh these questions, while simultaneously learning the various stakeholders’ values and beliefs from their positions.
Volunteer preparators work in a glass-walled lab with museum visitors right up against the glass.
Returning to glass-walled labs, here an important function is to display the scientific work (and workers) behind the displays. These labs portray science as a process, as a profession, and as an activity done by ordinary-looking people. Many glass-walled labs are literally full of “ordinary” people: volunteers. These labs thus create an opportunity for non-scientists to participate in and contribute to research work, as an unusual and powerful form of inclusion and access that circumvents traditional paths to becoming a professional scientist (Wylie 2022 and the associated comments from other scholars). These labs are also therefore a workplace. Preparators and volunteers who carefully remove rock from fragile fossils, one tiny tool-scrape at a time, describe working on display in a variety of ways (Wylie 2019). Some see it as a joy to show the public this interesting work. Others find it stressful to be watched. They all worry that a visitor’s sudden movement or a knock on the glass will make them jump and damage a fossil. Glass-walled labs are great for offering the public a view behind the scenes, and institutions benefit from the public’s strong interest and enthusiasm, but this access is purchased at a cost. Some labs allow visitors to talk to workers: for example, through a sliding window or an open door. Others have railings to keep visitors back from the glass walls to prevent knocking and distractions. Most are brightly lit while the space around the visitors is dark, to help the workers forget that they’re being watched and also to spotlight them as though they’re on a stage.
Glass-walled labs simultaneously house a workplace, the work of processing nature into evidence, and a public performance of scientific work and workers. They are rich sites, then, for philosophers of science to ask questions about how people (should) do science, how people (should) produce evidence, how people (should) make knowledge, and, crucially, how institutions (should) portray that work to the public.
Caitlin’s book, Preparing Dinosaurs, is available open access through MIT Press Direct. Both Max and Adrian had the pleasure of (very positively) reviewing it.
