To Bomb or Not To Bomb: The Online Museum of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History

It's interesting that I stumbled across the online portion of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History recently.  I just got done reading an article in today's New York Times magazine about Iran's nuclear ambitions and the many problems that's spawned for the wider world.  Even more than two decades out from the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons are a serious matter in international politics - which is why I'm disappointed in the way these online exhibits choose to present nuclear history.

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History was chartered by an act of Congress and is a Smithsonian Institute affiliate.  With these credentials I would expect the museum to be an unbiased source of information - which is what they claim to be in their mission - and to have a decent online presence.  Alas, this is not the case.  In terms of layout, the online exhibits range from boring to frustrating.  The History section is nothing but text accompanied by tiny, un-enlargeable pictures.  The narrative veers all over the place, jumping to ancient history mid-paragraph or inserting addresses of publications into the body of a passage.  Some of the pages look like drafts that accidentally got published.

And that's the best section.  You can also choose to learn about Today, Future, and Other Resources, but the Today section is totally blank, and the Future section contains only a link to a campaign for the physical museum.  There are only two websites suggested in the Other Resources section, so if you really want to know more you're going to have to search on your own.

But what really bothered me about these online exhibits was that there is no real voice of dissent.  The opening image to the exhibits shows a woman holding a sign reading "War Ends", which tells you how the museum feels about nuclear weapons.  Throughout the History section there is really no information on anyone who believed nuclear buildup wasn't such a good idea.  For example, in the section The Decision to Drop, we hear only from the pilot of the Enola Gay, who was convinced that the United States made the right decision in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Nowhere do we hear from anyone who opposed these strikes, or from the thousands of Japanese civilians who suffered.  Curious too is the fact that in a long account of Einstein's contribution to the nuclear effort, we never hear about his regrets in contributing to the atomic bomb.

It can be easy to forget that nuclear weaponry was once feared by citizens across the globe.  I'll never grasp what it must have felt like to know that world leaders considered unleashing nuclear arsenals to be a viable option in world affairs, but it's wise not to forget the troubling realities of past generations.  So I'm not sure why the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History has chosen to sweep all this under the rug and package it in such an unappealing presentation.  Perhaps the physical museum is a more nuanced and informative place, but based on their online presence they've got a lot of work to do.


National Museum of Nuclear Science and History
Mission:  To bring an informational, objective history of nuclear science to life - for everyone, everywhere.
Website:  www.nuclearmuseum.org/online-museum

Your Insides Out: The History of Visualization of Biological Macromolecules On-line Museum

Look at the title above.  Does it make any sense to you?  Probably not, unless you've got some college-level biology classes under your belt.  I had to read the opening page of this museum - and then re-read it to make sure I caught all the salient points, and then look at some of the images - before I understood what this museum is about.  This is kind of how the museum operates:  slightly confusing for the layman but full of pretty pictures.

Biological macromolecules are the larger molecules in our bodies, like proteins and the nucleic acids in our DNA.  Collected here are images and movies scientists in earlier generations produced in order to bring these macromolecules to a human scale.  The earliest images come from 1946 and were created in MIT laboratories.  There is also a 3D model of a protein, some pictures of crystals, and the cover of a 1966 molecule catalog (unfortunately, the link to flip through the catalog is no longer working).

The coolest section is the Early Molecular Graphics Movie Gallery, which shows films of protein and insulin molecules from 1966 and 1971.  They're on the primitive side, but it's interesting to see just what these structures look like.

Each section is accompanied by plenty of footnoted text, but it's not too user-friendly.  I suspect this was written with fellow scientists, not the general public, in mind.  That makes this museum frustrating, because with a more explanatory tone these images could provide a truly enlightening look inside our bodies.

So stop by and take a look, and try to glean what you can, but don't feel bad if it doesn't make sense to you.


History of Visualization of Biological Macromolecules On-line Museum
Mission:  This site is an on-line archive dedicated to the various tools and techniques that have been used by molecular scientists to visualize and study the structure of biological macromolecules.
Website:  www.umass.edu/molvis/francoeur/index.html