WHAT many of us don’t know about genomics – the study of genes and their functions – could fill a museum. Now it has.
On Saturday, the American Museum of Natural History will open “The Genomic Revolution,” an eye-popping exhibition of videos, artwork, interactive displays and more aimed at explaining DNA to those who don’t know their genes from their Levi’s.
“There’s a strong possibility a human being may be cloned by the time the exhibit closes in January, 2002,” says the exhibit’s curator, Rob DeSalle.
“We hope it will make clear that there are some important issues to face and decisions to make – and give the public the information it needs to do it.”
Divided into eight sections, the exhibit opens by showing the enormity of what scientists accomplished last June, when they completed the map of the human genome – all 3.2 billion units of it.
On an electronically lit screen, the blocks of DNA code unscroll at the speed of the Fox News zipper. At that speed, the accompanying text points out, it would take you 11 months, day and night, to see the code in full.
To drive the point home, there’s a tower of 140 Manhattan phone books – 1,646 pages each – whose letters, numbers and spaces altogether equal the number of units in a single human genome.
LED (light-emitting diode) screens nearby show what researchers might do with that information in the next century – how genetic tinkering may increase the human life span by 50 percent, eliminate cancer, render most common surgery obsolete and let us choose traits for our children. That’s followed by a videotaped debate about the ethics of all of this.
More hands-on is a touch screen that lets you see how similar we are to other species, like chimps, mice and the round worm. And at the “Mutation Station,” a colorfully lit Lucite ladder, you can twist a rung and cause a mutation in the fruit fly on the screen – making his wings shrink or changing his color.
There are several videos in the exhibit, and several put a human face on genetic testing. In one, a couple speak about why they had a second child to save their first – a little girl with an inherited blood disease who would have died without the bone-marrow transplant obtained from her newborn brother.
Polling stations let you vote – and see how others have voted – on such topics as genetically modified food and cloning a pet.
There’s even a flashy-looking lab that museum scientist James Bonacum jokingly calls “Evolution R Us.” Here, in what looks like a neon pool parlor in “Blade Runner,” high-school students and other visitors can watch scientists extract DNA from hair and cheek cells.
In real labs on the museum’s fifth floor – away from the public eye – researchers are at work at the museum’s newly established Institute for Comparative Genomics, studying leeches and other species to understand the links between us all.
Meanwhile, downstairs in the museum shop, visitors can shop for genome mouse pads, double-helix bracelets and ties patterned with multiple images of Dolly – the sheep scientists cloned in 1996.
