White nylon valve. Courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Gift of John T. and Mollie Marvel, CHF Collections. Photograph by Gregory Tobias.
Julia M. Klein July 2009
Opened less than a year ago, this new institution holds a special appeal for physicians
“You can make the case that the original chemist was the Stone Age person who sparked fire,” says Tom Tritton, president and CEO of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, founded in the 1980s to guard and promote the history of the field. “Combustion is the transformation of one substance into another, which is really what chemistry is.”
The Chemical Heritage Foundation’s surprising museum, which debuted last October two blocks from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, doesn’t take us back quite that far. It begins its engrossing tale of the origins, impacts and perils of chemistry with Roman glassmakers and medieval alchemists, who sought to transmute base metals into gold. That so-called philosopher’s stone never materialized. But chemists would soon accomplish amazing feats: discovering invisible gases, creating artificial substances like nylon and plastics, and laying the groundwork for biotechnology.
The scientist’s passion for mastering – and transcending – nature is the overarching theme of “Making Modernity,” the museum’s elegant permanent exhibition. The museum also includes temporary exhibitions and an extraordinary trove of genre paintings about alchemy. It is part of a $20 million renovation of the foundation’s headquarters in the 19th-century First National Bank building.
Tritton, whose own background is in cancer research, says that the foundation’s original plan was to create a museum of scientific instruments, but the idea kept expanding. Now, the museum covers “the whole sweep of the molecular sciences,” he says. Laid out thematically rather than chronologically, “Making Modernity” occupies a soaring grand hall that is decorated with restored Doric columns and linked by a glass staircase to a balcony. The exhibit backdrops are backlit “glow walls” that are part of the building’s structure.
Except for a few rare objects, no glass separates visitors from the artifacts and images on view – an eclectic mix of paintings, documents, chemical instruments, and products drawn from supermarket and department stores shelves. The concept, says Ralph Appelbaum, was to recreate the feel of an actual laboratory. The most high-tech feature is a video column at the center of the space. It features a deconstruction of the Periodic Table of Elements on one side; on the other, visitors can use an interactive program to explore the intersections of chemistry and modern life, famous chemists, and other topics.
The displays in “Making Modernity” emphasize science as a human endeavor, where a laboratory team becomes a substitute family and the consequences of invention (from pollution to poison gas) can be morally ambiguous or worse. There are instruments like the Beckman Model E Ultracentrifuge, used in the celebrated experiment that demonstrated how DNA molecules replicate, and the Merrifield Solid Phase Peptide Synthesizer, which paved the way for the development of synthetic insulin.
Physicians may also be entranced by American chemist Paul C. Lauterbur’s original MRI scanner, a technology that now routinely replaces or supplements X-rays. “The cool thing is we actually have his medal that you get when you win the Nobel Prize – and the notebook where he wrote down the original idea,” says Tritton. “That’s like looking at the Mona Lisa.”
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.