This is a collaborative research project on the shaping of ecological and evolutionary biology at Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The project examines the organizational structures and theoretical commitments guiding MVZ's development across the 20th century. It aims to show how MVZ's continuity in program provided a broad platform for technical and institutional change. Initiated by its first director, Joseph Grinnell, and guided by concerns about ongoing changes in native fauna and their environment, MVZ's research on vertebrates was integrated from the start with the practice of collecting specimens with diverse associated data. MVZ built on Grinnell's vision to achieve special strengths in biodiversity informatics and long-term comparative bio-geographical, ecological, and evolutionary studies, while bringing new concerns and techniques on board. The museum thus provides a window into the reconfiguration of natural history over a century of profound change. The project documents, analyzes, and makes public MVZ's history from the Grinnell era forward. It characterizes the museum as an organization initially built around a single research program. It then shows how its theories, descriptions, and procedures proved both robust and flexible as circumstances changed. The project treats the museum as a system of arrangements for studying the changing spatial distributions of populations, evolution at the species and subspecies level, and the relation of species to their varying environments.
The project addresses cutting-edge themes in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, as well as contemporary biology, integrating organizational considerations with theory construction with large-scale historical change. MVZ offers a window onto the simultaneous intellectual, organizational, and material transformations in twentieth-century American biology that are hard to grasp in the terms of a single discipline. It provides a way to track some of the complexities of evolutionary and ecological science with a high level of detail at a manageable scale. The research team's core consists of an historian, a philosopher, a biologist, and a sociologist with each having recognized expertise in the respective area of study of the biological sciences. The team also includes a research associate, the MVZ archivist, and graduate and undergraduate students, many of whom have worked on early stages of the project. The primary methodology is archival research in MVZ and other collections, with the MVZ's directors and curators forming the backbone of the account. Other sources will also be integrated. The project will produce a book, multiple scholarly articles, and a web exhibit.
The team will disseminate its research results through print and web publication, and through conference presentations. It will also do so by effectively leveraging MVZ's centennial celebration. In addition to contributing to the research element of the project, the team members will promotes teaching, training, and learning at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Finally, the results of this project will serve to make MVZ into an unmatched site for reflection on the significance of the past for the present and future of university-based natural history museums. It will do so by showing MVZ to be a place where professionals and amateurs, researchers and students, and academic scientists and conservationists interacted. It will reveal connections among the vision of the museum's scientific personnel and the practices of MVZ students and staff, new ways of thinking in evolutionary biology, and concerns about disappearing native fauna shared among scientists, conservationists, hobbyists, policymakers, and other actors.
Funds for this project were provided by a joint venture of the BIO and SBE directorates known as "Impacts of Biology on Society," which is administered via the STS program.
On most days, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, Berkeley is closed to the public. It does not have displays or exhibits. Instead, the MVZ’s resources are primarily devoted to research. Because its research happens behind closed doors, it is not surprising that the scope and character of museum-based natural history research remain a mystery to many. Using the MVZ as a case study, our research has explored the role of museums and collections in the twentieth century history of the life sciences. To address common questions about the historical and present-day functions of museum collections, we built an educational web exhibit, "Doing Natural History," that is hosted and maintained by the MVZ (http://mvz.berkeley.edu/DoingNaturalHistory/). The web exhibit shows the paths and procedures involved with taking specimens from the field into the museum and onto the pages of scientific publications. The site is designed as an educational resource for biology and environmental science instructors and students in high school and college. Our paper "Doing Natural History" is a companion to the web exhibit. It serves as a guide for instructors who may want, for instance, to develop a classroom module around the web exhibit. What is the value of museum collections? How did museum-based research help to shape the ongoing transformation of life sciences? Our research explored these questions from multiple perspectives, and our findings are published in philosophy, history, and science journals. During the twentieth century, many museums, small and large, had to give up their collections or move them off-site. However, our project has shown how museum collections are important research tools that both constrain and enable research. There are multiple kinds of data embedded in historical collections, and museum-based research has extended to discovering ways to access new data, such as DNA sequences, and developing new ways to analyze them. The data contained in collections of historical specimens are unique and therefore could be an invaluable resource in the future. A historical collection cannot be easily manufactured -- doing so requires time, infrastructure, and planning. Our research reveals that natural history museums have struggled to maintain adequate support for their collections since at least the 1950s. Protecting museum collections requires using the collections for both research and education. Our project has aimed to explain how the MVZ was able to maintain its collections and stable research program during a period of rapid change in the life sciences. Important keys to the long-term success of the MVZ include student involvement at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a general commitment from curators and faculty members to share resources. Because the value of museum collections is constantly scrutinized, it is strategic for natural history museums to demonstrate a sustained, shared commitment to using the collections and to collectively develop new resources and strategies for putting them to work.
