Open Forum

We are a history museum developing an exhibit with a section on genetics. It will include discussions of genetic diseases, discovery of ancestry, and evolving Jewish identity. There will also be a polling-type interactive to encourage visitor discussion of ethical issues around these topics. We feel that the concept of risk in genetic ineritance is important to understanding the ethical issues and would like to create a (non-digital) interactive to help visitors with this difficult background information. Have you created a gallery-based activity on this topic, or have you seen a good one you can point us towards?

We've found a few classroom-based activities online that we are working to modify. But we'd love to consult with an exhibition colleague on this one!

Thanks.

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Karen Falk
Curator
Jewish Museum of Maryland
Baltimore MD
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Hi Karen- It's been awhile since I visited there, but the U.S. Constitution Center in Philadelphia might be a good place to find a variety of crowd based polling exhibits.  Since its so close it might be worth a visit. 

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Stephen Estrada
Museum Consultant
Former Director U.S. Diplomacy Center, Washington, DC
Silver Spring MD
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Karen-- At the Museum of Science, Boston, we've created exhibits and programs to help our visitors have discussions about the societal and ethical implications of science and technology topics. For our forum dialogue and deliberation programs, visitors participated in facilitated discussions and discussion activities to explore their and others' viewpoints. You can find more information about these programs and what we've learned about their effectiveness in the societal and ethical implications chapter in the report below.

Review of NISE Network Evaluation Findings: Years 1-5

We've also created an exhibit to help visitors have conversations and consider their viewpoints in an unfacilitated setting. The main activity is computer-facilitated, but there is no reason that it needs to be. You can find a report about this project through the following link:

Provocative Questions: Supporting effective dialogue about societal issues informed by human biology in a changing world: Exploratory Research Study

I'm also happy to talk with you about this further. Let me know if you'd like to talk about this offline.

-- Liz

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Elizabeth Kollmann
Senior Project Manager, Research & Evaluation
Museum of Science
Boston MA
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Sounds awesome, Karen!

Are you wanting to create a hands-on way to help people understand how genetic risk works? Like, the odds of inheriting a certain trait, whether its dominant/recessive, how you can carry a gene but not show any signs, genes that only express themselves under certain circumstances, etc.? I'm not well-versed in the details of genetics, but I can imagine a game or activity based on familiar probability stuff -- flipping coins, rolling dice, maybe a slot machine type of thing. Is this the kind of thing you're trying to come up with?

Mikala 

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Mikala Woodward
Exhibit Developer
Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience
Seattle WA
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Yes, Mikala--this is what we'd like to do. We were thinking of something with different colored balls in a bingo-like tumbler.

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Karen Falk
Curator
Jewish Museum of Maryland
Baltimore MD
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That sounds great! I love coming up with stuff like this -- especially when it's not my exhibit ;)

I like the idea of the colored balls in the spinning bingo basket... You could have two baskets, so you get half your genes/balls from your mom and half from your dad (you’d have to be sure your language doesn’t exclude adopted folks, or IVF folks, but that shouldn’t be too hard)… Maybe you could have a range of baskets with a different mix of colors, to show how certain genes are more common in certain populations… So the visitor picks a “mom” and a “dad” basket to play with… and grabs a bingo card and a marker...

You could structure the cards as 2 column tables, with each row representing a different genetic trait… so you pull one ball/gene from each basket/parent, and see if you got “bingo” in that row for eye-color, or tongue rolling ability, or whatever. You could start with easy yes/no ones like blue eyes, and then go on to something like height, where your parents genes get kind of averaged somehow (is that how height works? I actually don't know). And you could include genetic disorders, like sickle cell anemia where you have to get the same (rare) "unlucky" gene/ball from both parents in order to get the disease…

I wonder if you could design the bingo card layout to look like a helix DNA structure... 

This might get too complicated, but if you wanted to get at the idea that some genes give you a higher chance of getting a disease (rather than a certainty) you could have it be like, “okay, now that you got this breast cancer gene in the bingo game, you get to go roll these two dice. People without the gene have to roll snake eyes to get breast cancer, but people with the gene get breast cancer if they roll a single “one.”  (No idea what these relative probabilities should actually be, but you get the idea.)

Just some random thoughts – seems like you’ll probably want to test out a bunch of ideas until you figure out something that’s simple enough to play, but also conveys the basic ideas…

Would love to see what you come up with!

Mikala

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Mikala Woodward
Exhibit Developer
Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience
Seattle WA
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