GERALD HOLTON
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too long, and that nothing could be squeezed out to make room. To
which I would gladly respond, "Just let me try." In fact, a few scientists
are now asking the history standards writers to reconsider the omissions -
again in the spirit of correcting a false image of our culture.
There is a third current example in which an enterprise with national
scope, distinguished patronage, and years of labor resulted in a severely
flawed educational presentation of science and technology in our time.
This is of course the exhibit entitled "Science in American Life," now
showing as a permanent installation at the National Museum of American
History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (not to be confused
with the plans for the Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space
Museum). There has been a great deal of public commentary, pro and
con. As
Science
magazine put it, after the commissioning of this exhibit by
the American Chemical Society at the cost of $5.3 million, there ensued a
"five-year battle between an advisory committee appointed by the ACS
and curators at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. At the
heart of the battle was the portrayal of science. . .." As one of the histori–
ans associated with the project in the early stages reported, "the chemists
came in for a rude shock." "They wanted something like the Du Pont
slogan - 'better living through chemistry' - [but the head curator] and
others wanted pollution and death." A second member of the advisory
committee added, "We spent most of our political capital making sure it
wasn't a complete expose of the hazards of science." And yet a third
member of the advisory committee wrote: "Several historians assigned to
the curatorial team made no secret of their disdain for 'big science' and of
everything they believed it represented. Their political ideology opposed
industry, and dismissed chemical manufacturers as 'polluters.' Eventually
the lead curators ... wound up creating a largely negative [exhibit]."
This is not the place or time to rehearse the flaws of that exhibit,
which I have seen. What I do want to point out here is why, in this case,
as with the National Standards for Science, there is, after all, hope that the
prejudicial and unbalanced representation of science for the education of a
national audience is going to be corrected. The main reason for this re–
thinking is that while all the individual objections from scientists and
others at first made no impression on the Smithsonian and its curators, at
last a scientific society - specifically the American Physical Society - blew
the whistle loudly. Asked to do so by his elected council of the Society,
the president of the APS, the Nobelist Burton Richter, reported to the
Secretary of the Smithsonian that APS members who had visited the ex–
hibit "Science in American Life" had found the portrayal of science
trivializing its accomplishments and exaggerating any negative conse–
quences . They were concerned that the presentation was seriously
