Imagining future bodies: Wellcome Trust Strategic Programme on the Human Body
The Wellcome Trust Strategic Programme on the Human Body:
- arranged a self-guided museum trail on the future of the body at Manchester Museum
- programmed guided tours of the trail for daytime and evening visitors
- organised an evening debate on the ethics of human-animal hybrids and new reproductive technologies
- attracted a total audience of 24 for the two guided tour events and 60 for the panel discussion; an unknown number of museum visitors viewed the highlighted exhibits during a normal museum visit.
Medicine works with the body, but does it also change it? Biomedical sciences affect how we think of our bodies and what we can do to them - now and in the future. These effects are the focus of the philosophy and bioethics group at Manchester University and the University of Edinburgh, who have come together in the Wellcome
Trust Strategic Programme on the Human Body, its Scope, Limits and Future.
The Manchester researchers are unusual because they are not doing biomedical science themselves but thinking about its implications. Their public engagement effort was designed to find ways to discuss the issues that might be raised by science.
Professor John Harris, who leads the programme, says: "It's been very valuable for us because we are ideas people. We don't have labs, or test tubes with coloured things in them to muck about with." As such, the Manchester researchers naturally want to engage people by writing and talking about the issues they are considering. This time, though, they wanted a different approach.
The approach
The idea was to work with a museum, but - as Catherine Rhodes, one of the research fellows who led the project, recalls - the need to fit the work into the anniversary year made this difficult: "The short timescale meant that trying to set up our own exhibition was too ambitious."
Instead, the researchers explored links between museum displays that already existed and the questions with which they wanted to provoke people. They had four themes in mind, each relating to a research strand in their own programme: biomaterials, human enhancement, genethics and new reproductive technologies. Their ambitious overall aim was to convey some of what has emerged from science and technology in the past 75 years as an invitation to think about what might happen in the next 75. As they put it, the question is "What could, should and should not happen?"
After investigating local resources, the researchers chose the Manchester Museum, which happens to be across the road from their offices. A tour of the museum guided by the curators quickly produced a list of relevant exhibits that were already open for viewing.
According to researcher Sarah Chan, "What we did in developing the trail was to come to the museum and look at different objects and see how they inspired us to think in various ways about our research programme on the human body. We thought that if we were inspired by these objects, then we could use them to help the public understand what it is we do and to engage with them over our research."
A little imagination allows many biological exhibits to be related to biomedical ethical issues. Shark's teeth, for example, led to thinking about the imperfections of human teeth and the scope for improvement, and an exhibit about vampire bats fitted well with ideas about the need for blood. Seahorses prompted a question about whether men should be allowed to bear children, and kangaroos jumping provoked a discussion about enhanced sports performance - and so on.
These ideas do not arise automatically from seeing the exhibits on show, so the next step was to turn them into a trail with a suitable guide.
Sarah Chan explains: "We had a leaflet printed up that guides people coming to the museum to these different objects, so people can follow this trail in their own time.
What we've done with each of the objects is develop a little text box that poses some of the interesting questions in relation to that object and our research, so these have been put on display in the museum."
Museum visitors could follow the nine stops on the Human Body Trail by themselves, which took around half an hour. Some visitors also joined guided tours run during the Manchester Science Festival: "We took people on a short walk around, and got their ideas as well on how those objects made them think differently about the human body. We followed that with a discussion over tea and coffee, of how technology has changed the body and how it might affect it in future.
"It's been an event that is also aimed at families, because it is a science festival event, so there were some activities for children included in that, including drawing and puzzles."
Chan's colleague Catherine Rhodes added: "We got some really nice feedback from the children - things like it had made them think differently, which is great, as well as that they had enjoyed the process. That gave us a bit of a confidence boost."
The tour is flexible, and the team recently answered a request for something a little different from their family-friendly daytime tour. "The museum were very interested in having us run it as one of their evening adult members' events," says Rhodes. A separate guided tour for adults was run, which included a look behind the scenes in the museum and a focused discussion on whether people ought to donate body materials - and, if so, which ones.
The direct interaction with people on the tour was a highlight of the project. "What was interesting was the way you could see people's ideas and thought processes developing as part of the discussion," says Rhodes.
"There was one participant on the adults' tour, for example, who started off saying to all the different examples of donation, 'I'm just going to say no to everything.' Then she stopped and thought, 'Oh, this one, actually, I think is all right,' and then in the discussion, she really started to think differently about some of her preconceptions about the use of technology."
The main trail was promoted on the internet and through the Manchester Science Festival. The project team complemented this using a more traditional medium and commissioned four postcards, each with an image representing one of the four areas for discussion. These were distributed around the city to help publicise the project and the research programme.
The museum also hosted an evening panel discussion organised jointly with the Academy of Medical Sciences.This was linked to the Academy's recently published report on animals containing human materials and allowed experts to respond to questions from the public.
Next steps
The project team are keen to follow up their work and have drawn some useful lessons from their effort.
Sarah Chan found that the project, "has been perhaps more work than we anticipated to begin with. Funding covered the cost of the activities and putting them on, and not our time developing them, so one lesson is not to underestimate how much in person resources were needed to develop this. But it's been good fun, a chance to do something different, and it has helped us think about our work in a different way as well - a genuine two-way engagement."
She also emphasises how crucial it was to have experienced local partners, although the necessity of coordinating several different organisations can slow things down.
The idea of the object trail, and the particular ideas developed for this one, are both repeatable in other venues. Catherine Rhodes emphasises that the trail is based on objects in the Manchester Museum, "but they are not very specialised objects. They are things you could find in a lot of different museums around the country. And one of the things we’d like to do with this is to take it to other places."
Plans have been made to repeat the trail in Edinburgh, where the Manchester group has close collaborators, using objects chosen from the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Eight of the original objects have substitutes there, leaving only one that had to be dropped from the tour list.
There is also the possibility of filming a guided tour, so that the experience can be sampled online and linked to teaching materials for schools.
Meanwhile, Catherine Rhodes is developing a version of the 'body bits' exercise for use in schools after it sparked discussion during the adult tour. Pupils will be asked to rank a set of possible donations according to their 'moral force'. The topic encourages a lively discussion because there is no consensus on the status of the various parts a person might be prepared to part with to benefit someone else - a portion of blood, an organ removed after death, bone marrow, sperm or even a live organ such as a kidney.
This issue relates directly to a current research project, but the team are determined not to use the discussions as new data: "We resisted the natural response of social scientists!"
The problem with advancing follow-up plans is always staff time, according to Rhodes, and she hopes that future grant proposals in the area will include earmarked funding for public engagement, as is more common now for grants in the natural sciences.
The final word on this first effort comes from John Harris: "Has it been time well spent? Yes!"
Further information
Visit the Strategic Programme on the Human Body website.
