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Inside HSM Oxford

Stories from the History of Science Museum, University of Oxford

Exhibitions

MHS Inspires Innovative Merchandising

7 July 2017 by Robyn Haggard Leave a Comment
Lunatic Elegance by Derek Kang on display in the Museum

Lunatic Elegance by Derek Kang

Chris Parkin (Education Officer) talks about the Museum’s new shop project with Banbury College of Art and Design (Oxford Brookes), and the Royal College of Art (RCA).

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Many of our visitors will have noticed the exciting new development that is the MHS shop ingeniously located beneath the old staircase. The shop has begun to stock bespoke merchandise which reflects the beauty and mystery of unique objects in the collection.

Such was the source of inspiration for two groups of creative art and design students from Banbury College of Art and Design (Oxford Brookes), and the Royal College of Art (RCA), who were involved in a project initiated by the Museum’s education department to develop innovative product designs for the Museum’s shop.

After initial research visits to the Museum in which the students were treated to interactive highlight tours, the students were set a brief to develop proposals for new merchandise.

The Museum shop.The students returned in January for a study day in which they were introduced to the Museum’s shop, attended a fascinating lecture on museum retail given by the Ashmolean’s commercial director, Lycia Lobo, and were treated to a tour of the shop at the Old Fire Station.

In March the students braved a Dragon’s Den event, hosted by the Museum, in which they had the opportunity to pitch their product proposals to a daunting panel of five museum professionals including the museum’s director, Dr Silke Ackermann.

What did the students think?

Students had clearly relished the opportunity to develop their own unique lines of enquiry. Chris Massey (RCA) explained how he began by exploring the physical function and light mechanics of a traditional spectroscope, and related those to modern gemstone faceting techniques, the resulting optics of jewellery and finally to branded colours.

“This research has been a perfect bridge to continuing my work in these areas and has helped expand the ways in which I consider our relationship to light, optics and our surroundings today.”

Anthony Wong (RCA) was captivated by the story of John Dee’s Holy Table, his belief in Angels, and quest to communicate with these supernatural entities: “It provoked questions on belief and sparked new ideas, whilst exhibiting gave me the chance to show something of the thought and design process, culminating in a new jewellery collection.”

Rachel (RCA) was stimulated by the sheer diversity of the museum’s collection: “Being able to explore and investigate objects of such historical importance from the Museum’s Collection was an exciting prospect when approaching this project; From pastel drawings and globes to magnifying glasses and sextants, the vast collection meant it was difficult to choose one as a starting point.”

The project’s academic impact.

Louise Williamson, the course lecturer from Banbury College of Art and Design, delighted in the opportunities that her students had been given and the positive outcomes of the project. Indeed, the experience has led her and colleagues to consider the possibility of developing a new module for a course in illustration currently proposed at Oxford Brookes focusing on commercial innovation. The project has led her to think more about how contrasting models of small batch production and mass production can sit together in the retail setting.

Tony Hayward, a lecturer in jewellery design at the RCA commented, “The feedback and questioning from the panel in the final presentation was encouraging; and to exhibit as a culminating show of our work was very useful, and brought the project to a satisfying conclusion,” whilst Louise Williamson, the course lecturer from Banbury College commented, “This is an amazing opportunity for the students and the course.”

Tangram Teasers

The project has been so successful that, following the ‘Dragon’s Den’ style finale, several of the proposals were selected for commercial development including an ingenious Tangram puzzle (Hayley Ash), a unique set of greetings cards featuring unusual objects from the collection (Joanne Woodward), and a collection of high end silver jewellery (Anthony Wong).

Christopher Parkin, Lead Education Officer at the Museum, commented “This has been a very exciting project not only for the students but for all the staff at the museum who have been involved witnessing the extraordinary range and imagination of the students’ work and their response to the collection.”

Over the summer months there will be a changing display of the students’ work in the library cabinets in the basement gallery.

Visitor looking at display

Follow the Students

Royal College of Art

Science to Studio: Exploring the history of science to create new and innovative design
View the students’ project blog here
View the students’ Instagram page here

Banbury and Bicester College

View the students’ Facebook page here
View the students’ Twitter feed here

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Posted in: Art@MHS, Education at MHS, Exhibitions Tagged: Banbury College of Art and Design, jewellery, Royal College of Art, Science to Studio, shop

Blessed Plot

9 March 2017 by Robyn Haggard Leave a Comment

MS. Eng. b. 2056 (B. 281). The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

Georgina Ferry is an Oxford-based science writer, and author of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: A Life (Granta 1998, reissued by Bloomsbury Reader 2014). In this guest blog post she discusses Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s work, the complicated process of drawing 3D structures as 2D figures and a computer programme called Pluto. 

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In 2015 the Bodleian Library included in its Marks of Genius exhibition a diagram of the molecular structure of insulin. The drawing, in red and black, came from the papers of the Nobel-prizewinning crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who was also the first to find the structure of penicillin. The curators included it among examples of handwritten and hand-drawn works, as expressing the ‘creative intensity and singular character’ of their creators: a reproduction of it is also included in Back from the Dead. But did Hodgkin draw this picture?

Model of the Structure of Penicillin by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin on display in Back from the Dead.

X-ray crystallography reveals the spatial arrangement of the atoms inside crystals in three dimensions, and representing this structure in two dimensions for publication remains a challenge today. Hodgkin was a highly competent draughtswoman, the evidence going all the way back to the beautiful architectural paintings she made as an eighteen-year-old in her gap year. However, drawing structures was time-consuming work, and once Hodgkin had assistants working with her, the task was usually delegated to them. She even drafted in her sister Betty Crowfoot, who made the electron density maps of penicillin at different depths through the molecule that were used to construct the innovative Perspex model now on display as part of Back from the Dead.

So it was unlikely that Hodgkin would have drawn the insulin diagram herself. There was a clue in the Marks of Genius exhibit, however, that it was not drawn by human hand at all. The diagram was on tractor-feed paper, with tell-tale sprocket holes down either side. This kind of paper would have been used with the earliest plotters and printers. Intrigued, I contacted Eleanor Dodson FRS, Professor Emerita at the University of York, who was one of the team working on insulin and in charge of crystallographic computing for Hodgkin’s lab.

Professor Dodson told me that the diagram was indeed one of the earliest examples of the use of a computer program called Pluto to draw a protein structure with a pen plotter. The program was originally written by Sam Motherwell in Cambridge, brought to Oxford by his colleague Neil Isaacs, and modified by Dodson to make it suitable for proteins.

I rang up Dr Motherwell to find out more. ‘I first had access to a pen plotter in 1968’, he says. ‘Before that they were very expensive, and even in 1968 it was a very special resource that had to be shared with lots of people.’ The principle by which the plotter worked was very simple. ‘You had an X and a Y axis’, he says. ‘The basic set of instructions is nothing more than move the pen to point XY, pen up or pen down, move to the next point, and then you’ve drawn a line. If you wanted to draw a circle, you might need 100 little steps.’ Motherwell wrote the Pluto program in 1969 (the name was a contraction of Plot Utility – he was thinking of Walt Disney’s Pluto, not the planet). The critical thing he did was to make it easy for the user to input the coordinates. ‘That’s why Pluto became so popular’, he says. ‘Any scientist could use it.’

Dodson did not have access to a plotter until about 1971. The solution to the insulin structure was published in 1969, so all the first insulin drawings would indeed have been made by hand, though probably not Hodgkin’s (various technicians are acknowledged in her papers for drawing diagrams). ‘I had to make Pluto able to deal with many more atoms’, says Dodson, ‘and draw the correct bonds between pairs of atoms. For small molecules you just give a list of the coordinates, C1, C2, N1, O1 etc. But for proteins there is a very strict naming convention – I think we were using the names of the amino acids to say where to join the bonds. I remember it was a dreadful headache! But once we had it we used it a lot.’

The plotter was far too valuable for the scientists to have one of their own. Dodson had to write the programs and submit them to the Computing Service, whose staff would run the job. ‘It was incredibly slow’, she says. ‘That insulin image probably took an hour to print. And if the computer service people got something wrong, that was irritating. It was quite a thing to draw a picture like that – you wouldn’t do it every day.’

Although Hodgkin did not concern herself with the details of the programming, she was extremely interested in the results. ‘She had a very good 3-D sense’, says Dodson, ‘and loved looking at electron density. She put a lot of thought into how you best illustrate structural stuff. Even with modern computer graphics, it’s still a problem, how you produce a two-dimensional figure for publications. There are a lot of conventions about what colours you use to make it easier to visualise what is happening.’

When I told the curators of Back from the Dead this story, they were able to change the description of the insulin illustration to read ‘plot’ rather than ‘drawing’. I’m rather sorry to see that the image is not included in the online Marks of Genius exhibition. While it may not have been drawn in Hodgkin’s own hand, it illustrates something much more interesting: her collaboration with colleagues within and beyond Oxford to marry imagination and technology in visualising the invisible.

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Posted in: Collections, Exhibitions, Oxford Science Stories Tagged: Hodgkin, insulin, penicillin

A day in the life…

7 August 2015 by Scott Billings Leave a Comment

We may be a small museum, but we get up to lots of different things… If you’ve ever wondered what happens here in a typical day, then take a look at this short film. Thanks to Tom Wilkinson and Tom Fuller in the University of Oxford Public Affairs Directorate for putting this together.

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Posted in: Education at MHS, Events, Exhibitions, MHS News, Press and media, Research
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