Zircons and the zeitgeist

It has come to light that the Royal Ontario Museum plans to close the Jack Satterly Geochronology Laboratory, part of its Department of Earth Sciences.

The lab, which bears the name of one of the giants of Ontario geology, who late in life developed an abiding interest in precise age determinations on rocks, is one of the museum’s finest ornaments: a research centre known worldwide for the work it does in a difficult and scientifically important field.

Consider: of the museum’s active curators, only two have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada. One of them is Thomas Krogh, the long-time director of the Satterly Laboratory, who was inducted three years ago for having “revolutionized the technique of radiometric uranium-lead dating.” The Royal Society’s citation said Krogh’s techniques “have been copied around the world, and are openly acknowledged to be unsurpassed,” and glowingly praised his contribution to science’s understanding of early earth history.

This is the same laboratory the museum is now ready to close: a laboratory the museum itself described as the world leader in direct dating using the uranium-lead method, and a laboratory that is responsible for between a fifth and a quarter of the museum’s annual output of scholarly papers.

Museum management have, in what seems a belated discovery, decided that geochronology is not part of the museum’s mandate. That mandate — endorsed by the museum’s president, William Thorsell — is, unluckily for prevaricators, carved in stone. There, by the museum’s main door, are the carefully chiselled words: “the record of life through all the ages; the arts of man through all the years.” Perhaps the museum’s chief thinkers use a back entrance.

The Satterly Laboratory has, up to now, taken responsibility for about 88% of the time span mentioned in the museum’s mandate. The rest of the Earth Sciences Department, plus Paleobiology, account for the other 12%. (It is proper here to make some gesture to the two parts per million of time covered by the departments that catalogue the “arts of man.”)

And it is this same mandate, Thorsell insists, that the museum means to fulfil by a program called Renaissance ROM, a $200-million building, renovation, and technology campaign. “The status quo,” he says in an oh-so-original coda to his presidential message, “is not an option.”

So up will go “brand new galleries on textiles and costume, world indigenous peoples and musical instruments.” Up will go a fully remodeled gallery of Canadiana. Up will go a new wing with atriums, bridges, and open stairways. Usefully, the new addition will be attached to the Institute for Contemporary Culture, whose past exhibits have included “The Mystery and Evolution of Commercial Brands” and “Sturm & Bang: Techno’s Links to High Art.”

And the museum that can find $148 million for that, $18 million to put in retail and restaurant space, $10 million for public programs, and $24 million for technology and curatorial upgrades, is ready to axe the world’s leading zircon geochronology lab. Not contemporary or cultural enough, apparently, and half a million a year that the museum thinks could be better spent on something else.

Tell that to the country’s geological surveys, who regularly submit samples for dating. Tell that to mapping geologists around the world, who rely on good geochronology, developed to a large extent by the Satterly Lab, to sort out difficult field relations.

Direct dating — a craft that was to a great extent developed a few blocks from the museum, by University of Toronto geophysicists — is one of the silent services of the earth sciences, but one of its most prolific contributors of hard scientific data. It is basic, unglamorous dog work, but important out of all proportion to its cost when geologists have to think clearly and quantitatively about the relationships between rocks.

If the museum’s “renaissance” is to be anything more than the triumph of a dumbed-down and Philistine literary culture over its scientific rival, then the Museum will have to share the wealth with those who do a large part of its heavy intellectual lifting. That means recognizing the place the natural sciences have in its public duty, and properly funding the people that do that important work.

The Canadian and Ontario governments have each committed to $30 million for the Renaissance ROM project. It might be helpful if they looked seriously at the kinds of scholarly activity that money will go toward, and examined the usefulness of an important scholarly activity the museum proposes to drop.

It might also be helpful if president Thorsell were to take a break from ruminating about the fun of dressing up and consider what the loss of a top-drawer laboratory might mean to the museum’s credibility in the scientific world.

The ROM was built on science, not show. To abandon one for the sake of the other now will not bring the museum either honour or success.