Dismantling research in the Natural History Museum of Denmark

The University of Copenhagen is about to dismantle the research programme of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. 

This is a gross mistake. The Natural History Museum is beacon of world-class interdisciplinary research in natural sciences and the plan is to move all research groups to the Biology Department, or to split them among Biology and other departments. Neither the Biology Department nor the Researchers at the Museum are happy, understandably.

The short-term consequence of this decision is the loss of the unique interdisciplinary research environment that currently exists in the Museum and that enables top-research to be addressed at the borders of different disciplines.

The mid-term consequence is the loss of the privileged connection between biological collections at the Museum and the research conducted on them or with them. Science at the Museum does not only benefit from the collections but also feeds them with new data and even new types of data. That connection will be weakened.

The long-term consequence is the most likely loss of world-class research groups and brain drain that comes with it, which would start an almost inevitable decline in the stature of natural history collections at the Museum and the natural history research conducted at the University of Copenhagen.

This is sad news. A new Natural History Museum of Denmark is being built with the vision of merging three independent museums: Botany, Geology and Zoology. The new building was conceived to host natural history collections, research, and exhibitions with obvious synergies being established with each one of these three types activities in the Museum. The whole process of merging of independent museums together with the policy to host large interdisciplinary research centres was the driving force for the construction of the new Museum and the reason why it was often seen as an innovator and source of inspiration by colleagues abroad.

Unfortunately, the decision to dismantle the the research programme of the Natural History Museum supports my reasoning back 2003 when I wrote  about the consequences of Natural History Museums being managed by Universities (Ambio blog; in Portuguese). 

Then, I was referring to another Museum (in Lisbon) but the problems related with universities managing Natural History Museums are general and can be summed up by the all too frequent lack of vision and understanding of the specific needs of museums by top leaders of the universities (they are chosen based on their understanding of the workings of universities not museums), and the low funding priority given by universities to museums when budgets are stretched and other (more central obligations of universities) are at stake. For these reasons, I concluded that museums, when managed by public institutions, should ideally be independent institutions under direct roof of the Ministries of Science, Education and/or Technology.

The Natural History Museum of Denmark was, so far, the example that proved me wrong. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be the case anymore.