03 Nov 10
When I was a baby, I almost died of whooping cough (that’s me on the left with Mum). As the story goes, my father rushed me into the hospital emergency ward, where a nurse heard my desperate gasping for air, ripped me from his arms with a look of horror and ran down the corridor to put me in a humidicrib with no time to spare.
No doubt the story has been embellished over the years, but I swear I still have a memory of that terrible feeling of trying to draw breath between wracking coughs.
Whooping cough, or pertussis, is a highly contagious bacterial disease. We may think of it as just one of those things that babies and kids used to get, but in fact, according to Wikipedia, it affects 48.5 million people yearly resulting in nearly 295,000 deaths. It’s also completely preventable due to a vaccine.
Of course, there are a growing number of complete idiots that think they know better than all the scientists and researchers whose efforts have saved millions of lives, and advocate not immunising your child against whooping cough (and other preventable diseases). Despite the fact that the vaccine, introduced in the 1940s, has dramatically decreased the number of deaths from the disease, unscientific and unsubstantiated anecdotes and rumours swirl about on the internet that vaccination can cause brain damage.
I was thinking about the idiocy of people who would rather trust anecdotal evidence than scientific research, as I’ve recently been suffering from what my doctor suggested may be whooping cough. My last immunisation was at the age of 15 and apparently it can wear off in your forties. Then I read this article which claims that a recent epidemic of the disease may be attributable to the ‘conscientious objectors’ of Byron Bay and the eastern suburbs and northern beaches of Sydney, who are not immunising their children. It’s not too far beyond the realms of possibility that I got my dose of it from just such a child.
Seriously, what is it with these parents? Want to go back to the ‘good old days’ folks? Back when mumps, tuberculosis, meningitis, smallpox and measles, to name a few, caused millions of death worldwide? In the same way smallpox was eradicated, we could actually conquer these diseases, wipe them from the planet, only some people read a few crackpot internet articles or believe their village witchdoctor or priest and decide they know better than the people who devote their lives to this research—and the disease lives on, feeding on ignorance and fear.
Science is not perfect, and there’s been the occasional misstep along the road to enlightenment. But by its very nature, it learns from its mistakes, and it’s the best method we’ve got of saving lives and making the world a better place. We have to eradicate the ignorance that causes people to believe anecdotal evidence and superstition, and to think that science is somehow involved in some vast evil conspiracy of secrecy. Everything I’ve read about the history of this planet tells me that there were never any ‘good old days’; in fact, most people led nasty, brutish and short lives, right up to the most recent of times (and of course, many people in less developed countries still do). What has improved most lives in almost every conceivable way? Science.
The most cursory review of the facts tells us that the human race has never had it so good—let’s not start going backwards now.
Opinions ignorance, science
01 Nov 10
I was one of those kids who loved going to museums. There was one in Sydney called The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences—everything there moved to the new Powerhouse Museum in 1988—that was full of the most fantastic exhibits; strange machines and engines, with buttons you could press to make them work, a machine that played noughts-and-crosses, and of course an Egyptian mummy or two (I was obsessed with archaeology back then).
The other great museum in Sydney was the Australian Museum, a big old building next to Hyde Park full of the most fascinating stuff. There were upstairs galleries, their walls lined with thousands and thousands of specimens of creatures; slightly moth-eaten life-size diaramas (one of early man confronting a sabertooth tiger) in the stairwells, and a skeleton room that featured a skeleton man riding a skeleton horse.
I spent many, many hours wandering these places, and even then, one of the things I loved about them was the feeling of antiquity, not only of the exhibits, but of the buildings themselves. There was an old English stuffiness about the Australian Museum especially. You went there to escape the noise and bustle of the busy streets outside; to go somewhere cool and quiet and wander among the glass cases, perhaps casting a cursory eye over them, or perhaps immersing yourself in one small field of study for a few hours, reading every placard and studying every object in that field.
I hadn’t been to the Australian Museum for a while; perhaps for the occasional disappointing exhibit. Not only have I been around the world a couple of times since those early days, and seen places like the British Museum and the Louvre, but the shows always seemed so low-budget and thrown together on a shoestring. A symptom, perhaps, of the Australian obsession with sport, which wallows in bountiful corporate sponsorship, while our sciences and arts continue to struggle.
So my recent visit came as a shock, because the Australian Museum has completely transformed itself into a children’s creche. It’s a noisy, frantic place full of screaming, running children and bored parents with prams. Most of the exhibits seem to have disappeared—the upper galleries are empty—to be replaced by temporary walls, basic text in big easy-to-read fonts, bright colours and jigsaw puzzles and toys scattered around the floor.
Now I understand why the Museum has gone this route—they need money. I suspect it happened around the time they changed the logo from something simple and elegant to something that looks like it belongs in a children’s picture book. I also understand that kids need interactive exhibits these days; that the games and movable wall tiles are just extensions of the buttons I used to push in the old science museum.
But what happened to the museum? What happened to the place you could go to learn something? Where does the kind of kid that I was—the kind of kid that actually likes the fact that they’re in an adult place of learning that’s quiet and serious, and is mentally stimulated and made curious and challenged by that kind of atmosphere—where does that kind of kid go? Because today’s museum is a noisy playground just like every other noisy playground. And I can tell you, that’s exactly how most of the kids there were treating it.
I guess the museum has to make money like any other business these days. And they’re pursuing that agenda pretty ruthlessly it seems, with things like two hour ‘backstage’ tours at $130 per person, or children’s Halloween parties at $75 A kid. Something has to fund the research going on behind the scenes. It just seems a shame that the whole quality of the museum seems to have become so kid-focussed. Perhaps the latest research says you have to entertain the kid before he or she learns anything.
Maybe that’s how kids are educated these days. But if I look back and remember the kinds of child I was, who enjoyed the hushed, rarified atmosphere of learning in those old museum halls, I wouldn’t have learnt anything if the museum was like the playground it is today.
Unfortunately, there’s certainly no reason for me to go there as an adult with no kids.
Opinions Sydney
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