Article ID: CBB001320039

Modernizing Natural History: Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Transition (2013)

unapi

Throughout the twentieth century calls to modernize natural history motivated a range of responses. It was unclear how research in natural history museums would participate in the significant technological and conceptual changes that were occurring in the life sciences. By the 1960s, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the few university-based natural history museums that were able to maintain their specimen collections and support active research. The MVZ therefore provides a window to the modernization of natural history. This paper concentrates on the directorial transitions that occurred at the MVZ between 1965 and 1971. During this period, the MVZ had four directors: Alden H. Miller (Director 1940-1965), an ornithologist; Aldo Starker Leopold (Acting Director 1965-1966), a conservationist and wildlife biologist; Oliver P. Pearson (Director 1966-1971), a physiologist and mammalogist; and David B. Wake (Director 1971-1998), a morphologist, developmental biologist, and herpetologist. The paper explores how a diversity of overlapping modernization strategies, including hiring new faculty, building infrastructure to study live animals, establishing new kinds of collections, and building modern laboratories combined to maintain collections at the MVZ's core. The paper examines the tensions between the different modernization strategies to inform an analysis of how and why some changes were institutionalized while others were short-lived. By exploring the modernization of collections-based research, this paper emphasizes the importance of collections in the transformation of the life sciences.[

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Authors & Contributors
Sunderland, Mary Evelyn
Rosenberg, Gary D.
Clary, Renee M.
Gregory P. Dietl
Steve A. Trewick
Priscilla M. Wehi
Concepts
Natural history
Museums
Collections
Paleontology
Collectors and collecting
Fossils
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
Early modern
Renaissance
Places
United States
New Zealand
Great Britain
Brazil
Padua (Italy)
Berkeley (California, U.S.)
Institutions
University of California, Berkeley
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (University of California, Berkeley)
University of Padua
Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen
Dalhousie University
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
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