05.20.10 kulturnatib

Enough?

Last weekend we visited a museum, our second in as many years. I didn't expect to see much difference between these visits. But it wasn't so much our expectations as much as that of our two-year old whose fascination with animals is in turn a continuous source of fascination for us that propelled this trip.

Animals are indeed the main feature of this museum. It is properly called so because it is not a zoo. Unlike their brethren in zoos who do nothing much except try to look like they are in the 'wild', – and occasionally overdo it by actually becoming 'wild' and harming keepers, handlers or the sometimes stupid or clueless visitor who gets too close -- the animals here actually do some work.

The work they do are often under appreciated, the credit going mostly to humans, who, of course, deserve some credit – the idea for this museum, for one – but not all, and not even the most important.

These are farm animals in an agricultural museum. It is a functioning museum in a way most museums are not. It is a demonstration farm involving mostly the fauna side of farming, although some exhibits are about the flora side (on our previous visit it was on hops and beer making) and its concomitant technologies (the present exhibit is on tractors).

Housed in the dairy barn of the still functioning Central Experimental Farm are animals we are familiar with. The mostly smaller local versions that is, of which, the fully-grown adult is just a juvenile in this farm.

Still, they are not out of the ordinary.

I was content enough to see them, their humongous selves, and be reminded, especially with the ruminants that cows are always female while the males are bulls and their offspring, when young enough are calves, when my wife called my attention.
There was something new in the museum after-all that we didn't see during our visit last year.

If not for the more detailed than most information card hanging on the enclosure fence they would not attract or encourage closer scrutiny. Actually, the information card, the only one there that was in the question and answer format of the popular “(Subject Here) For Dummies,” had an eyebrow raiser for its first question: What are transgenic spider silk goats?

Here was my first encounter with a GMO. At least one that was fully admitted as such unlike many staple food or food ingredients these days whose real provenance call only be guessed at by what it does not say in the label.

These goats have been genetically modified to produce milk with spider silk proteins. Researchers hope to produce spider silk in commercial quantities in goat's milk. Spider silk with its high tensile strength, elasticity and strength to weight ratio is ideal for use in biomedical devices, aerospace and transportation and the military.

The card goes on to explain how this silk is extracted, why the museum had these goats in the first place, if the goats are any different from ordinary, 'normal' goats, and other information of a mostly public relations kind that was clearly aimed at assuaging still widespread fears of 'frankenorganisms.'

Having the goats on display was by itself a public relations initiative as indeed admitted in the infocard for truly there was nothing particularly fearsome with the goats.

Yet, stepping out of the museum and into a truly wondrous spring day, I wondered with a book (“Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age,” by Bill McKibben) I read recently if with all the promise and, in fact, deliveries of technology, we can mature into a future where we will have learned to say 'enough.'