Michael Nagle for The New York Times
COLD STORAGE At the American Museum of Natural History, George Amato reached into a vat, cooled by liquid nitrogen, holding vials of tissue samples.
George Amato climbs a step and lifts the lid on a shiny stainless steel vessel that is basically a tall, portly thermos bottle. Clouds swirl off liquid nitrogen inside, making the tank look like a high-tech witch?s caldron.
This vessel and the others in the room hold some of the least-imposing exhibits in the American Museum of Natural History, the sprawling, 143-year-old complex on Manhattan?s Upper West Side.
Inside the vessels are tall racks that hold small boxes; each box contains dozens of plastic vials; each vial contains a tissue sample, and all of it is preserved at minus 160 degrees Celsius. The museum has collected 70,000 of these vials from 40,000 animal species since the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection opened in 2001.
?There is no other tissue bank that has the overall diversity of life represented here,? said Dr. Amato, director of the museum?s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.
Few visitors to the museum would be likely to want to see the little bar-coded vials. They lack the grandeur of the rearing Barosaurus skeleton in the Roosevelt Rotunda or the 94-foot model of a blue whale. Those can be found in the vast public spaces of the museum?s complex of 26 buildings; the Monell collection sits in a basement room next to the carpentry shop.
The samples in the mist are part of more than 32 million biological specimens and cultural artifacts owned by the museum, only a tiny fraction of which are seen by the public. Their purpose is not to educate and entertain visitors, but to further the museum?s role as one of the world?s leading research institutions, with more than 200 scientists on board. This is the museum?s less-known life, but one that goes back to its founding in 1869.
Anesthetized by visits to museums that have more in common with amusement parks than with research centers, most visitors would be surprised to find that the American Museum of Natural History grants graduate degrees to scientists who work within its walls. Facilities like the Monell collection show how the scientific work undertaken at the museum has broadened over the years: what started with avid collecting, comparing and drawing of specimens, skeletons, feathers and skin now involves DNA sequencing, CT scanning and high-powered computational analysis.
The office of Michael J. Novacek, provost of science at the museum, shows the blending of old and new. The outer wall of the office is curved, tucked into one of the seemingly ancient towers at a corner of the building. On his desk is a big-screen iMac computer displaying a project the museum is engaged in under a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, a database known as the MorphoBank.
The database turns morphology ? the study of the form and structure of organisms to discern the evolutionary relationships among them ? into a social media endeavor that incorporates physical characteristics, genetic expression and environmental factors to more fully describe ?the tree of life,? Dr. Novacek said. As he gazes at a screen filled with information about the anatomy of elephants, he notices that a colleague in England has added an image and filled in accompanying information about it.
?It changes the way people work, it changes the way people collaborate, and it really shoots science ahead,? he said.
And, he added, projects like this mean that the museum?s scientific resources are open to the world. ?It?s as if we took these 32 million things ? specimens, tissues and artifacts ? and opened a window on them,? he said. ?It?s not just on display in an exhibit or sitting in a drawer in the corner of the museum.?
These resources will eventually be accessible to schoolchildren and the general public in formats they can understand and use, he predicted. The hundreds of schoolchildren waiting at a nearby subway stop to enter the museum may not know about the online world of the collections, he said, but ?they will know this.?
For now, he notes, the rich scientific work of the museum goes largely unnoticed outside the scientific community. Dinosaurs, meteorites, the hominid Lucy and the Star of India sapphire get the spotlight. ?In some ways, we?re victims of our own success,? he said. ?The objects are so amazing.?
The museum now looks at its objects differently, with tools that include scanning electron microscopes and a CT scanner that allow magnification and imagery that seem the stuff of science fiction ? or nightmares. Scientists can study the hairs and carapaces of insects, wear patterns on ancient rock tools from Kenya or the inscription on a sword that has fused with its sheath. In the room that houses the CT scanner, a table is crowded with jars containing snakelike creatures preserved in alcohol, ready for their extreme close-ups.
Underlying the museum?s research efforts is computational power that is now beginning to tackle some of the tough problems of sorting through enormous amounts of data for comparison, pattern recognition and analysis. That is the work of Ward Wheeler, whose banks of clustered computers sit in the museum?s basement around a corner from the cryo lab.
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