A Night at the Museum

It’s not every day that a project comes to life. This is especially true when that project has been over 4-years in development. That’s just what happened as we arrived at the National Museum of Scotland for our grand night at the museum.

Parasites: Battle for Survival

Parasites: Battle for Survival is a brand new exhibition. It has been developed in partnership with the Museum and colleagues from the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh Infectious Diseases.

The exhibition focuses on five tiny parasites that cause some of the most devastating diseases:

• malaria,
• schistosomiasis
• leishmaniasis
• sleeping sickness
• guinea worm disease

These diseases affect 1 in every 18 people in the world. These five are among a range of diseases which the World Health Organisation is aiming to eliminate, some as soon as 2020. Research centres in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow at the forefront of these efforts.

Contemporary collecting

In contrast to what you might expect in a museum, it’s a very forward-looking exhibition. The section on Dundee, for example, focuses on what we do here in our labs, with a fabulous liquid-handling robot donated to the Museum’s collection. There are also some brand new microscopes and ‘software interactives’ – which is museum-speak for computer games. With rapidly increasing levels of difficulty, you’ll need to see if you can choose the right medicine.

We’ll also be running lots of sessions for public and schools as part of our public engagement programme. For high school students, we’ll run a workshop looking at the Design/Make/Test cycle of drug discovery. We’ll also be running our large-scale interactive board game, Heal the World. This will be for school pupils and for public as part of Edinburgh Science Festival – our first time there!

We can’t wait to see what people make of the exhibition and all of our activities alongside. Hopefully we’ll see you there soon!