I recently had the opportunity to visit the exhibit GENOME: The Secret of How Life Works at the New York Hall of Science. Because part of my strategy for interacting with the world and the designs of culturally-embedded objects is to make their implicit sets of meanings explicit, I paid close and careful attention to the dominant metaphors employed in this exhibit. I was particularly interested in how the metaphors did or did not support the mission of the exhibit’s main sponsor, Pfizer.

Here is a summary list of those metaphors:
>Genome: Cracking the code

>Secrets(“this is the secret of you”)

>Gene switches shown with electric light switches that, when switched on, revealed concepts with text

>recipes with secrets
>recipes made in a factory

DNA=zippers
DNA=stuff
double helix=ideal shape
genes=DNA
DNA is a copy cat
proteins=origami

choreography in cells
cutting and pasting
cellular “community”
cell “world”

junk dna was, interestingly, deemphasized and implicated in the process of recombination

genes on chromosomes are like pairs of shoes

“the frontier” of research presented as a techno/ambient soundtrack with digital visualizations

“staying ahead of the flood” (of information, I hope)

time traveling

Information about applied careers and technology was presented after watson, crick, and franklin. Topics included:
gene therapy
bioinformatics
counseling
chemistry
treatments
newborn testing
drugs

stem cells = supercells

heredity slot machine (with the phrasing, “genes allow“)

The Reality Checks! (irony that reality is presented in a theatre)
-genetic engineering
-swapping genes from different animals
-cloning
-stem cells