O Say Can You See?

Interview: "Teaching AIDS" in the early 1980s

Editor’s Note: This is the second post in a series exploring the 30th anniversary of HIV and AIDS. Beginning on June 3, the National Museum of American History will mark the anniversary of the emergence of the HIV and AIDS epidemic with a three-part display and companion website. This blog series provides additional context and includes the perspectives of people directly involved in the history the museum is documenting.

Marcia Quackenbush was a social worker in San Francisco in the early 1980s and wrote one of the early textbooks for K-12 teachers, Teaching AIDS. Interviewer John O’Keefe is a guest assistant curator of the showcase display “HIV and AIDS 30 Years Ago” and is finishing a doctorate in American Studies at The George Washington University.

JO: Tell us about how you got involved with HIV and AIDS while doing social work.

MQ: I was hired at the UCSF AIDS Health Project pretty much fresh out of my graduate program, San Francisco State University’s Counseling program. It was 1984, and I was one of seven staff hired at the start of the project. They wanted people who were fresh in their thinking, able to try out new things, willing to shift perspectives when necessary.

I was one of two people assigned to an AIDS prevention program for youth. That’s where I focused much of my earliest work. I don’t think there was any other youth-focused AIDS prevention program in the country. There were maybe four adolescents in the entire nation [diagnosed] with AIDS at that point, and they were teens with hemophilia. We had a hard time convincing youth service providers in the city that AIDS was a concern for their clients.

JO: What was it like teaching about HIV and AIDS in a K-12 school setting?

MQ: I remember going to one high school for an after-school inservice for the entire teaching staff. At one point, someone asked, “What should I be saying in a class if I learn that one of the students has AIDS?”

I replied, “It’s confidential medical information, and unless the student or family chose to tell the school, no one would know.”

This caused almost instant pandemonium in the room. One of the P.E. teachers actually spit his coffee out all over the floor, he was so shocked. There was this universal outcry: “What?” One of the coaches started yelling at me. “My kids play hard. They bleed. If some kid has AIDS, are you telling me I’m not going to know that?”

I was able to get the group calmed somewhat, and spent the rest of the meeting talking about universal precautions for infection control. There was an amazing level of fear at the time. These are the ways it came out.

We also didn’t have very good awareness about LGBTQ kids in schools. I don’t think any school-based Gay-Straight Alliances existed at the time. I facilitated a drop-in group at the Pacific Center in Berkeley while I was in graduate school. The group was an amazing resource. Most felt they could not come out at school. Those who did sometimes got suspended, expelled or otherwise disciplined for it.

Early in this period (before there were many young people with AIDS), I did some work at a juvenile correctional facility. I told the director I would specifically be talking with young people who might be engaging in risks for AIDS. “And who would that be?” he asked.

“Well,” I answered, “young men who are having sex with other men. Young women who are having sex for money. Anyone using injection drugs.” (This list was limited because of our limited understanding of AIDS—we didn’t know then that ANYONE having sex could be at risk.) “We don’t have many of those kinds of juveniles here.” A baffling statement, really. I don’t know if he truly didn’t have a clue about the risk behaviors of the youth detained there, or he was just being obstreperous. But he took a couple of long, slow weeks to decide whether I’d be allowed to do this work.

Marcia Quackenbush and friends, circa 1986, San Francisco

JO: What has stayed with you about those early years?

MQ: The thing that comes back to me when I reflect on these early days of the epidemic is how profoundly affected we were, the community of people working in AIDS services.

We hoped that there would be an answer. A treatment that worked. A vaccine. As the numbers of teens with AIDS and HIV began to rise, I felt heartsick. I’d see a teen or young adult with HIV talking on a panel at a conference and think, “Did I see you hustling on Polk Street back in 1984? Did we talk? Did what I say have any impact at all?”

I once returned after a three week vacation. As I walked into work, I learned of six people I’d known who had died while I was away.

We’d hear about friends who had died, cry for 10 minutes, then go on to our work. It needed to be done. A close friend of mine was doing intakes for our project one night. He took a 20-minute break to go get his own HIV test result, which turned out to be positive. And then he went back to his intakes, providing words of encouragement and support to others for the rest of that night.

The display HIV and AIDS Thirty Years Ago opens June 3 at the National Museum of American History. Visit the companion website at americanhistory.si.edu/hivaids.

Tracking the condition of objects in Julia Child’s kitchen

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is the second in a series of six about the museum’s work in Julia Child’s kitchen. Amanda Browe is a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University.

Visitors to the museum earlier this year may have noticed something unusual when they arrived at the Bon Appétit! Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian exhibition—a number of people actually in the kitchen during visiting hours. This prompted quite a few questions: “What are those people doing in the kitchen?” “Why are they wearing gloves?” “Why are they touching the objects?” One of the most popular questions was, “Can I go into the kitchen too?” Unfortunately, the answer is no. To protect the kitchen, entry is limited to people who are performing necessary museum tasks, which, for several weeks this spring included four of my fellow graduate students and me. Never fear: we were not alone in the kitchen—we were supervised by our professor and also by museum staff involved in the creation and installment of the exhibit.

George Washington University Museum Studies student working with an object as a museum visitor looks on. The student is wearing nitrile gloves, which protect the object from oils on the student’s hands.

For those unfamiliar with the kitchen’s layout, it can be viewed through three acrylic viewports and this can create a bit of a fishbowl effect. The first time I was in the kitchen I felt that not only were the objects on display, but suddenly so was I. It can be a bit nerve-wracking to handle the objects while people watch, take pictures, and talk about what you are doing (the viewports aren’t soundproof and it can be distracting listening to the visitors). School children seem to be the most excited by our presence in the kitchen and they often knock on the acrylic to get our attention. My favorite experience with museum visitors involves one very confused kid who shouted, “Are you real?” When I turned and answered in the affirmative, he shouted and jumped back (apparently we look like very life-like mannequins). The knocking and camera flashes have become commonplace and now I find it much easier to focus.

But what exactly are we doing?  We are assessing the condition of the objects in the kitchen.  Museum practice involves documenting the condition of objects on a regular basis, and especially when the objects are moved. In addition, we are noting any effects from what the museum profession refers to as "agents of deterioration," including light, temperature, relative humidity, and contaminants (such as dust of air pollution).  We are recording the environmental conditions of the exhibit by taking light level, temperature, and relative humidity readings, which will help the museum maintain the best conditions for the objects.

Museum visitors who stopped to watch us may have noticed us filling out forms. These forms are called object condition checklists and they are used to evaluate and record the condition of the kitchen objects. An object condition checklist is the most practical method given the situation—we are assessing over nine hundred objects. These checklists allow us to gather basic facts about the object (such as its material components) and any problems the object may be experiencing (e.g., dust or discoloration).

Partial view of a completed object condition checklist.

Students filling out an object condition checklist for one of Julia’s many knives.

Preserving objects that are part of a long-term exhibit is dealt with differently than object preservation for short-term exhibits. Preservation issues can become more complicated when the objects are going to be displayed for a long period. During the early stages of exhibit planning, it is important to address ways to minimize the risks from agents of deterioration. As the kitchen is going to remain on display in another gallery, each student is focusing on a possible high-risk material. An example is paper materials, which are very vulnerable to changes in temperature, relative humidity, and exposure to inappropriate light levels. These agents of deterioration can cause discoloration, embrittlement (the paper becomes very dry), and cockling (the paper can wrinkle and bulge). Based on our research, we made preservation recommendations for each of these materials. These preservation recommendations and object condition checklists will aid the museum staff in ensuring that the proper preservation methods and care be given to Julia Child’s many tools and gadgets so they can continue to be displayed for the public.

Amanda Browe is a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University.

In the nano-world, anything can happen

In Michael Crichton’s 2002 sci-fi thriller, Prey, Jack Forman, a Silicon Valley computer programmer with serious job and marital problems, has been thrust into a military experiment in nanotechnology that has gone haywire. Xymos, a defense contractor on the Nevada desert, has developed molecular-scale cameras that can be injected into the bloodstream to monitor diseases—think Fantastic Voyage without Raquel Welch. The medical application, however, is only a cover for what they are actually making: clouds or “swarms” of tiny nanoscale cameras designed to spy on the enemy.

Jack’s wife works for the same top-secret firm, and things quickly get terribly personal for him. But his real problem is trying to bring a runaway technology back under control. It seems that Xymos has magically achieved the fantasy goal of nanotechnology: not only creating molecules by manipulating atoms, but programming atoms to come together on their own, a process known as “self-assembly.” The problem is that, once they can self-replicate, these nanoparticles start to behave functionally like living creatures; they don’t need humans anymore and anything can happen. Armed with a smidgeon of artificial intelligence, the swarms, so called for their mimicry of the social behavior of bees, are able to learn and evolve with astonishing speed. They go after Jack and anyone who threatens their freedom. The whole world is at peril. Jack wins, but just barely.

Prey ends with some unbelievable death-defying scenes and, for the sake of a good yarn, takes this still-infant technology to implausible extremes. But like the best science fiction writers, the late Crichton could be remarkably prescient about technological breakthroughs, if not their human and social impacts, which are always up for grabs. For example, as I write this, a DARPA-funded company is showing off a tiny flying gadget, its so-called Nano Hummingbird, complete with spy video camera—not strictly nano but on the road to it.

 

The Nano Hummingbird surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft developed by AeroVironment, Inc., under contract to the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Courtesy of DARPA, via Wikimedia Commons.

A counterbalance to Crichton’s dystopian vision is the one given by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku in his new book, Physics of the Future. Sensitive to the critiques of nanotechnology, he asks if it will “unleash the fire of enlightenment and knowledge or the winds of chaos?” Kaku looks on the bright side and opts emphatically for the former view; it can and will be controlled, he insists. He then takes us through near, middle, and far future scenarios, based on interviews with working scientists. His examples include super gyroscopes, designer molecules that hunt down cancer cells, DNA “on a chip” that monitors our health, remote-controlled “nanocars” that patrol our bloodstream for cancers (Fantastic Voyage, again), carbon nanotubes stronger than steel, non-silicon substrates for faster chips and computers, shape-shifting and self-healing structures (think here Terminator II), and the nanotechnologist’s holy grail, the “replicator” that perhaps by 2100 will manufacture everything at the atomic level practically from nothing, including body organs. The world’s major problem will then be the sociopolitical one of learning how to cope with this limitless supply of goods.

History tells us that dawning technologies, especially the more powerful ones, commonly provoke these divergent expectations. In his fascinating new book, The Information, James Gleick documents this with technologies from the telegraph and the telephone to the internet. Initial euphoria gives way to fear and anxiety about information overload. But, like Kaku, he puts a positive spin on his subject with some convincing arguments in its favor.

These divergent visions seem particularly pronounced in the case of nanotechnology, even though scientists and engineers have barely scratched the surface of its possibilities. Let me suggest one reason for this. Unlike any other technology to date, nanotechnology operates exclusively in the atomic realm. At the level of the ultra-ultra-small, everything is strange and mysterious. In a 1959 talk titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” generally recognized as the founding vision for nanotechnology without naming it as such, physicist Richard Feynman described some of the strange, commonsense-defying physics that comes into play. In addition to very short-range electrical forces that cause atoms to hew to one another in strange ways, there are the overriding laws of quantum mechanics that take charge at the nano level. It’s a bizarre world of ultimate uncertainty where particles can be in two places and two states at once or even disappear and then reappear someplace else. Feynman once observed that quantum mechanics “describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.” ^[1] A mysterious world indeed, where it seems anything can happen.

It is a measure of the potential and newness of the technology that the public knows of it mainly through fiction and films. To explore today’s nano reality, though, we recently participated in NanoDays 2011, a nationwide festival of educational programs about nanoscale science and engineering. In the Lemelson Center’s Spark!Lab, our hands-on invention space, visitors of all ages learned about nanotechnology through activities that ranged from measuring their height in nanometers to building a giant model of a carbon nanotube entirely from balloons. At the Lemelson Center, we believe that the tiniest spark of an idea can have widespread impact on everyday life, and with these activities, we sought to fire the imaginations of young people about nanotechnology, without overstating its promises or its dangers.

Art Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History.

¹ Feynman is quoted in Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), p. 157.

Spark!Lab staffer Chris White invents thin film artwork with visitors during NanoDays. Photo by Kate Wiley.

Stubby: Dog, Hoya mascot, and war hero

Stubby the dog, known to many as “Sgt. Stubby”, is one of my favorite artifacts in the Armed Forces History collections. He was the mascot of the 102 Infantry 26th Yankee Division in World War I. He showed up at training camp one day on the grounds of Yale University, and was such a hit with the soldiers that he was allowed to stay (he would drill with them, and even learned to salute). When it was time to ship off for Europe, Stubby went along for the ride to Newport News, Virginia, and was smuggled by Private J. Robert Conroy aboard the SS Minnesota. Upon discovery by Conroy’s Commanding Officer, the story goes, Stubby saluted him, and the CO was so impressed he allowed Stubby to remain with the troops. Stubby took to soldiering quite well, joining the men in the trenches. He was gassed once, and wounded by shrapnel another time, and once he disappeared for a while, only to resurface with the French forces who returned him to his unit. Stubby even captured a Hun (that’s WWI slang for a German soldier)!

Stubby leading a Legion parade

When the war ended, Stubby returned to the states with his companion Bob Conroy (note: I don’t say owner, because anyone who has dogs will tell you that it’s debatable about who owns whom) and to a certain amount of celebrity. Conroy enrolled at Georgetown University to study law, and Stubby became the mascot for the Hoyas. There were visits to the White House, a meeting with General John J. Pershing, parades galore, even a vaudeville appearance. Stubby touched the hearts of many, the hero dog who followed his buddies to war, and when he died in 1926 his obituary ran in several newspapers.

Stubby being decorated by General John J. Pershing

After Stubby died, he was stuffed and mounted (actually, his skin was placed over a plaster cast, and the rest of him was cremated and placed inside the cast), and was lent to the Red Cross Museum where he was on display for many years. On May 22, 1956, Bob Conroy donated Stubby to the Smithsonian Institution, and he was put on display in the National Museum (now the Arts and Industries Building, next to the Smithsonian Castle). And after that, well, Stubby went into a crate and stayed there for many years, in one of the storage rooms of the Division of Armed Forces History in the American History building. And that’s where I met him, when I began working with that division in the late 1980s.

I’ve had an affinity for animals since I was a toddler, especially dogs. (In my life, I’ve had: 3 mutts, 1 Collie, 1 Cairn Terrier, 1 Beagle, and 4 Labrador Retrievers!) So it was only natural for me to become interested in the story of Stubby. In 1998, the Connecticut National Guard inquired about a loan of Stubby to their museum, so he came out of his crate and went on display in Hartford for a few years; during that time, we began planning the exhibition The Price of Freedom: Americans at War which had a World War I section. When the exhibit was installed in 2004, we made sure Stubby was front and center, where he is today.

My first two Labs, Dunn and Bubba.

Stubby wearing his coat and collar

Now, Stubby is again enjoying a certain amount of popularity. In the past few years, I’ve received numerous inquiries about Stubby from children’s book authors, aspiring screenwriters, and even pit bull advocates who see Stubby as a role model (to whom I reply, Stubby was of no particular breed, he might have had some American Staffordshire Terrier blood, and I have nothing against the breeds currently categorized as pit bulls). He has his own Facebook page, and is the subject of several others. Maybe one day soon, a theater near you will be playing “Stubby Goes to War” or the local bookstore will be displaying Stubby: A Dog’s Life in the Trenches on the shelves by the door. Meanwhile, Stubby will be waiting for visitors in the WWI case of “The Price of Freedom,” along with Cher Ami, the hero pigeon who saved the Lost Battalion. But that’s another story.

Kathleen Golden is an Associate Curator in the Division of Armed Forces History at the National Museum of American History. If she wasn’t in the museum business, she’d be a veterinarian. Or a dog sitter.

A presidential visit

As we closed the museum last Sunday after a typically busy spring weekend, we prepared for three visitors who live in Washington but rarely have time to visit local attractions—President Obama and his daughters, Malia and Sasha. Like thousands of people who are flocking to the museum this spring, the president heard about the Abraham Lincoln exhibition and wanted to be sure he saw it before it closes on May 30. He also wanted his children to see the exhibit and learn more about one of America’s most admired and influential leaders. Their visit reminded me why families value the museum as a place for teaching and inspiration, where people make the connection between the past and present.

From the moment the president arrived, it was clear that he did not need a guided tour. His knowledge of Lincoln’s life and of the Civil War is extensive. In front of a wooden desk, he explained how Lincoln and other lawyers traveled to various courthouses in Illinois along the unpaved roads of the “Mud Circuit.” He was keenly aware of Lincoln’s political rise and the strategy he used to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1860. He noted the impressive collection of campaign artifacts in the exhibition. At a display that describes Lincoln’s first days in office, the president explained to his daughters the causes and consequences of the Civil War.

As the tour proceeded, the president used the exhibit to discuss issues and events beyond the battlefields—the impact of the draft of young men into the Union army, the significance of the telegraph and other technology in the war effort, and life in the White House. The section on the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address offered an opportunity to discuss two famous examples of presidential leadership. A display case of the prison hoods of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination plot attracted attention as it does for every visitor who has seen the exhibition over the past two years. A final and poignant moment occurred with President Obama viewing Lincoln’s life mask cast two months before his death.

Lincoln life mask, Clark Mills, 1865

Before the presidential visit concluded, Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough led us into the neighboring gallery devoted to The American Presidency for a brief look at some of the museum’s most treasured collections. The centerpiece of this exhibition is Thomas Jefferson’s writing table on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence. We examined the writing table, admired its design, and read the note that Jefferson attached to the desk, a note that comments on political superstitions and the “imaginary value” of historical relics. I fully expect that the Obama presidency, already full of dramatic events, will produce a rich collection that will reflect the history of our own times.

Brent D. Glass is Director of the National Museum of American History. The exhibition Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life is on view through May 30.