The museum was fortunate to host an audience with Australia’s first pregnant man during the Ultimo Science Festival recently. Adam Jones spent time being interviewed by Museum science educator Derek Williamson, and answering questions from audience members.
Adam explained the thinking behind the decision for he and his wife to start there family in this cutting edge way, the science and technology that went into the fertility process, the wide ranging public responses to this new science and the complications encountered and associated with the delivery.
While at the museum Adam explored our collection and came up with his favourite gadget, an early 20th century electro-therapeutic device. These were common in Sydney homes until about 1930, used to relieve all manner of pains, disturbances and hysteria. They used electric fields to create small vibrations to massage away the symptom.
“Australia’s first pregnant man, Adam Jones, engages with an electro-therapeutic device from the Powerhouse collection.”
Adam was a character played by actor James Lugton, with a script first developed by Spectrum Theatre for the Science Museum in London, but the discussion was real. The Museum decided to run this program as a way of allowing our audience to discuss the ethical and moral issues around breaking science in a safe and easy forum.
Here at the Museum we believe science proceeds at a fabulous rate with new announcements everyday of the discoveries and improvements that advances are going to deliver into our lives. Quite often this rate of change is much faster than society’s ability to discuss and think about the progress and its implications. Museums try to be places for open and accurate presentation of facts, but here at the Powerhouse we also try to be a venue to allow safe discussion of developments and ideas which will have implications for not just our life styles but also societies cultural and moral stand points.
Two outcomes that quite surprised me about our audience with Adam Jones were, firstly, that the response was generally of fascination and intrigue, with very little of the reactionary questioning I had expected, and secondly, how prepared people were to go on this theatrical journey with us, to ask questions of Adam that took us deeper into the character than we had anticipated.
People asked what and how would the “birth” be explained to the child as it grew? What possibility or intention to breast feed? What of the long-term effects of the hormone treatment?
The question that came up in each forum, and one we had really not expected, was is it real? Science has raised people’s expectations of what can be possible that people were really uncertain about the extent to which this was possible. This raises two fascinating questions for me, where does the ability for people to suspend their disbelief come from? Is it important for people to be able to draw the line between science fiction and science fact?
And in our Museum context exactly how clear do we need to be about the line between theatre and reality?
Related links
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/
http://www.malepregnancy.com/
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2346476
