Old Museums, New Tricks

THE NEW CRITERION, February, 2017

Old Museums, New Tricks

On the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History, the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia, and the lessons we can learn from older museums.

The best museums are often museums of museums—institutions that put their own history on display alongside their collections. The museums that fascinate me are never the buzziest models off the shelf but those that have been allowed to age. Either through conscious efforts at preservation or through the preservative fluids of neglect, such institutions invite us to experience history as a part of history. Rather than attempting to exist outside of themselves by erasing their past, museums that seem antiquated or even “out of date” can reflect the highest values of their mandates to protect and present the objects in their collections, which must include themselves.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is of course one example of a museum that has preserved its own history better than most, something I wrote about in these pages in December. Even as it has evolved into more contemporary forms, the museum has worked to reveal the ornamental details of its architectural past—from the Victorian Gothic heart of its initial 1880 building by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould (now its gallery of Medieval art), through its many later additions in the Romanesque, Beaux-Arts, and modern styles.

Such a presentation can be even more revelatory in museums of science. Here older buildings and displays serve a vital and often overlooked role in teaching us about the history of instruction and inquiry. By seeing what older halls get right and wrong (or what we now believe to be right and wrong), we gain perspective on our own scientific certainties and the charismatic methods through which museums now present themselves to the modern public.

The American Museum of Natural History, the grand institution just across Central Park from the Metropolitan, and with a similar history, has likewise developed as an accumulation of buildings in a wide variety of styles. The institution has also been blessed with generations of naturalists and craftsmen who were the best in their scientific fields. History has borne that out, and we can continue to see it in the wondrous animal dioramas that have become the hallmark of the institution and have fascinated patrons across the ages (including this reviewer, beginning with almost weekly visits as a child).

After the naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley died in 1926 on the slopes of Mount Mikeno in the Belgian Congo while developing his Hall of African Mammals—beneath the spot now represented in his gorilla diorama—background painters such as James Perry Wilson, foreground sculptors such as Raymond DeLucia, and taxidermists such as Robert Rockwell carried on his work though the Hall of North American Mammals, one floor directly below. A decade ago, Stephen Christopher Quinn, who has continued what is now a century-old legacy of dioramic design at the museum, published a history of their efforts in his book Windows on Nature.

The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History, c. 1920

An equally interesting but less frequented area of the museum is the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians—in part because the room has been diminished over the years from its original brilliance. Directly off the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, now fully enveloped by later additions, the hall occupies the first floor of the museum’s first building.

This room is remarkable not only for its age but also for the work of the museum’s iconoclastic anthropologist, Franz Boas, who developed it at the turn of the last century. A curator and field worker, Boas was, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, one of the country’s primary Pacific Northwest explorers and personally responsible for acquiring many of the objects the museum now possesses from the region.

Anti-evolutionary, Boas was also anti-theoretical and argued for pragmatism and a high degree of intra-cultural observation in research. Departing with his day’s progressivist beliefs in the eugenic order of evolution, which grouped non-Western cultures together with primitive man, Boas displayed ethnographic objects on their own terms. He divided the large hall into sections and dedicated each to a certain tribe of the Northwest Coast: the Tlingit, the Haida, the Kwakiutl. Within these alcoves he further assembled the items of each group: ceremonial masks, pots and bowls, ceremonial ladles, the blankets and coppers of the potlatch. Extensive texts and descriptions were located with the objects, and additional pamphlets and monographs were available for museum patrons within the hall and in the museum bookstore. During his time at the museum, Boas himself even led tours of the collection in order to explain his advanced method of display.

Franz Boas with a ceremonial mask from the Northwest Coast

The result was distinctly non-hierarchical, allowing each object to exist in tribal specificity. But more than just recognizing the value of his objects, Boas also acknowledged the intelligence of his patrons. Far from the feeble-headed immigrant masses envisioned by his trustees, Boas believed his museum-goers were able to take on the complexities of his own field experience and understanding. (He was, unfortunately, less charitable to a family of Greenland islanders dying in the museum basement).

The young Claude Lévi-Strauss happened to be one such new arrival to absorb Boas’s lessons. Boas’s displays served as a visual structure for Lévi-Strauss’s developing methodology when he visited the hall in the 1940s. The opening paragraphs of The Way of the Masks, Lévi-Strauss’s book on ceremonial masks in the Pacific Northwest, is dedicated to the museum and its “outmoded but singularly effective museographic methods.”

Boas feared that elisions and simplifications of ethnographic material would delude the museum public into believing they had mastered complex information. “There appears a multiplicity of converging and diverging lines which it is difficult to bring under one system,” he said against surface conclusions and quick assumptions. Yet Morris Ketchum Jesup, then president of the museum and an ally, nonetheless objected to what he saw as Boas’s cluttered display. He wanted a presentation that combined didactics with entertainment, and set about instituting these changes after Boas’s departure in 1905.

While Boas’s tribal enclaves were maintained, the number of objects on display was reduced, large totem poles were commissioned for the room, and wax mannequins were created to add an element of theater to the large Haida canoe in the center of the hall. Between 1910 and 1926, the artist Will S. Taylor painted theatrical murals along the inside walls while the windows were blacked out and the architectural ornamentation covered over. Each of these post-Boas additions raised the stakes of spectacle but retreated from the radicalism of the presentation. What has resulted today is a muddle of intentions in a hall that calls out for a return to his original design.

The totality of the museum’s rich history, its masterpieces and its missteps, must now inform its latest efforts at building and development. Since its founding in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History has always been a work in progress. With a wide range of buildings, the museum has gradually expanded over a quadrangle between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue that was, in fact, set aside in the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which established the original street grid.

This past month, the museum unveiled plans for a 194,000-square-foot, $340-million new wing known as the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, to be constructed facing Columbus Avenue in line with Seventy-ninth Street and set to open in 2020. In recent years, a pocket of local residents has objected to any additional encroachment by the museum onto what is now known as Theodore Roosevelt Park, yet the museum has every right to build there. Arguments for green space ring hollow considering the proximity to Central Park, and new construction will fit within the footprint outlined in the museum’s nineteenth-century master plan, which remains incomplete.

More pressing should be questions of how the building—costing as much as a stand-alone museum—relates to the values of the institution and reflects the culture in which it has been conceived. It might be said that every generation gets the museum wing it deserves. The fanciful rustication of J. Cleaveland Cady’s south façade gives way to the Beaux-Arts grandiloquence of John Russell Pope’s Roosevelt Rotunda on up through Polshek’s vitrine-like computer-age planetarium. Such organic expansion at the very least allows for the preservation of older buildings and halls.

Model for the American Museum of Natural History’s Gilder Center, facing Columbus Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street.

The Gilder building, by Studio Gang Architects, will dispense with historicized style altogether in favor of sculptural concrete resembling “slot caverns, riverbank canyons, and hydrologic flow,” explains Jeanne Gang, who used water and blocks of ice to study the forms. The monumental effect will be post-diluvial—a natural history museum at the eschaton.

Inside, some of what is planned sounds very promising. A five-story “collection core” will line the interior with visible storage displaying 3.9 million specimens, or about 10 percent of the museum’s collection. Large areas will be dedicated to live butterflies and other insects as the museum continues to drift into a role traditionally taken up by zoos.

Still unknown remains the proper use of the building as a center for education—the same questions that dogged Boas’s original hall. With new “exhibition techniques for diverse audiences” offering an “authentic engagement with science,” here is a fully immersive diorama that promises seamless storytelling on the deleterious effects of humanity but one that may not fully consider the “multiplicity of converging and diverging lines,” as Boas put it, in the Malthusian shade. With a new building designed to “combat the post-truth era” and provide “wisdom for how to treat your environment,” according to museum leadership, it remains to be seen whether such mandates will also lay bare the history of science in the hands of progressivism. In this museum of natural history, the Gilder Center must not become a temple of doom.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphi

It is taken as a given that museums must keep current with contemporary dictates and modern expectations. Yet just consider an exception to this rule, and a truly exceptional one at that. The Wagner Free Institute of Science, incorporated in 1855, has operated out of the same building in North Philadelphia since 1865. Much like Boas’s famous hall, but without a growing museum to envelop it, the institute and its displays remain nearly untouched since the late nineteenth century.

As a remarkable specimen of Victorian science, the institution deserves a visit by anyone interested in the history of museum culture. Yet more remarkably, even with its antiquated resources the Wagner continues to operate today as the oldest free education program in the country, teaching 18,000 low-income children annually while offering free access to its 100,000-object collection, mainly to an under-served local community. On the day I visited, while educators had organized a collection hunt upstairs, a paleontologist was unwrapping his findings for an enraptured assembly of children in an auditorium that still retains hat hooks beneath every seat.

With barely the resources to remain in operation, here is an institution that continues to instruct us on just what it takes—or doesn’t take—to learn from the objects of our fascinating world.

The Manor Reborn

ART & ANTIQUES
April 2015

The Manor Reborn
by James Panero

The renovated Cooper Hewitt Museum harmonizes new, immersive exhibition spaces with the elegant, century-old infrastructure of New York's Carnegie Mansion

THE DECEMBER 12, 1902, inauguration of Andrew Carnegie’s New York mansion on Fifth Avenue, between 90th and 91st Streets, captivated the city and solidified Carnegie’s ambitions in brick, mortar, steel, wood, and stone. When the Carnegie family returned from their Scottish castle, Skibo, to see the home for the first time, a crowd gathered at the New York pier to greet the famous industrialist. “Why, I am fit as a brand new piston rod and solid as a rock!” he told waiting journalists. Across a city blanketed with snow, a team of horses carried the family through Central Park to what was then an underdeveloped neighborhood still far to the north of midtown high society. Arriving at the entrance, Carnegie turned to his five-year-old daughter Margaret, his only child, and gave her the key to their new home.

Since that first day, the keys of the Carnegie Mansion, on the heights of what came to be known as Carnegie Hill on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, have passed through several hands. In a ceremony following Louise’s death in 1946, Margaret handed over the same front-door key to the New York School of Social Work, part of Columbia University, which occupied the buildings for the next 20 years before moving onto the Columbia campus. Beginning in 1976, after losing the original support of the Cooper Union and being taken on by the Smithsonian, the Cooper Hewitt design museum has called the mansion home.

Following a three-year renovation—112 years to the day since the Carnegie family first set foot inside—the Cooper Hewitt has now handed over the keys for us to explore this museum in a mansion. In her diary entry for her first evening in residence, Louise Carnegie concluded she was “very pleased with the house.” With a revitalized museum, thoughtfully brought to life by 13 design teams working closely with museum staff through a $91 million capital campaign, we can all be very pleased.

Through the latest renovation, Carnegie’s original imprint has been brought back to the forefront of the mansion. At the same time, the Cooper Hewitt has been able to update its approach with the latest forward- thinking concepts in museum presentation, improved efficiencies, and a 60 percent increase in exhibition space (achieved largely by clearing out its underused third floor), all without enlarging the campus footprint.

The genius of the renovation has been not to fight old with new, but to find synergies between the two, tapping Carnegie’s own sense for design, education, and betterment through technology. For example, his was the first private residence in the United States to have a structural steel frame (supplied, of course, by his own state-of-the-art mills) and among the first to have an Otis passenger elevator along with central heating and air conditioning. Carnegie’s philanthropic vision, now manifested in the latest technologies of the revamped Cooper Hewitt, lives on through a principle he stenciled along the frieze of his library wall: “the highest form of worship is service to man.” Carnegie’s philanthropy was greatly inspired by Peter Cooper, the founder of the Coo- per Union, whose three Hewitt granddaughters created the initial design collection that formed the Cooper Hewitt. “I feel very proud,” Cara McCarty, the Cooper Hewitt’s curatorial director, explains. “We are repurposing a historic home, celebrating its design, not denying it or covering up the historic features. We’ve tried to work with it. And I think it makes our objects feel so much richer. Because it’s landmarked, there are a lot of limitations for what we can do with an intervention. We turned those limitations into an asset.”

By “knowing so well what we wanted to achieve,” McCarty says the museum avoided “the Bilbao syndrome” affecting many museums, in which spectacular expansions by celebrity architects take precedence over collections. The Cooper Hewitt’s sensitivity continues the approach of Lisa Taylor, its inaugural director, who maintained, “The use of an old building for a modern purpose is the essence of urban recycling, so...we have a museum that exemplifies in its facilities the very principles we are trying to communicate through our collections.” From its arrival in the Carnegie mansion, the Cooper Hewitt has respected the building’s original design, which helps explain why the museum now has so much to draw on for its latest revitalization.

The design of the mansion, by the architects Babb, Cook & Willard, reflected Carnegie’s desire to create a proper home for his family around art and nature that, given his extreme wealth, was still relatively modest in its exposed brick and Georgian style but full of personal details inside. The most sumptuous space, now newly restored, is the small second-floor family library, better known as the Teak Room, designed by the painter Lockwood de Forest. With intricately carved teak paneling from India decorating the ceiling frieze, corbels, door, and fireplace, the room is the most intact de Forest interior still in place. The room also shows the wide scope of Carnegie’s design interests, here drawing on the same Eastern influences that informed Olana, Frederic Church’s Persian-inspired country home in Hudson, N.Y.

“Tools: Extending Our Reach,” the inaugural exhibition in the new 6,000-square-foot third-floor Barbara and Morton Mandel Design Gallery, brings a cross-cultural 2001-like consideration to the instruments that make such design happen, with 175 objects ranging in date from a Paleolithic hand chopper to a live feed of the sun transmitted by an orbiting satellite. Especially impressive here is Controller of the Universe, a sculpture by Damián Ortega made of old hand tools suspended on string that appears to radiate from a central point that a viewer can walk through. There is also “Beautiful Users,” an exhibition on the ground floor that explores “user-centered design,” from thermostats to telephones to hand grips for kitchen implements to the latest in innovations for the handicapped to open-source 3D-printing “hacks” to connect Legos to Lincoln Logs. Next door, “Maira Kalman Selects” invites the beloved author, illustrator, and designer to “raid the icebox” of the permanent collection and tell a story with a selection mixed in with her own personal artifacts. Especially tempting here is a pair of trousers draped over a bench with a handwritten admonition: “Kindly refrain from touching the piano and Toscanini’s pants.” The “Process Lab,” in Carnegie’s sumptuous library, poses museumgoers with their own design challenges through hands-on interaction.

Among a host of new digital displays underwritten by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the “Immersion Room” stands out for using digital and projection technologies to help visualize wall- covering design in a new way. With access to hundreds of patterns digitized from the museum collection, and the ability to sketch their own designs on a digital table, museum goers can now see patterns projected full size and floor-to-ceiling on the room’s walls, rather than having to extrapolate from see- ing a single strip of paper.

Such interactive engagements elevate the making along with the made and use historical examples to challenge museum goers to think about contemporary design in a new way. The exercise is not all that different from the challenges faced by the Cooper Hewitt as the institution thought through its historic home.

The Code of the City

CITY JOURNAL

Winter 2015

The Code of the City

by James Panero

The New York Genome Center’s project to map Gotham’s diverse genetics

Ever since James Watson, Francis Crick, and their colleagues discovered the double-helix molecular structure of DNA in 1953, scientists have dreamed of unlocking the secrets of our genetic code. Tightly folded strings of just four molecular letters, DNA contains the equivalent of a gigabyte and a half’s worth of data about our identities, ancestry, and the illnesses to which we might be prone. As Peter W. Huber explains in The Cure in the Code, understanding and harnessing the data in our genetic fingerprint “will eclipse everything that the information age has delivered so far.”

No one knows when that will happen, but geneticist Nathan Pearson thinks that he knows where the breakthrough will come—at the New York Genome Center in downtown Manhattan, which is attracting world-class geneticists to the city. A young prophet of genomic science with a soft-spoken, wide-eyed intensity, Pearson is the center’s senior director of scientific engagement and public outreach. “Here, in just a few blocks, you have this incredible diversity of humanity,” says Pearson of New York. He isn’t just referring to the broad-ranging ideas that a city can promulgate, though that helps explain why ten major medical and academic institutions came together to found the consortium behind the Genome Center in 2011. He also means genomic diversity—the variations of DNA in the city’s multiethnic population that form his source data. If the New York Genome Center had a bank of data from “a thousand Yemeni New Yorkers, a thousand Maltese New Yorkers, a thousand New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds that are still understudied in terms of genomic diversity,” Pearson says of the center’s aims, it would have a unique understanding of genetic variations in the world’s population. So when health issues with a genomic basis arise in any area of the globe, the center could check specific variants against these known ethnic differences. “We have data here that could be immediately useful,” he says.

Tapping a wide network of public-private partnerships, the Genome Center looks to advance a civic mission to improve public health while becoming a distinctive New York institution alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, and the New York Public Library. “There’s this great pride of place here in institutions,” says Pearson. “There’s the sense that if you want to find the finest version of a civic institution, you will find it here. I see a chance for the Genome Center to anchor itself as a cornerstone scientific and cultural institution, where New Yorkers have a place to entrust the data in us in ways that we know will help propel health care forward.” The Genome Center hopes that, by decoding and understanding the city’s diverse genetics, it can help diagnose and cure illnesses the world over.

Until recently, New York lacked a significant biotech industry. A Center for an Urban Future study found that the city’s biotech firms employed only 563 people in 1996, compared with 22,200 industry jobs then spread among 59 public companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Gotham’s share of the burgeoning biotech industry further declined between 1996 and 1999 because of the high cost of New York City real estate (especially in creating and zoning city buildings for laboratory work), the often adversarial relationship among the city’s health-care institutions, and Albany’s apparent lack of interest in creating an attractive climate for biotech investors.

In 1998, recognizing that New York’s biotech industry was underdeveloped, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani promoted a biotech incubator at Columbia University and created the Task Force on Biomedical Research and Development. “Since 1981, New York has fallen behind California and Massachusetts in total funding from the National Institutes of Health,” Giuliani said. “Unfortunately, the multiplicity of medical schools and health care institutions that once made New York the dominant player in medical research have frequently acted as a hindrance to growth because these institutions have traditionally competed with one another for money, talent, and prestige.”

Still, Gotham’s biotech sector continued to lag. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s push to create a biotech center on Governors Island fell short, and the city missed out on the “genomic decade” in the years following 2003, when the first representative sequence of a human genome was published. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biotech required large, expensive machines and specialized workers, putting New York at a disadvantage compared with regions that could offer tech firms massive academic laboratories and office-park build-outs. Today, most established institutions for gene sequencing are located elsewhere: the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute outside Cambridge, England; and the Genome Center of Washington University in St. Louis. Each has a focus. Washington University, for example, specializes in tumors.

The hope is that New York’s late arrival to biotech will mirror its history with tech in general. While the city was not an early leader in the tech industry, it recently surpassed Boston to become the nation’s second-largest (and fastest-growing) tech center. The reasons are similar. In both computers and biotech, the early years were dominated by expensive machines and specialized workers who benefited from academic settings and office-park build-outs. Today, the cost of whole-gene sequencing has plummeted. In 1990, an estimated $3 billion was allocated for the decade-long project of sequencing the first human genome; today, the cost has fallen to just $1,500 for thoroughly reading one human sequence. With the big-data challenges of DNA partially overcome, biotech is increasingly turning to analyzing and applying genetic data to solve real-world problems. And that requires the diverse social capital that only cities can offer.

Despite the city’s slow start, the Genome Center has put down fast roots in New York. In 2010, “we were operating with a cell phone and a Hotmail account,” said Nancy Kelley, the center’s founding executive director. Kelley then brought the idea for a genome center to molecular biologists Tom Maniatis of Columbia University and Tom Kelly of Sloan Kettering. A year later, they had raised $120 million and built out an institutional consortium. By September 2013, the center was ready to open its state-of-the-art headquarters at 101 Sixth Avenue, just north of Canal Street. The building was already zoned for a wet laboratory along with office space—the Service Employees International Union had previously used it as a clinic—meaning that research could start right away. “Innovation seems to be in our DNA,” then-mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the ribbon-cutting. Last summer, the center hired its 100th employee. Its eventual goal is 500.

The Genome Center’s diverse consortium of partner institutions has helped it overcome the problem of the competing local health-care interests that Giuliani identified. Nancy Kelley’s successor, physician Robert Darnell, has assembled an all-star team of scientists from laboratories, hospitals, and medical colleges around the tristate area. Much of the center’s funding has come from individuals and private foundations, as well as through support from its member institutions. In April 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state legislature had approved an additional $105 million in funding to support a partnership between SUNY Buffalo and the Genome Center to advance medical science in New York. As part of this initiative, the Genome Center will receive $55.75 million from the state and has committed to match it dollar for dollar with funds raised separately.

The New York Genome Center’s offices are divided among four mid-rise floors. One level is dedicated to laboratory space, with glass walls, reinforced floors, and positive air pressure—that is, to prevent outside air and contaminants from leaking in—pumped through the rooms. One way the center hopes to fulfill its civic mission is through urgent diagnostic sequencing—the use of genomic analysis to diagnose sick patients by examining, say, the irregular DNA from someone’s tumorous tissue to optimize treatment. Currently, says Pearson, “if a child has a really puzzling syndrome, the family may spend years and thousands of dollars . . . to try to figure out what’s wrong. People call that a ‘diagnostic odyssey.’ Full genome sequencing can help some people get an answer faster and cheaper.” Eventually, the center plans to make available its entire facility for this use while also supporting prognostic screenings: “In the long run, the dream is that everybody will have lifelong, birth-to-old-age prognostics, managing their health at every stage from pediatrics to geriatrics. ‘Should I get braces’ will eventually be partly a genomic question.” Laboratory rooms are already built out and set aside; the center now awaits regulatory approval to begin this work.

Next door to these rooms, sequestered behind glass walls, are the center’s active sequencing laboratories, where the genomic research database is being built. Here the process of reading DNA and RNA is getting faster, cheaper, and more efficient. The research now typically begins with a blind blood sample provided by one of the partner institutions. In building its database, the center acquires both healthy and sick samples from the population, as well as ancient DNA and DNA sequences from the full spectrum of life—including, when I visited, from African starlings, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. Another focus is “microbiomes”—the bacteria in the gut, on the skin, or in the eye.

When observed through the glass walls of the Genome Center’s laboratory, the process of reading our genetic code can seem almost routine. First, white blood cells, which contain the DNA, are separated from red blood cells in a centrifuge. Chemicals then cause these cells to burst open, spilling the DNA. Filters remove other materials so that only a solution of DNA and water remains. The strands are then chopped into short pieces and copied. Dyes are added to distinguish the chemicals in the sequence, and the samples are fed into a bank of machines, which read the chunks in 100-letter snippets. The countertop machines that conduct these readings are among the most sophisticated in the world. The Illumina HiSeq X retails for $1 million and is sold only in groups of ten. Finally, a computer takes the samples, compares them with others, and assembles the snippets back into a full genetic picture. The whole process takes a few weeks. Now that all the machines are up and running, the center is able to analyze 50 genomes a day.

But the readings are just the beginning. Directly above, in an open-floor plan with standing desks, collaborative work spaces, and the latest in office ergonomics, are the programmers, doctors, physicists, and mathematicians working to make sense of the biology that the machines pick up downstairs. The open, contemporary feel of this part of the office is deliberate and necessary, says Pearson—to compete for the country’s best talent, who might otherwise choose to work in financial services, big pharma, or the latest tech start-up. The center relies on mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists to partner with the doctors and biologists in developing algorithms to sort the data out, while much of the data storage and processing occurs in computer centers off-site. The center sits over a data pipe that leads directly to its offsite data-storage and processing facilities.

Among its current clinical trials and projects, the center’s scientists are researching glioblastoma (GBM), a brain tumor for which the median survival rate is a mere 14 months. Harnessing the computing power of IBM’s Watson, the center has partnered with 27 doctors and scientists in hopes of improving patients’ chances through a better understanding of the genomic basis of the illness. In addition, the center’s autoimmune disease project is investigating why rheumatoid arthritis flares up in patients with debilitating autoimmune diseases, by sequencing RNA before, during, and after a symptomatic episode. The Sohn Conference Foundation has approved a two-year grant to study the causes of pediatric neuroblastoma and leukemia; the center will act as the grant coordinator among partner institutions. The center has also won a federal grant that would help it develop infrastructure to become a data hub—safely storing and communicating the genetic information of 6 million patients.

While New York City and State have encouraged the center’s growth, current health-care regulations remain a hindrance to genomic innovation. Today’s standards still largely rely on population-wide studies that ignore an individual’s data. “A drug might not work on the population scale,” says Pearson. “But it can actually work for a subset of people” with the right genomic makeup.

Restricted access to genomic information and privacy laws that “lock down” patient information are additional obstacles in New York. “It’s much easier for you, as a citizen, to see your genomic data in other states than it is here,” says Pearson. “It’s your data. It’s in you and belongs to nobody else on the planet. But the state has been paternalistically concerned about what you might do with it.” Studies show that anxiety levels decline in patients who become aware of their genomic predispositions. Nevertheless, “right now, it would be very hard for you to get sequenced in New York State, and get your sequenced data back,” Pearson says.

Zoning regulations and the city’s tight real-estate economy also inhibit biotech’s urban growth potential. The Genome Center would not have been able to get off the ground as quickly as it did if 101 Sixth Avenue had not been zoned for laboratory use. Unlike the broader tech industry—which needed only ample broadband to move into the loft buildings around Union Square and Madison Square Park—biotech needs lab space and room to grow. If the city wants biotech to flourish, it must fast-track zoning and regulatory approvals and create incentives for landlords to convert real estate for laboratory use. Without such policy changes, the center, and the city’s biotech industry in general, will have a harder time fulfilling the mission “to make people’s genomes a more useful part of life in New York.”

In the Genome Center’s “innovation lab,” a smartphone-size device, plugged into a computer’s USB port, can read DNA at the flick of a switch and without expensive dyes. While less accurate than the million-dollar machines and currently unable to sequence whole human genomes, such handheld devices will soon retail in the several-thousand-dollar range and could expand the public-health potential of genomic research by inexpensively testing, for example, the genomic indicators in our air quality. “You could have sensors like this that are helping maintain public health in restaurants, potentially avoiding contamination,” says Pearson. One day soon, we may even use devices that check our bedroom dandruff each morning for the first signs of cancer, or that can monitor air quality for infectious diseases, including Ebola. “We have thought of trying to develop quick ways of sequencing microbes like Ebola on site in West Africa,” says Pearson. “Or in the air in a plane that might have trace amounts of Ebola. We haven’t done anything yet, but we have been thinking about it and talking with authorities.”

So what does genomic science mean for the future of medicine? “I’m speaking personally right now,” Pearson says. “I really can’t speak for the center because views vary a lot about this, even in our field. But doctors will have to adjust, and the staff within our health-care system will have to adjust, to patients who are more informed and empowered about their own care.” If Pearson is right, the New York Genome Center will be a big reason why.