Superbug exhibit proves timely for Chinese audience

A travelling exhibition about bacterial infection is proving to be a remarkably well-timed hit with visitors in China after it reopened following the lifting of restrictions on movement as part of efforts to combat the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The Superbugs exhibition at the Chongqing Science and Technology Museum is a localized version of an exhibition that ran until spring 2019 at the Science Museum in London, after which a variety of off-shoot displays opened around the world.

But as curator Sheldon Paquin told China Daily, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus has cast the exhibition in a new light, particularly in China.

"This is a global story but every country is different, with different fields of expertize, so each version of the exhibition celebrates that in its own way," he said.

"We had a four-city tour planned in China, having been open at the Guangdong Science Center for four months, and then Chongqing since December," he said.

"We were intending to go to Wuhan in April and we will still go there, to the Wuhan Science and Technology Museum, but it's been delayed, and then the Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum.

"Before everything changed, we'd already had around 650,000 visitors at the first two stops of the tour, and we'd had a really positive response. We weren't expecting that many people so we were very happy."

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria currently account for 700,000 deaths each year, and by 2050, that figure is expected to rise to 10 million. But Paquin insists the exhibition is not as bleak as those statistics look —quite the opposite.

"We look at it in a very different way," he said. "We celebrate the power of bacteria, we want to look at it the way you look at a lion on the savannah, it's beautiful, powerful and worthy of respect. We want people to look at bacteria like that.

"A lot of this exhibition is about the power inherent in this part of nature, but also the human stories of the heroes whose work is making a difference. You get a sense of hope and surprise at new developments that are being made."

The nature and timing of the virus outbreak in China, as opposed to other countries, means that the Chinese version of the exhibition is the only one currently open, and Paquin said they were exploring ways to try and incorporate recent events into the display.

"We're still in conversation about how to make changes, we really want to but we haven't figured out how to update it yet," he said. "For now, though, we're just thrilled to see people coming back and getting interested in the subject."

The exhibition does not have an online aspect to it, but on the Science Museum Group website, the group's science director, Roger Highfield, has written a series of blogs about the recent virus outbreak, exploring topics such as its diagnosis, how it is transmitted and mutates, and the importance of data, all of which is now of much wider public interest than anyone could have predicted when the exhibition was launched.

"We're living in a very different climate now, after this outbreak," said Paquin. "Superbugs present a very complicated problem but through a thousand very simple solutions, we can get near where we want to go."