Museum of Science

This guide to the Museum of Science in Boston centers on a letter that arrived in the year two thousand, when United Poultry Concerns objected to a chick hatchery exhibit planned for the museum's new Discovery Space wing. You'll hear how animal rights groups read the museum's plans, and how the dispute reached back to the building's own origins on pilings in the Charles River Dam since nineteen fifty-one, when live animals first became part of its mission. It traces that same tension into the present, at the Live Animal Care Center down the hall. Stand near the old incubator site and you're standing right where the argument played out.