Natural History Museum ‘on path to irrelevance and failure’

The Natural History Museum (NHM) is “set on a course that can only lead to irrelevance and failure”, a former member of staff at its Department of Life Sciences has warned. 

In an article entitled The tragedy of the Natural History Museum, Fred Naggs, an honorary Scientific Associate at the museum, criticised its “utterly inappropriate leadership and funding model".

He said that the NHM is the only public sector research establishment to be funded through the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, adding that “role of DCMS has been an unmitigated disaster”. 

Founded in 1881, the museum’s collection includes around 80 million items spanning botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology and has long been recognised as a world-leading institution. 

Naggs said the museum’s declaration of a planetary emergency has been undermined by the “inappropriate” leadership, he wrote, diverting its research in directions that overlap with other academic agencies and “undermining the reason and justification for the museum’s existence”. 

“Rather than responding to a planetary emergency, the museum is tragically descending into irrelevance,” he wrote, adding that during a period of mass extinctions it is prioritising “aspirational virtue signalling” over science.

“Its current strategy, vision and priorities are fundamentally flawed”, he warned in his conclusion, adding that “the upbeat assertion that we can deal with the environmental and biodiversity crisis and dismissive rejection of so-called doom-mongering, is not just irresponsible and dishonest, but deluded and dangerous.”

Naggs outlined some steps he believes the NHM should take to regain its relevance.

Establishing an external review body made up of international scientific authorities would be a “first step” towards changing direction, he wrote. “This would need to be followed up by the restoration of regular external reviews.”

He called on the museum to return to a collections-based focus and establish a new model for building collections based on shared objectives.

“There is an urgent need to build new collections both for future research and to contribute to safeguarding and restoring a biodiverse world,” he wrote.

“Existing collections do not begin to meet the need for a collection’s legacy for a future in which much of Earth’s biodiversity will have been lost.”

A Natural History Museum spokesperson said: "Our scientifically-critical collections and world-leading research expertise both play a pivotal role in finding solutions to the planetary emergency. 

"We are committed, through initiatives such as our planned digitisation and science facility, to ensuring the collections and the vast data contained in them are safe, accessible and digitally available for researchers all over the world, enabling cutting-edge analysis and major scientific collaboration to help tackle issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change and food insecurity."