Audio Transcript

Published: 20 August 2017
APA 7 Citation: Newsome, B. (Host). (2017, August 20). The Museum of Human Disease… biology teaching at its best [Audio podcast transcript]. Fizzics Education.

Ben Newsome CF is the recipient of the 2023 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Excellence and a Churchill Fellow. He is a global leader in science communication and the founder of Fizzics Education.

[00:00:00]
Derek Williamson: Probably the biggest compliment we have from that was one of the mothers who had brought her kids in during the holidays who kind of went, “I was just amazed that here was this thing about zombies and it wasn’t overly about zombies. It was about medical science and my two 10-year-old boys have spent the last two hours reading.”

[00:00:25]
Ben Newsome: And that was Derek Williamson from the Museum of Human Disease. I mean, wow, what a way to start a STEM podcast when you’re talking about zombies.

[00:00:32]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:44]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. My name is Ben Newsome and I’m so glad to bring a great friend of mine, Derek, onto this podcast because he runs one of the most wicked, most fascinating, most unreal museums you could possibly think of. The Museum of Human Disease. It is a UNSW museum in the heart of eastern Sydney, and it’s actually well known amongst the STEM professionals, but I must say, it’s not as well known as you might think. And actually, the Sydney Morning Herald only recently called it one of Sydney’s treasures.

[00:01:21]
Ben Newsome: The only thing is that people just have to discover it. So that’s why I wanted to get Derek on because he does an enormous amount of work in STEM, in teaching kids all about science and specifically in his role, medical science. And that intro there about the zombies, well, we’ll get onto that. It’s a bit more than the average museum, but I tell you what, it is well worth your time and really better down in some hard science as well. Enjoy.

[00:01:50]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:01:53]
Ben Newsome: G’day Derek, welcome to the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:01:56]
Derek Williamson: Thanks Ben, very happy to be here.

[00:01:58]
Ben Newsome: Especially coming into a winter’s morning. We’re in the middle of the July holidays, a very cold around this time and it’s really chilly.

[00:02:09]
Derek Williamson: It was icy this morning. Icy, yes.

[00:02:12]
Ben Newsome: It is actually. Seeing as we’re chatting obviously on a STEM podcast and by the way, people listening, like a number of guests I’ve known Derek for quite a few years, but I know that there’d be people out there who haven’t met Derek before. So Derek, maybe describe what you do.

[00:02:30]
Derek Williamson: So I am the director of the Museum of Human Disease, which is a medical pathology collection at the University of New South Wales. It’s part of the medicine faculty and we try and get people to come in and learn about their health. So we have, as I said, a whole range of diseased human organs in bottles.

[00:02:54]
Ben Newsome: You’ve got one of the coolest names of a museum I’ve ever heard of. Anytime I ever mention it to someone, “Hey I know this bloke who works at the Museum of Human Disease,” people go, “What?”

[00:03:06]
Derek Williamson: It is. I think if we were much bigger, it would be less impressive. I think the fact that we are quite obscure means that most people are unlikely to have heard of it, which kind of gives it that extra impetus and then the surprised nature of it. But pretty much we’re not hiding anything. People know what they’re getting to some extent when they come in. It’s hard to think that you’re going to go to the Museum of Human Disease and not be confronted by something.

[00:03:32]
Ben Newsome: “I’m going to the Museum of Human Disease and I thought I was going to learn about shipping or plants or something.”

[00:03:39]
Derek Williamson: Yes.

[00:03:40]
Ben Newsome: Yes, actually we should address that because I get that the obscurity is kind of a very much a niche area, but when you do a niche area you can do it really well because that’s all you concentrate on and my gosh you do. Speaking of niche, the University of New South Wales is a big campus, a proper campus in Randwick in Sydney. Do you find walking around campus that people know you exist there?

[00:04:08]
Derek Williamson: No. No. Most people, because it’s quite a long campus and there’s a big hill in the middle and we’re at the top of the hill, anyone who studies a course that’s at the bottom of the hill has very little need to come up to the top of the hill. And so there is a vast number of students who spend all their life at the bottom of the hill and don’t see our signs or things like that. But there are a lot of people who do enter through or past the museum and kind you’ll talk to them, they’ll go, “Oh, I’ve been here 10 years and I’ve walked past it every day for 10 years and I’ve always wanted to go in.” You go, “Go in!”

[00:04:53]
Ben Newsome: It’s funny. I wonder what the barrier is. Obviously at university they’ve got lectures to attend to, they’ve got research to be done and whatnot. If they popped their head in the door, what are they going to see?

[00:05:07]
Derek Williamson: Diseases of human beings. And I think to some extent there is, when you give yourself that name, there is a percentage of the population who are going to go, “That’s not for me.” You know, just that kind of immediate response to it. And I think the other thing, you know, people who go to museums, it’s a social occasion and so going, “Oh, I’m not sure my friends would want to come along.”

[00:05:37]
Derek Williamson: And then there are issues that these people who are coming to campus are coming here for a reason. If it’s coming for work, they turn up at work at the same time every day and the idea of going out at lunch and going to the museum probably doesn’t occur to them. And we try and do some things around that, but I guess we accept that there are issues with our location and our collection, and I think we’re getting more well known. We’ve kind of focused a bit on trying to get into the minds of the residents of campus so to speak, the people that work here and the people who study here, but it’s a slow burn I think.

[00:06:26]
Ben Newsome: But what’s cool about that collection, I know you say you’re a small museum tucked away in the middle of the hill, but the collection is quite extensive. The thing is, it’s not just a museum just, “Hey public, go check out the disease stuff.” You’re in the middle of a massive teaching area. You’d have students from all over the place who could benefit from what you’ve got.

[00:06:47]
Derek Williamson: Oh, absolutely. In our collection, we have about 3,000 bottles which are distributed between various teaching areas of campus and our clinical schools in rural areas. So we have about 1,800 here and they represent the way most people will die in Australia this year. In terms of teaching, because classes on campus have become so enormous, the museum isn’t a venue for classes anymore. So the pots that we have, the bottles with these specimens in go out to classes and are used in classes, tutorial classes and things like that.

[00:07:28]
Derek Williamson: But probably the biggest move towards teaching was we got a grant through the NBN stuff five years ago or so, and our entire collection has been digitized and turned into a teaching repository that’s available for anyone in the world to access now. It’s part of a thing called the BEST Network and Slice is this image repository. So it has our specimens and X-ray specimens, X-rays and microscopy images and a whole range of different sorts of images in this collection called Slice that medical educators and biomedical educators around the world take these images and put them into their online courses or their presentations and things like that.

[00:08:15]
Ben Newsome: Wow. Is that freely available or do people have to pay a fee to be able to get in behind the scenes?

[00:08:21]
Derek Williamson: No, it’s completely free to access to a limited extent. So you can go and browse it. The network is called the BEST Network, Biomedical Education Skills and Training Network, which is best.edu.au, I think, or .org or .net. Anyway, if you Google BEST Network and then within that, there is a bunch of digital teaching resources which are predominantly being produced by tertiary educators. Some of those are freely available and so a teacher could go and grab one of those and put it in their class and go through this tutorial.

[00:09:11]
Derek Williamson: The BEST Network allows a certain number of those freebies, but if an institution is using these things every day for thousands of students, then they will approach them to purchase a licence which then gives them a whole range of extra benefits and stuff. But for Slice, which is this image bank, anyone in the world can access Slice and just go in and look at images and you can take a URL and you can put that in your computer wherever it is and you can use that image in a presentation through that URL.

[00:09:47]
Ben Newsome: I was just thinking how great that would be for obviously tertiary educators, they’re going to love that, but this could bring down secondary into even primary areas so easily.

[00:09:59]
Derek Williamson: Yes. There’s a lot of that that’s there and we are looking at how we can leverage off that availability to offer those sort of resources to schools, but it’s one of those things where people got to know about it in the first place. Well, one more thing to do. So that Slice repository is a great teaching resource for anyone who wants to teach biomedical human biology sort of topics from anatomy to diseases to X-ray technologies or anything like that.

[00:10:35]
Ben Newsome: Stunning. No, it’s brilliant. So you’ve got this digital collection which people can access albeit limited, but it’s still got a lot of stuff in it and then if you’re a major institution using a lot, you’ve got a whole bunch of resources you can jump in as well. So the digital side’s fantastic and then you’ve got the physical specimens in your site. What are the ones that really grab people’s attention? I’ve been in your site, there is a lot of bottles there, a lot of specimens in there. What are the ones that really you can just see the visitor just go, “I’ve just got to look into this more, this is strange.”

[00:11:09]
Derek Williamson: So there’s probably three specimens that are in that really mysterious kind of category. We have a polycystic kidney. So polycystic kidney is a genetic disorder that the cells in the tubules in the kidneys, some of the cells begin to reproduce out of control and as they grow, they create a bubble which then fills with fluid. So that’s the cyst nature of it, and if lots of cells do it, you get lots of them, it’s called polycystic.

[00:11:52]
Derek Williamson: As the cysts grow, they press up against the healthy kidney and they basically demolish the healthy kidney. And so we have this polycystic kidney which would be about 45 centimetres long. It would have weighed a couple of kilos. Put that in perspective, the average human adult kidney is 13 centimetres long. So this is an enormous, enormous thing and we’ve kind of sliced, butterflied it to use a cooking term.

[00:12:18]
Ben Newsome: Let’s talk about cooking while we’re talking about this, why not?

[00:12:22]
Derek Williamson: And it’s just full of these great big bubbles, and they are big. They’re kind of the size of the big marble, the Tom bowler or whatever it was. Even bigger, maybe a small mandarin, keeping on the topic of food. You can tell I haven’t had morning tea yet. So that one simply for the enormity of it is one of ours. And if people want to look at that, that’s actually one of our volunteers just recently posted that on our Instagram. If you’re a bit queasy our Instagram account is probably not for you, but it does have images of our polycystic kidney.

[00:13:04]
Derek Williamson: The other one that kind of gets a lot of attention is a thing called a teratoma, which means monster growth. So these are teratomas occur in they are basically a tumour of a sex cell. So not the egg or the sperm, but the support cells within the ovary or the testes. And because they are these germline cells that go on to produce eggs and things, they are effectively stem cells.

[00:13:38]
Derek Williamson: And so as the tumour grows, it can differentiate into anything. So unlike a tumour that grows anywhere else in the body, so if you have a lung cancer, the cells of that will always be lung cells, even if they metastasize and move somewhere else in the body. One of the ways we know where they came from is the fact that you look at them and go, “That’s a lung cell, what’s it doing in your liver?” But these ones, because they are stem cells and haven’t had that kind of differentiation happen before they became tumorous, they can differentiate.

[00:14:08]
Derek Williamson: And so within we have a specimen which has a growth about 10 centimetres across and in it there are brain cells and lung cells and skin cells and basically cells of every type of the body, but the bit that strikes people the most is it has this long flowing red hair and a couple of teeth, which is where these got their name originally of teratoma because they were the monster, basically this monstrous growth inside someone.

[00:14:42]
Ben Newsome: Frankenstein’s monster stuff thing. Wow, Mary Shelley would be in her element right about there.

[00:14:48]
Derek Williamson: Well these are not horrendously uncommon, one in 10,000 or so and women will have one. And so back in the day before we had medical care and scans and things where we might remove something at an early stage, this person would die from this growth and if someone was looking inside, they’d go, “My God, there’s this thing with teeth and hair that obviously killed this person.”

[00:15:16]
Ben Newsome: And that actually brings up the point, I was just thinking about this. So you’ve got visitors and you could have students and not always tertiary, they could be under 18. You’ve got that whole ethical side to discuss, don’t you?

[00:15:29]
Derek Williamson: Yes, it doesn’t come up a lot, so we’re happy to talk about it. It’s not something we kind of shy away from. And sometimes students will go, when we ask how do you think people react, sometimes they’ll bring up people might question why you have these things on display, which is a great question. We have this collection and it has been generously left to the university. And most other universities who have these collections, and most of the older universities in Australia will have one, they’re behind closed doors. So a school group might be able to arrange to go along or they might do an open day occasionally, but generally they are reserved for medical and medical science students to learn about these disease processes.

[00:16:23]
Derek Williamson: Ours is the only one that opens every day and advertises and encourages schools to come in because we think there are really important health messages that these students can learn from the specimens that we have.

[00:16:36]
Ben Newsome: And out of respect to the donors as well.

[00:16:39]
Derek Williamson: Oh, absolutely. If this is here, we should be making the best use of it that we can. And we have a great response from schools. In 20 odd years of doing this for schools, I don’t think there’s been a complaint in terms of, “How dare you show this to my child?”

[00:17:01]
Ben Newsome: I suppose once you’ve got the parental permission slips and they know exactly what they’re going to and critically why and where it fits within the curriculum. And you guys have a very unique perspective in this because a lot of museums would love to interact more with, I’m going down the high school track here a little bit, but often the high school curriculum is dense. It’s got so much stuff going on, it’s hard enough to get any sort of field trip sorted out. And so you really want to be ticking off some serious syllabus dot points. And you guys have a very unique situation where senior science, the seniors about to head off to university, they’re just in the very last part of high school, you really can help them out in their biology subjects.

[00:17:42]
Derek Williamson: Oh, absolutely. The area in the biology syllabus called Search for Better Health could almost have been written for us.

[00:17:53]
Ben Newsome: You reckon?

[00:17:54]
Derek Williamson: Which is helpful. And the previous people in my role have set it up with these great programmes. We have some great programmes and we continue to modify them and tweak them as new information comes and things. But there’s this great set of programmes that just hit what is effectively a quarter of the Year 12 syllabus, and in two hours students can be exposed to nearly all of that quarter, plus a few of the other areas balance out really well.

[00:18:30]
Ben Newsome: I must say, obviously there’s the student side and that’s really cool that you can hit the education thing on the head. But you guys do more than that. I mean, one of the things that grabbed my eye is some of the days that you do is almost like an open day, kind of involving zombies.

[00:18:44]
Derek Williamson: Yes, so the zombies programme, it raised eyebrows here on campus when we said we were going to do it.

[00:18:53]
Ben Newsome: I thought it was fantastic. It was such a brilliant way to say come to our museum, we’re not a stuffy place.

[00:18:58]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, and we did a lot of stuff in the traditional sense around that zombieism, but effectively that zombie experience that we ran was a station-based set of readings for students to do, and our public audience. And probably the biggest compliment we had from that was one of the mothers who brought her kids in during the holidays who kind of went, “I was just amazed that here was this thing about zombies and it wasn’t overly about zombies. It was about medical science and my two 10-year-old boys have spent the last two hours reading.”

[00:19:42]
Ben Newsome: Brilliant.

[00:19:44]
Derek Williamson: And so we try and create hooks, but we want them to be for a valid reason that is deeply embedded in the outcomes that we want to see for the audience that come to the museum anytime, which is really about addressing a range of various things around medical health. But it’s really about people kind of going away with a better idea of how they can live a healthier, more relaxed life.

[00:20:13]
Ben Newsome: That’s right. And there’d be lots of listeners here who aren’t just in the museum thing, or teachers, there’d be parents. And they just want people to understand how the world works and having literacies around this and anything that can grab them and hold their attention is a good thing. I reckon it’s fantastic. I mean, you could certainly definitely do some interesting stuff around augmented reality.

[00:20:31]
Derek Williamson: We are just getting into that. So we’ve just started a student project here, 3D imaging specimens. It’s a small project at the moment, but the idea will be that we will 3D image a bundle of our specimens. And then we’re putting in a virtual reality studio in the back of the museum where we will then look at how we interpret these sorts of things and how we can bring other virtual reality in from across the university and kind of add to it with augmented reality within the museum space.

[00:21:05]
Ben Newsome: That would be fantastic. Actually, there’s something mind going off on a tangent, but I was looking up on YouTube various ways people are teaching biology only a couple of days ago. And something I stumbled across was someone had actually created a model of the human heart using Minecraft.

[00:21:22]
Derek Williamson: Wow, yeah.

[00:21:23]
Ben Newsome: I thought that was brilliant.

[00:21:25]
Derek Williamson: Absolutely. There’s so much of that stuff that is I think going to become ubiquitous across teaching of science and especially biology because as it becomes harder and harder to do a dissection in a school or some of those things, I think these opportunities with virtual and augmented reality and online things just give an opportunity to bring a realism to materials that your textbook and some of those things can’t.

[00:22:01]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. And speaking of dissections, I mean you’ve been doing dissections for quite a few years via video conference, which is certainly a great way for people to interact with you if they can’t get their hands on a specimen.

[00:22:13]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, absolutely. So we started that project a few years ago. So we offer a range of different ones. So the one that we kind of like the most is the pluck dissection. So a pluck is when you get the lungs and liver and heart still connected. Just to be absolutely clear, these are abattoir sourced animal organs. So we can’t do human dissections for people. Just to clarify that. But this gives us the opportunity with the lungs, you can inflate the lungs, which is quite impressive when you see the lungs inflating.

[00:22:54]
Derek Williamson: And then we use the pluck to show this is what a healthy lung looks like, this is what a healthy heart looks like, this is what a healthy liver looks like, and then we bring in our diseased specimens and talk about what’s different and why it’s different. What has changed in a liver with cirrhosis or hepatitis that makes it go from that beautiful dark red spongy-like thing to a gnarly yellow lump? What is it about a heart valve that can break down? So they’re illustrative and I think that’s important, is to be able to link those two things together.

[00:23:33]
Derek Williamson: Because being a museum of human disease, often the one thing we don’t have a lot of is healthy versions of the things that people are looking at. And it’s a query we often get and we’re continually trying to address this idea of how do we show what it would have looked like if it was healthy, given that we can’t display healthy versions because there’s a range of different collection practices around that.

[00:23:56]
Ben Newsome: That’s awesome. And so just thinking out loud, we’ve definitely got a very well-painted picture of what you guys do. And obviously, there’s some really cool stuff coming up with this virtual reality and augmented reality. Can’t wait to see it, to be honest. But I’m just wondering, what got you into the museum trade, the museum business, the teaching of stuff? Where did this all come from?

[00:24:23]
Derek Williamson: Where did it come from? It’s a good question. I studied zoology a long time ago and really was passionate about it and kind of really enjoyed it. But I am not the sort of person that does a PhD in zoology. And I guess what I worked out over the course of studying zoology and a couple of years afterwards is that I much preferred to talk about what other people were doing than do the work myself.

[00:24:51]
Derek Williamson: It’s a bit flippant, but it was a balance between the kind of natures that I have. One of which is to be quite passionate about science and knowledge and the dissemination of understanding and things, and the other one was a bit of a theatrical bent to my nature. And so this kind of allowed both of those things to happen.

[00:25:13]
Ben Newsome: I had a great chat with someone who is the distance learning person for an Arbor Hands-On Science Museum in Michigan, a good friend of mine from a couple of years ago. Her background in theatre has done amazing things. She actually came out with a Bachelor of Arts and doing theatre and all that type of stuff. Her trajectory into the Hands-On Science Museum was very interesting because she actually spent a couple of years working as an airline hostess.

[00:25:47]
Ben Newsome: It’s interesting how people fall into the positions that they do. There seems to be a bit of a bent towards, especially in this informal science education, but in a lot of ways it can be a little bit formal, but when we’re out on stage or in front of a video conference camera or something, we’ve got to have some sort of spark and hold people’s attention.

[00:26:12]
Derek Williamson: Completely, yeah. I used to love as a kid going to museums. I probably liked it a lot more then than I do now. Loved going to museums and I always thought, wow, how would I end up working in a museum? But there’s not really a clear trajectory into a museum. And so I kind of forgot about it for a long time and just kind of had quite a chequered twenties of not really careers, lots of different sorts of jobs.

[00:26:45]
Ben Newsome: You have a chequered past and now we’re going to divulge it.

[00:26:49]
Derek Williamson: From picking fruit to a range of different things, you know. And eventually ended up going back and doing a teaching qualification for an adventure camping programme that I was running, just to kind of give a bit of credential to it.

[00:27:07]
Ben Newsome: That is really cool. I used to work as a water ski instructor and ran a waterfront camp in California a long time ago. It was good fun doing that type of stuff.

[00:27:18]
Derek Williamson: Oh, they’re great experiences, you know, and I think they offer this interaction with people that is just extraordinary. And I think if we could get similar, and I guess that’s what I’ve always aimed for with science education, communication, whatever you want to call it, museum stuff is to try and provide that experience to people that you got in that camping outdoor ed kind of environment, which is: here is something that’s quite challenging, here is something that is fun, and something that’s going to be worthwhile for you.

[00:27:56]
Ben Newsome: So I’m just actually wondering, so if you had someone fresh out of uni, they wanted to get into the museum trade or not even just that. It could be a teacher who’s been teaching for 10, 20 years or even five years, and they go, “You know what? I want to just try a little bit different. I want to teach in a different way.” What would be your advice for them to sort of look towards this type of work?

[00:28:17]
Derek Williamson: I think with museums, that’s a really hard question to answer because they are all different. But I guess for me, it is to have a passion about a topic. Be really passionate about your topic, then creating some experiences that do that topic a bit differently than other people are doing it. I guess it’s a bit like success in anything, is that you need to have a passion and a focus on the thing that you’re interested in that you want to do, but then you need to do it in a slightly different way that puts you outside of the crowd.

[00:28:55]
Derek Williamson: But also take opportunities that take you into that environment. So if you want to do out-of-classroom education, then as a teacher, get your class out of the classroom and do some things in school that you can then provide as evidence for that ability to do that. We have so many people who apply for jobs here when they come up, and they have a great classroom credential, but not much on top of that to show they do things a bit differently.

[00:29:36]
Ben Newsome: It reminds me of a past episode we did with someone from the Australian Museum who started 20-odd years ago just volunteering on the floor of a museum. And to this day, still with the same museum, but I suppose it starts small and build up the whole experience. It doesn’t matter if you want to be a carpenter, you’ve got to start somewhere to learn how to chop wood. It’s the same sort of thing, I suppose.

[00:29:56]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, absolutely. I tell a lot of students from the university who volunteer in the museum, and they’ll ask things about, “How do I get ahead in a career?” looking at medical science or something like that. I think these days it’s… if you’re the sort of person that can do it, get yourself a YouTube channel. Because it’s something that you can then put as a URL on your CV and go, “Here’s me presenting. If you want someone who communicates, look at this. And here’s me showing my passion for my particular topic.”

[00:30:35]
Derek Williamson: You know, once you get good at it, point to a couple of those to people who you want to get a job from and go, “There’s me doing this thing that you want done. Here I am talking to a group of people in a way that’s articulate and clever and funny,” or whatever these things are. Or, “Here is me being deadly serious about whatever this is.” So do that, or a blog if you’re not confident in front of a camera, start with a blog and work on creating your brand, so to speak.

[00:31:09]
Ben Newsome: True. I mean, there are actually teachers especially that have created phenomenal YouTube channels of just, “Here’s a whole bunch of experiments we’ve been doing in my classroom, I just want to share stuff and go for it, use it all you want.” I’ve seen people sharing lots of information through Twitter or creating blogs and things. That’s a great thing. It’s a way to start. And to be honest, even if you never actually leave the teaching profession or wherever it is that you’re doing, it’s just good as an outlet to share and let people know what you know. It’s a good thing.

[00:31:39]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, yeah. And as you say, even if you’re not looking at changing career as such, but wanting to refresh your skillset and things, those are some of the ways that are relatively easy to do. To do some of those things and they’re kind of inexpensive and they can become expensive, but they might lead to a career change, but they might also just be great resources that you can share, that you can use in your classroom. So I think there is, especially for younger people, an almost imperative to be doing something other than the one thing you’re really passionate about.

[00:32:25]
Ben Newsome: It’s definitely a creative outlet, absolutely. And look, in the spirit of sharing, have there been times where everyone loves to show the postcard, the picture-perfect way of our website and everything’s going really well. But in reality, when you’re in front of kids all the time, I’d love to know what happens at the tertiary level. There have been times when you’ve been running programmes where you’re going, “You know what, this just ain’t working. I’m running this class and this lesson, we might as well stop and go out and have lunch.” It’s just gone bad. Have you ever had a situation where you’re running a particular lesson, it’s going bad, and I guess more importantly, what are the ways that you manage to turn it around?

[00:33:04]
Derek Williamson: We have a lot of technology-based stuff and quite often technology fails. So we went through a point where our AV setup would just pack it in every now and again. And so we had to kind of think on our feet. And fortunately, in this environment we’re kind of lucky that we have our physical specimens that we can fall back on and a whole range of different kinds of ways of doing things. So there’s that. And it’s very well rehearsed in some respects.

[00:33:38]
Derek Williamson: The times when stuff just doesn’t work is when we’re trying new things, when we go, “Oh, what people really would love to do is this online genetics thing. So let’s get them doing that.” And then you get halfway through it and people are glazing over and you’re going, “This was not quite the simple thing that we thought it was.” So let’s turn that off and say, right, let’s go and look at some specimens and drop back to what we know.

[00:34:04]
Ben Newsome: It’s funny you talk about the technical aspect. I interviewed recently on one of the Fizzics Ed Podcast episodes, someone from CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. And I distinctly remember being at a conference with her and a whole bunch of distance learning professionals, like we’re talking like 20 of us or something in this room in Philadelphia. So there’s this one moment in time, we had a lot of knowledge from people from all over the globe on how to make video conferencing work. None of us could get through the firewall. None of us could get the thing to connect even to the data projector. This museum that we were working at was just completely locked down.

[00:34:46]
Ben Newsome: And it was this bemusement where I was going, “Surely the brains trust is actually in the room right now and no one knew how to make it work.”

[00:34:49]
Derek Williamson: Yeah.

[00:34:50]
Ben Newsome: And I actually remember having to present because we couldn’t even get to talk to even get the data projector to work properly. It was just some crazy setup. I actually have a photo of me presenting to this group of esteemed museum types holding a laptop in my arm and walking around. So people could see a slide. “Yeah, really, we are technical. We really, really are.”

[00:35:14]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, yeah. And you get through it. And I think people who have been around a while with technology, I think everyone just goes, “Yep, been there, done it.”

[00:35:21]
Ben Newsome: Well, I think there is with tech, any technology, I look at a lot of presentations and I think I started back in the days of Gestetners and overhead projectors, and I think I still see slides where I go, “All that person has done is taken their overhead projector thing and put it onto a PowerPoint.” And if you’re going to be good at presenting with slides, you should be able to do it without them.

[00:35:48]
Derek Williamson: I agree. That slides are a replacement for palm cards in lots of respects.

[00:35:57]
Ben Newsome: Especially when people read off it. I’ve been sitting there in a conference and they’re talking about innovative teaching, reading the information off the slide itself, going, “Wow, I suppose it’s a good… 19 dot points on the slide.”

[00:36:11]
Derek Williamson: Exactly right. In 8-point font. Yeah, so it all fit.

[00:36:15]
Derek Williamson: Probably our worst thing is less about technology because those are things that you can kind of get around a little bit more easily. We had… we were running an HSC revision day here for Year 12 students and the facilities management people came, and they were going to drill a hole through the floor above us, above our theatre. They were going to do it in the middle of the night, so it wouldn’t interact, and there’d be no thing. And I foolishly said, “Look, I realise you clean up and stuff. Just… I just don’t want to come in and find that you’ve flooded the place.”

[00:36:53]
Derek Williamson: So I rock up at 8 o’clock the next morning and they had got the apprentice to drill the hole through the concrete, but no one had told the apprentice that about two and a half centimetres below the concrete was a high-pressure water main. And so when they drilled through and the drill broke through and kind of dropped down straight into this high-pressure water… So I came into our theatre flooded, all of the electricity turned off, and the flood continuing under the floor into the museum space, and had half an hour before we had this group of 50 HSC students turning up to be revised. So that was probably one of the more recent.

[00:37:36]
Ben Newsome: “Please explain. Sir, it happened again!”

[00:37:41]
Derek Williamson: “Oh no.” So that was… But fortunately on a big campus, so it’s not hard to find a new room and all that, and you know people are going to come and clean it up and things. So…

[00:37:54]
Ben Newsome: The good news is you’ve got boxes and most of your specimens are from a human body, well they are. So that means they’re going to be transportable in some way.

[00:38:02]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, well it was a floor thing and so it was in lots of respects not the drama, but it certainly kind of sets up one of those feelings of, “Oh my God, where do we go?” And then you’ve got to sit and sort it out.

[00:38:17]
Ben Newsome: I’ve been speaking with so many people, not just on the podcast, but for years, I’ve never heard of such a problem happen. I guess it’s going to happen eventually, maths says so.

[00:38:28]
Derek Williamson: Well yes, at some point someone about to present to someone is going to have a water main burst on them.

[00:38:34]
Ben Newsome: Wow. At least they weren’t doing it at the time.

[00:38:37]
Derek Williamson: Well yeah, at least they did it in the middle of the night and not… yeah, it didn’t…

[00:38:42]
Ben Newsome: Awesome. Look Derek, thank you so much for popping on our podcast. I really appreciate your time, I know you’ve got a busy schedule, definitely so. But undoubtedly there’d be people who would love to get in touch with you. How might they do that?

[00:38:56]
Derek Williamson: So I am [email protected]. On Twitter and Instagram, we are the… the museum is DiseaseMuseum one word at unsw.edu.au. So either of those email addresses or follow us on Twitter and Instagram and stuff.

[00:39:20]
Ben Newsome: And go get grossed out on Instagram now that…

[00:39:22]
Derek Williamson: And come and visit, yeah. Sorry, I might as well say we’re on the University of New South Wales campus in Randwick in Sydney.

[00:39:29]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, that’s awesome. We’ll certainly throw that all in the show notes and also links to be able to actually get some of those free resources out on the digital aspect because I really think that there’d be schools and tertiary places that could really get a lot out of that. Even just for pure curiosity.

[00:39:46]
Derek Williamson: Yeah, oh yeah. It’s well worth looking at, especially going and having a look on Slice is quite eye-opening.

[00:39:53]
Ben Newsome: Awesome. Hey, thanks very much, mate. I’m going to enjoy what winter sun we have left.

[00:39:58]
Derek Williamson: Yes, thank you. Much appreciated. Take it easy.

[00:40:02]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re all about science, ed tech, and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelt F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S, and click 100 Free Experiments.

[00:40:20]
Ben Newsome: And there you go, I told you that was going to be a fascinating interview. At least I certainly found it interesting chatting with Derek. I mean, I’ve known Derek for years, but actually getting him to talk about exactly what goes on in that place is really an eye-opener about what is hidden around our cities. And I must encourage you, go check out what’s around your cities. You might find that there’s going to be some hidden gems of learning and science and stuff which just doesn’t get the full mainstream media attention that, to be honest, should be well deserved. And how awesome is it that you can have literally 3,000 bottles of diseased specimens available for use for students to learn about how the body works and when it goes bad. That is wicked, I really do. I really love that.

[00:41:04]
Ben Newsome: So here are my three takeaways I definitely grabbed from this interview, and I’d love to know what you’d think too, by the way. But firstly, my one is definitely use unusual objects. Look, weird objects, strange objects are going to raise students’ questions and promote their interest in science in general. So even if you don’t have a wicked collection like what Derek has, I mean of course, not often you’re going to have a museum of human disease just at your disposal, having something interesting that is unusual for kids to go, “Whoa, what’s that thing?” is really, really handy.

[00:41:37]
Ben Newsome: I mean, even if it means just putting it at the front bench and just not saying anything and letting kids try and work out what the thing is about, will grab their attention. I guarantee it. So yeah, use unusual objects and hey, if you can engage with Derek and his team, be my guest. It totally is going to be worth your time.

[00:41:52]
Ben Newsome: Number two, experiment with technology. Now, the Museum of Human Disease does a lot of this. They’ve done video conferencing, they’re playing around with augmented reality and virtual reality. And how good is it that Slice, the image repository of X-rays images and microscopy images and all this other stuff that universities and, to be honest, the public, by the sound of it, and very much so, I’ve gone on there, I’ve gone and checked it out, you really can just jump on in and have a look at these world-class images to teach yourself about how the human body works. I mean, how good is that?

[00:42:29]
Ben Newsome: So yeah, like Derek mentioned, jump onto Best Website. That’s the Biomedical Education Skills and Training Network. A bit of a mouthful there. It’s the Biomedical Education Skills and Training Network. So just jump onto best.edu.au, and you can certainly learn a heap of that. And hey, if you’re an educational institution and you’re finding you’re using it a lot, pay it forward. See if you can contact with them and see if you can maybe organise some sort of ongoing small stipend to be able to help support that museum. It’s well worth it.

[00:42:54]
Ben Newsome: Number three for me is use a hook. Use a hook to grab kids’ attention. Now, I know certainly an unusual object that I mentioned at the start will grab kids’ attention, but I tell you what, when Derek put forward the Zombie Day for the holiday programmes during the Sydney vacation break, that really grabbed people’s imaginations. And like the mum said, the one that Derek was talking about, her two boys, her two 10-year-old boys were engrossed in reading after the fact. Yes, they came in for a zombie day, and now they’re learning about medical science. I mean, you know what, that is just brilliant.

[00:43:32]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Love your science? We do too. Here’s this episode’s Education Tip of the Week. Grab your pencil and get ready to make some notes.

[00:43:43]
Ben Newsome: Yes, it’s time for another Ed Tip of the Week, which will help make your classroom shine and be a really vibrant and, you know, the sort of place that students want to hang around with. And in this case, I’d like you to consider maybe trying out having the kids run a pitch fest. Now, what do I mean by that? A pitch fest generally is like Shark Tank or Dragons’ Den, you know those shows where entrepreneurs pitch what they do to people who might invest in their idea, concept and business.

[00:44:12]
Ben Newsome: This really has grabbed the world’s attention, especially these days on mainstream media. But I must say, it also has grabbed kids’ attention. They look up to start-ups and entrepreneurs and people finding and creating stuff that will do good in the world.

[00:44:23]
Ben Newsome: So rather than creating science or technology, engineering or maths, doing those classes in like a bubble, why not get kids to really understand that STEM doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to be used. It’s valued in the world. And nothing says that more than having kids pitch their concept, come up with their idea. And so in this case, I’m going to go through a number of steps that really could be worthwhile considering if you want to go down a lesson like a pitch fest. So here you go.

[00:44:52]
Ben Newsome: First up, if you’re going to do this, you need to share the marking rubric first and make sure kids actually know what you’re trying to do. Maybe even show them a short excerpt from Dragons’ Den or Shark Tank just to get their heads in gear before they start to sort stuff out. But the critical reason for setting up a marking rubric is that this will stop you from being too subjective.

[00:45:15]
Ben Newsome: I mean, it’s pretty hard when kids are trying to pitch different ideas. If you haven’t got something that they’re trying to shoot for and you’re trying to mark against, it’s going to be really hard to grade who does better and all the rest. And also, it’ll help kids understand that when creating something, they’ve got to create it for the end user. In this case, you’re the end user, you’re the one with the marking rubric.

[00:45:35]
Ben Newsome: Try and lean points towards STEM concepts that are raised within the design but still have room for creativity. Also, within that marking rubric, try and make sure there’s a bit of a grading towards their ability to persuade the audience on their idea. I mean, it’s all about speaking skills in the end when it comes to pitching a concept.

[00:45:55]
Ben Newsome: Secondly, ensure that they know that it’s fun. They’re not really competing to launch a product. I mean, kids can take things to heart a little bit too much, and if they make it all too serious, they may well freak out or crumble up on the front stage as other kids watch. You know, make it fun, make it easy. You know, they’re winning a chocolate bar or something. Make it fun. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a formal marking thing. It’s just something kind of good.

[00:46:22]
Ben Newsome: Hey, also consider a balanced judging process. What I mean by that is instead of you just marking it, why don’t you have a student panel? I mean, you could hold a lottery as to who gets to be on the judging panel. Maybe you need to rotate it, and to be honest, it’s probably quite fair to rotate it. Give them all the marking rubric that they have to adhere to and hopefully they help create.

[00:46:45]
Ben Newsome: This way that kids hear from their own peers what they like and what they don’t like, and that will help them grow as much as possible. Just for your classroom management, just be aware of classroom cliques. You want to get rid of those as much as possible. If the judging panel is a little bit too upfront, might be a bit uncomfortable with your particular group of students, maybe consider doing polling.

[00:47:07]
Ben Newsome: There’s a great programme called Poll Everywhere. There’s a free service and a paid service where kids could use their own devices, jump on the computer or whatever, and just put in their own grades without letting everyone know. It could be just simply anonymous. And you can see what the classroom is thinking, what the audience is thinking in real time. You could even have that happening behind them if you so feel.

[00:47:35]
Ben Newsome: Look, it doesn’t have to be modelled on Shark Tank or Dragons’ Den. It’s just going to be something that could be just fun that kids can do. It’d be ideal if they create a working model of their idea, not just a blueprint, not just a PowerPoint. Something that actually does stuff. And obviously you’ll need to give them some time so they can create it and, if you can, of course, embed it in the curriculum that you’re currently studying. So there you go. Maybe try a pitch fest. It might be worth your time.

[00:48:01]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Grab a copy of our new book, Be Amazing: How to Teach Science the Way Primary Kids Love, from our website. Just search Be Amazing Book. It’s available in hard copy and ebook. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelt F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S.

[00:48:23]
Ben Newsome: Yes, and while the Museum of Human Disease is very much tucked away in the heart of UNSW and often students walk past it, there are still well-known places, very well-known places where people don’t realise what also goes on in them. And one of these places is the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney. And last week’s guest, Mary Bell, went into some of the things that goes on in a garden like hers.

[00:48:44]
Guest: You know here at the Botanic Gardens, where we celebrated our 201st birthday this year as a botanic garden that is, of course. We have a deep history. We have Aboriginal culture, special sites here. We have the site of the first farm, so there’s great history. But we can bring language into our programmes and use the gardens as a backdrop to tell stories like Alexander’s Outing, which is a book written about a duck that lives here.

[00:49:13]
Guest: Or we can do mathematics programmes, or traditional science and life cycles. The world’s your oyster, it’s a lot of fun.

[00:49:19]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, you think a royal botanic garden would only do workshops on plants and plant dissections and flowers and all that type of botanical stuff, and yet there’s a lot more going on than people often realise. So look, I encourage you to jump on our last week’s podcast. It’s certainly worth the effort.

[00:49:34]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Sign up now for our fortnightly email newsletter. It’s loaded with details on new experiments you can do, STEM teaching articles, new gadgets, exclusive offers and upcoming events. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. Scroll to the bottom and add your email.

[00:49:53]
Ben Newsome: And that brings us to the end of this episode of the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Hey, check next week’s ones out. It’s a little bit different. We’ll be coming to you from the Innovation Games. Now, the Innovation Games is brand new. It’s a major festival which has been put together by Sydney Olympic Park as part of the Sydney Science Festival. It’s supported by Inspiring Australia and National Science Week, and we’ve got heaps of things going on from geology to road safety science, drones and you name it.

[00:50:18]
Ben Newsome: There’s all sorts of stuff when it comes to science, tech, engineering and maths. And look, I’ll be down there interviewing a number of good friends down there who are going to be putting on public exhibitions for people on their way to a rugby league match. So look, it’ll be a little bit boisterous, a little bit loud, but it should be a lot of fun.

[00:50:35]
Ben Newsome: Look, as always, may your science lessons be fun, and please make them informative as possible, and please grab your students’ imagination. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education, and of course you’ve been listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. All the best, catch you next time.

[00:50:50]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is the Museum of Human Disease and where is it located?
The Museum of Human Disease is a medical pathology collection located at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Randwick, Sydney. It is part of the Faculty of Medicine and houses approximately 3,000 specimens of diseased human organs preserved in bottles, used primarily for health and medical education.

Can the museum’s collection be accessed by students or teachers who cannot visit Sydney?
Yes. The entire collection has been digitised and is part of a teaching repository called the BEST Network. Within this network, an image bank called “Slice” allows educators and students worldwide to access X-rays, microscopy images, and specimen photos for use in online courses and presentations.

What are some of the most unique specimens mentioned in the collection?
Two notable specimens include a 45cm long polycystic kidney, which is nearly four times the size of a healthy adult kidney, and a teratoma, often called a “monster growth.” Because teratomas involve stem cells, they can differentiate into various tissue types; the museum’s specimen famously includes brain cells, teeth, and long red hair.

How does the museum support the high school science curriculum?
The museum’s programmes are specifically designed to align with the Year 12 biology syllabus, particularly the “Search for Better Health” module. In a two-hour visit, students can be exposed to nearly a quarter of their yearly requirements by seeing physical examples of the pathology they are studying in the classroom.

Is the museum open to the general public?
Unlike many other university pathology collections that are kept behind closed doors for medical students only, the Museum of Human Disease is open to the public every day. They actively encourage school groups and visitors to come in to learn about important health messages through their specimens.

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Power of the ‘Hook’ in STEM Engagement
Derek discusses using a “Zombie” theme to draw people into the museum, only to reveal the deep medical science behind it once they arrive. This raises an interesting point for educators: is it more effective to lead with “hard science,” or is using pop-culture hooks a more successful way to foster long-term literacy in complex subjects like pathology and anatomy?

Digital vs. Physical Educational Impact
The museum has invested heavily in digital repositories like the BEST Network and is exploring Virtual and Augmented Reality. Consider whether the “confrontational” nature of seeing a real human organ in a bottle provides a different psychological or educational impact compared to a high-definition digital scan. Does the physical presence of a specimen evoke a level of respect and curiosity that digital tools cannot replicate?

Niche Expertise and Career Non-Linearity
Derek’s career path—from zoology to outdoor education and eventually to museum director—highlights that a career in STEM is rarely a straight line. For students or professionals feeling stuck, Derek suggests that being passionate about a niche topic and “doing it differently” (such as starting a YouTube channel or blog) can create a unique personal brand that leads to unexpected opportunities in informal science education.