Transferring Cutting-Edge Research to Museum Learning Environments: Science in the Making versus Ready-Made Science

School science differs considerably from the science of scientists. This is because in order to become teachable, science is taken from its original research context, deconstructed and reconstructed, and implemented in schools. While this transition is both necessary and inevitable, it may cause school science to become disembodied from its purpose or even obsolete. Accordingly, we suggest that museums are ideal places for the dissemination of cutting-edge science because they are not bound to school syllabi, they have immediate access to contemporary research, and they are already established as out-of-school resources. To examine this issue, we carried out a mainly qualitative study of the museum program DNA and Life. The program was intended to engage secondary school students in authentic, cutting-edge research. Through targeted analysis of observations, video recordings, interviews and questionnaires with eight participating classes, we identified characteristics of the program that contributed to the authenticity of its activities, and also characteristics that detracted from it. We discuss these characteristics with regard to the rapid transition of the programme’s content from the world of science to the world of education, and offer our perspectives on their implications.