Science / Medicine : Little glass box is good news for world’s museums. : A Mummy Helps Build the Perfect Showcase

It is a creation of the great, rich J. Paul Getty Trust, and it resembles nothing so much as a Popular Mechanics home workshop project.

And that is part of its beauty.

The little glass box revealed last week by the Getty Conservation Institute in Marina del Rey is a prototype of bigger things to come, holding out the promise of preserving some of the world’s museums’ decaying treasures--on a shoestring.

Using equipment found in “any good machine shop,” conservators and craftsmen have come up with the affordable, hermetically sealed showcase that they say could “benefit millions of objects in museums around the world,” pieces of organic history that are crumbling--from medieval manuscripts and tapestries to wooden African masks.

‘Most Vulnerable Objects’

“Objects made completely of organic materials are the most vulnerable objects we have to take care of,” says the institute’s scientific research director, Frank D. Preusser.

While technology exists that accomplishes the same end, it is prohibitively expensive for many museums. Getty officials say their approach will help remedy that.

For starters, the institute announced last week, the 27 royal mummies of Egypt, pulled from display for nearly nine years because of problems including pollution and pests, should by next year be back on exhibit in the Cairo Museum--in the patented Getty boxes. The mummies are now sealed off to the public to reduce light, vibration and related problems.

“What you are going to see here,” institute director Luis Monreal said, “will be applicable to the conservation of the royal mummies in Egypt, but the possibilities of this system do not stop with Egyptian mummies.

“We are, as an extension of this project, going to be dealing with the problems of conservation of manuscripts, and one of the first collaborative ventures is going to be to attempt to salvage the Dead Sea Scrolls . . . as a continuation of the mummy project.”

Scrolls Call for Special Work

The scrolls are in an old gallery wing of a museum that has undergone renovation, where the environmental conditions are “not adequate,” according to Monreal. The fragile state of the parchment and ink has endangered the scrolls on exhibition. Getty officials will work to design cases that will preserve those and illuminate them adequately.

The stimulus for the so-called mummy project was Lady X, probably a commoner, the anonymous 3,000-year-old, 4-foot-10-inch New Kingdom mummy who arrived in Los Angeles last September, two days before the Pope did.

Nearly a year earlier, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization had approached the Getty facility about finding a means to preserve Lady X and her more exalted brethren. And last week, as Lady X lay behind a black curtain--demurely covered sternum to shins by a sheet and enclosed in her temporary nitrogen environment--the Getty staff shared its findings with an audience of curators, scientists and conservators.

After experimenting on samples drawn from mummies in museums around the United States and growing cultures from bacteria and fungi swabs from Lady X herself, researchers came up with the low-oxygen, low-humidity, warm-temperature combination that suppressed decay, held off pollution and stifled pests--without changing the appearance of the artifact.

Protection With Access

Then, they had to figure out how to maintain such an environment for museum access, without, as Preusser said wryly, “building a bunker . . . (and sending) our visitors through clean showers, give them white clothes, take their shoes off.”

Comparing the Getty system with one current solution, Preusser estimated that at a price of $2 million or $3 million, the frail parchment documents on which the United States was founded--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights--were hermetically sealed in atomic bomb-protected helium-filled bronze and glass cases.

In contrast, Preusser said, the cost per mummy case in the Getty system would be “in the low thousands of dollars . . . not much more than a conventional showcase” containing no preservation features except for glass and lighting. “We want this system to be realistic in the museum picture,” Monreal said. “The Third World (museums) especially have a very low budget.”

As is often the case, designers found that creating something to look simple and work simply was far more difficult than creating something complicated and expensive.

Elegant Simplicity

But the three-tier box that they came up with is a sort of elegant Model-T of museum cases: low budget, low maintenance, operating with a minimum of expensive high-tech clutter, and quite presentable, a compromise between the extremes of absolute conservation (which ideally would hide every artifact in a dark room) and unrestricted access (in which visitors might try to cop a furtive feel of every statue, basket and painting).

On top is a standard-looking aluminum-framed glass case, hermetically sealed by O-rings, similar to those used on the space shuttle, and indium metal, and filled with an inert gas--in this case, the benign nitrogen.

Below the display level is a deck with dishes of silica gel to maintain low humidity, bags of an oxygen “scavenger” to draw out any puffs of oxygen that might be in the case, and oxygen, temperature and humidity sensors.

In the base layer--also in lieu of a complicated flushing system--is a plastic bag. If the sealed display case heats up from sunlight or room temperature, the plastic bag expands and contracts instead of the glass. There is also an oxygen monitor transmitter, and temperature and humidity transmitters, all self-contained.

Unlike many finicky, labor-intensive devices, such a case, if properly constructed, could be left maintenance-free for as long as four or five years, the Getty people believe. “The thing that’s nice about this design,” said institute researcher Steve Weintraub, who designed much of the box, “is it’s really quite simple.”

Mummy Is Next

The next stage is copying the case full-size for Lady X, who will spend several months inside as the test mummy. “I’m concerned about this mummy,” joked Zahi Hawass, director general of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. “It is here a year now; I’m afraid it will stay here and ask for the American green card.”

The development costs to date have been “very modest,” said Monreal--perhaps $50,000 to $100,000, in line with the low-budget goal of the design, which is “not much more” than a conventional showcase.

The Getty Trust plans to publish its results and patent its findings “to make sure this is at the disposal of the public and not fall into commercial use.”

As for its uses, says Monreal, “I personally could not imagine what our cultural heritage would be without being able ourselves to keep for future generations not only mummies but many other types of organic materials which represent our cultural heritage.”