Briefs · Frontier Science
Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences just closed – a blow for budding young scientists like me
America’s oldest natural science museum has closed. It survived 214 years, two centuries and several wars, but not a balance sheet.
Drexel University, which acquired the Academy of Natural Sciences in 2011, announced on 1 September 2026 that it would close by the end of the month, citing financial difficulties and declining attendance; the last visitors left on 27 September. The William Penn Foundation offered to cover operating subsidies for at least another year, but Drexel says it needs a long-term solution, and Philadelphia City Council spent nearly four hours on the question on 26 October.
For the author (Lili Mei Granda Argianas, a physics PhD student), the Academy was where a first-generation college student first saw herself as a scientist — the same way a childhood visit to the blue whale hall had done years before.
Conclusion: a museum is not a building full of old bones. It is a doorway, and this one just shut.
Read the original at The Conversation (Science and Technology)
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