Munich

Science historians and computer scientists in Berlin are working to create a virtual nineteenth-century physiology laboratory on the Internet.

The project will allow people to learn how biologists first moved from observation to experiment. Its backers hope that it will give students and the public an insight into the history of science and a stronger understanding of the scientific method.

Window on the past: the electrical stimulation of frog muscle will be recreated online.

The virtual laboratory will recreate classic experiments — such as the twitching frog's leg that showed that electrical stimulation can make muscles contract — on the web.

“An experimental approach to life was very new in the nineteenth century,” says Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, who is coordinating the project.

Rheinberger's team is collecting and digitizing the scattered documents and drawings of early physiologists for the website, which will be launched next year.

Eventually the virtual laboratory will be interactive. “The site will be used not only by archivists and researchers in museums and scientific institutes, but also by the general public,” says Sven Dierig, a member of Rheinberger's team. “Historic instruments help the public understand experiments much more easily than today's 'black boxes',” he says.

Robert Bud, head of information and research at the Science Museum in London says that it “is a very ambitious and challenging project which links the public to the scientific community”.

But the project needs to raise money for its software. So far, the project has a sponsor, the Volkswagen Foundation, only for its scientific component.