Paul Bowers is public-offer project director of the Darwin Centre at London's Natural History Museum (www.nhm.ac.uk). He determines the content, design and installation of exhibits at the just-built addition, which debuts Sept. 15. Bowers, 36, is a native of London.

Q. What exactly is the eight-story, $128.6 million Darwin Centre?

The Natural History Museum, in South Kensington, is a massive research institute as well as a major visitor center. The Darwin Centre brings those two areas together: to provide new facilities for the collection, and a place where scientists and the public can interact.

It's huge, the biggest thing the museum has done since the main building on the site opened in 1881. We've got 17 million insect specimens and 3 million flowering plants, as well as about 200 scientists and all the lab and research facilities that go along with that.

We have new public spaces for exhibitions, plus live studio spaces where the public can see scientists at work and talk to the scientists about their work here.

Q. Where are all these specimens coming from?

They're already in our collections, which were created over the last 400 years and donated over the years. The collections come from all over the world. There's pretty much nowhere in the world we don't have specimens from. We network with institutions worldwide to study biodiversity – how all living things are classified and how they evolved. We use that knowledge for practical purposes: fighting human, animal and crop diseases. We do a lot of work on malaria, loss of biodiversity and the consequences of climate change.

Historically, most museums have focused on telling people what we already know about science – things like, “How big is a whale?” Here, we're trying to open up what we don't know – about the research process, and what exactly needs to be known.

Q. Will the Darwin have big space-consuming specimens, like whales?

Not on display. We have dinosaur skulls, whale skeletons and things like that in the basement: moose, big cats and so on. Our holdings total 70 million specimens.

For our purposes, it's rarity that matters, something's “unusualness” – variations across a species. So we're exhibiting our insects and plants.

Also, bones are relatively stable: You can leave them on a shelf for five years and not much will happen to them.

The insect and plant collections are the most at risk. They're much more vulnerable to fire, theft and something we call the museum beetle: If these beetles get into a collection, they will eat everything. They're like roaches and will reduce coveted specimens to dust. Once lost, we can never get that knowledge back.

Q. But I'd assume you have a sample of the museum beetle.

We probably have it. I think our curator would probably like to stick extra pins in it.

Q. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) died a year after the Natural History Museum opened. Did he ever visit it?

I'm not a historian; I just don't know. The original, Victorian museum was a part of the debate on Darwinism. The then-director of the Natural History Museum disagreed with Darwin and Darwinism, and the museum was intended to reflect the unity of all creation. Now we understand from evidence that Darwin's theory is the most useful way of describing the world. So it's ironic that the Darwin Centre is part of a building that intended to say Darwin was wrong.

Q. What's the coolest thing about the Darwin Centre?

To me, it's that we have groups of scientists comparing specimens – for the first time – in public view.

One part of the center is called The Cocoon. It's a large exhibition space with windows. You can look through them and see scientists at work. You can't disturb them, but we've created interactive exhibits telling the story of what they do. There are video diaries and blogs by the scientists.

We also have an area where curators are preparing or repairing specimens. It's in a space where you can look through windows and watch them, and there are microphones, so people can talk with them.

There's another part, the Attenborough Studio, where there are daily events. People can meet researchers at the cutting edge of knowledge. You can hear them talk about their work.

Q. So in a manner of speaking, the scientists are also specimens at the Darwin.

You could take that view. It's an opportunity that lets scientists have conversations with non-experts about the cool stuff they're doing. The scientists are tremendously proud of their work. It's their passion and their intellectual interest. And you can't find a single person on Earth who doesn't want to talk about passions and interests.

It helps motivate them. Everyone loves to show off the cool stuff they do.

We had a friends-and-family preview day. This interaction got an overwhelmingly positive response.

So perhaps the scientists are specimens. But they're happy specimens.

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