The Armand-Frappier Museum gets a makeover

(Laval) Projected since 2019, the new Armand-Frappier Health Museum opens its doors this Tuesday in Laval, in brand new premises located right next to the Cosmodôme, an investment of 14 million dollars which will allow the institution to welcome twice as many visitors to its new light installations of almost 1800 square meters.

“It was a long and difficult gestation, but the baby was born and we’re really happy,” says the museum’s director, Guylaine Archambault, before taking us to visit the premises. “We want to train the muscle of knowing people,” she continues, guiding us first down a long alley that recalls the exceptional course of the D^r Armand Frappier, from his love of music to the birth of his vocation, triggered by the death of his mother at the hands of tuberculosis.

“We hope it will be a memorable experience that will help sow a little seed that will inspire young people to learn, read, ask questions, continues M^me Archambault. If there are young people who then decide to embrace careers in research or care, so much the better, but what we want is to help form well-made little heads who like to document themselves and who pose an enlightened look at our society and its challenges. If we manage to do that, we will have accomplished our mission. »

Exhibitions

The permanent exhibition 4, 3, 2, 1 Health! addresses the major health issues in an interactive and fun way by developing according to four themes, molecules and cells through individuals, populations to conclude on issues that affect health at the planetary level. In particular, we can listen to the testimonials of people with serious illnesses on their ways of coping with their condition, we can act on an interactive board where we are invited to take action to contribute to everyone’s health, or we can even play a life-size snakes and ladders game orchestrated around healthy lifestyles.

Before going up to the labs by climbing the spiral staircases whose shape is inspired by the double helix of DNA, you have to spend a moment in the temporary exhibition Pandemics: Humanity challenged, where we are invited to put on an RFID bracelet that will allow us to participate in a game whose objective is to stem a fictitious pandemic. “We consulted our members and our visitors and while we might have expected them to be tired of hearing about pandemics, we noticed on the contrary that the elements present in the news are always the more popular”, explains Guylaine Archambault.

It takes about 45 minutes to go around the temporary exhibition, but you can spend almost an hour and a half there if you read everything and listen to all the testimonies. There are also some interesting artefacts from the Armand-Frappier Institute as well as a fascinating chronology of the pandemics that have struck humanity since Antiquity.

Upstairs are finally four laboratories where you can follow workshops related to the content of the exhibitions – we advise you to reserve your time slot before going to the museum. Real laboratory tools are handled in functional installations. “We’re really recreating lab conditions, so it may not work exactly as we expected,” explains educational activities manager Ilinca Marinescu, after seeing the inconclusive results of our own experiment.

“It allows us to show that it’s possible that it doesn’t work, but people still understood the technique and the scientific content that went with it,” adds Claudia Bélanger, operations manager. It allows us to integrate the fact that this is also how it goes in the lab of a researcher, who will repeat his experiment dozens, even hundreds of times to ensure results, because he, it will be peer reviewed! »