Speyer also has a technology museum and a sea-life centre.
"The point is that it's not a technology museum," Ms. Scanlan said.
Spirit of Ford is a children's science and technology museum focusing on the auto industry.
The science and technology museum is an apt place to welcome inventiveness: It is also the repository of most of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.
The Gulotta-era vision for the area became Museums at Mitchel, a cluster that would include a refurbished children's museum, a firefighting museum, a science and technology museum and a hand-carved carousel circa 1915.
Plans for the science and technology museum are still vague, Mr. Fox said, but it may include a wide-screen theater, a dinosaur exhibit and interactive computer exhibits with the Connecticut River as their theme.
Hands-On Science WEDNESDAY -- Morley Safer will be the master of ceremonies at a black-tie dinner at Pier 60, Chelsea Piers, to raise money for educational programs and exhibitions of the New York Hall of Science, the science and technology museum in Corona, Queens.
Under the conservancy's plan, the site would include a 10-acre environmental park, a history and technology museum, a research center that would focus on the Hackensack River, an environmental education center and a cultural center.
But on Nov. 1 the Tech Museum of Innovation, a three-year-old science and technology museum in downtown San Jose, held just such an event -- with a keynote speech by former President Gerald R. Ford -- to honor technology specialists who "improve the quality of life around the globe".
In his current research, Mavhunga studies the impact of mobility on pathogens and plants, creating culturally grounded solutions to climate change and poverty, and developing an indigenous technology museum in Kruger National Park in South Africa with his NYU colleague, Kenyan geneticist Simon Kang'a.
