There have recently been articles in the press about new findings regarding King Tut, which are being heavily promoted in advance of a BBC broadcast of a documentary about the research. (By the way, the research that led to the “new findings” in the documentary was actually published 4 years ago. However, now that someone needs some buzz for a televised documentary, the findings are “new.”)

One of the things I noticed was the various ways different media reported the findings. They ranged from the dry and straightforward “New Documentary to Reveal the Real Appearance of King Tut” in Youth Health to the attention-grabbing “The Real King Tut Was Sick, Crippled, and Ugly” in Nature World News.

But the more fascinating aspect (to me) was one of the sources who was repeatedly interviewed and cited: Prof. Albert Zink, who is the head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, which is part of the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano in Italy. The academy, known informally as EURAC, is primarily funded by the provincial government and employs 387 people in 11 institutes. Their Web site says that they “are home to researchers from all over Europe” who “collaborate with public and private agencies towards the resolution of some central issues of our day” and “contribute to create a future-oriented Europe.”

The Institute’s claim to fame is that it is home to Ötzi the Iceman, “the oldest wet mummy ever discovered.” A Baltimore Sun review in 2000 of a book about the Iceman summarizes the highly political process that led to its location at the Institute:

Then, the scientific and political communities start to squabble. Where was the body found? (In Italy, it turns out.) Who will control access to the Iceman and his artifacts? (Spindler and a clique of his colleagues, who create an organization called the Research Institute for Alpine Prehistory to manage all Iceman-related research.) Who will pay for preserving the corpse (the public, of course), where will the Iceman be displayed (in the Italian province of South Tyrol), and how are the interested parties going to profit from their discoveries (any way they can)?

So they had this iceman that needed a publicly funded home: enter the Institute. However, if it were to be only the Institute of the Iceman, there wouldn’t be much to do around the office, since there’s only one iceman. So it is the Institute of Mummies (plural) and the Iceman (singular). Now, of course, in addition to a frozen mummy, the Institute has a special cold-room to keep him in, a next-gen DNA lab, and all kinds of other research equipment (and researchers) that need to do something, and a name that allows them to branch out into . . . well, “dry” mummies, I guess. And this dry-mummy part of the name is apparently the open door they needed to involve themselves in a study of a high-profile mummy. The research apparently involved some 2,000 CT scans of King Tut’s mummy, with some reports mentioning 15,000 scans. Either way, it was clearly a massive undertaking, which apparently took 2 years to complete, in cooperation with Egyptian researchers.

Although the findings are interesting enough, I don’t understand why they are worth the funding from a provincial government in a country currently teetering on insolvency. More to the point, I guess, is why it would fall to EURAC to undertake this investigation. Returning to the mission stated on EURAC’s Web site, how can our new knowledge about an Egyptian teenager who lived 3300 years ago – like the revelation that he had buck teeth, a club foot, and “girlish hips” – reasonably be considered to be one of the “central issues of our day” or a contribution to a “future-oriented Europe”?

So this research was the result of originally needing to store a cold mummy. That led to a search for a larger role and the installation of a lot of cool technology. And because they now had the people and technology to conduct specialized research on a wide variety of other people’s mummies, that became a virtual mandate that they should do it, that they must do it.

And that is precisely how scope creep happens in all types of organizations.

Scope Creep by Ed Ward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.