The role of research in museums is a complex one, and science museums are no exception. This category of museum does raise a number of distinctive issues, however. If science museums are construed as primarily for children, "research" in the sense that historians of science, medicine, and technology (STM) understand it, plays a minimal part. But if, as many of us believe, science museums must engage with adults, and in sophisticated ways, the question remains how to bring to our professional understanding to non-specialist audiences through objects, images and displays. Around the world many attempts to do this have been made, but the question needs, nonetheless, to be asked repeatedly, and it is this question my plenary will address. I will argue that in order to bring forth the materiality of practices associated with STM, we need to address a number of difficult conceptual-cum-political issues. These include the ways in which abstract matters can be communicated through artefacts, and by "abstract matters" I mean to include both historical analysis and the object of that analysis - science, medicine and technology. We can usefully construe this presentation to wide audiences in science museums as a form of public history. But this notion too needs requires careful conceptualisation, which must include a discussion of the inflections of "public" that will, at least in part, be driven by local political circumstances. Furthermore, public history is now a big issue in countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States, and those concerned with STM form only a small section of the communities that produce and debate it. These are matters of considerable importance not just for historians of STM but for those who run, and indeed care about, science museums and the well-being of their staff.