Museum specimens could help fight the next pandemic – why preserving collections is crucial to future scientific discoveries
Imagine yourself as the first naturalist to stand in a place where little recorded scientific knowledge exists, like Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago or Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas in the early 1800s. The notes you record will expand humanity’s scientific knowledge of the natural world, and the specimens of plants and animals you collect are destined to be used for centuries to describe past and present biodiversity and make new discoveries in biomedicine and beyond.
Now, imagine if those specimens were never collected.
That’s what it’s like if samples from the field are not archived. Natural history museums are the guardians of specimens, ensuring their future availability to the scientific community on shelves, in libraries and through curated online databases. Yet, despite scientists continuing to sample the natural world, many specimens are not ending up in biorepositories. If specimens are not archived, the next generation of scientists will inevitably have to reinvent the wheel, spending more time and money resampling the world’s species and geography to answer future questions.
There’s a variety of reasons that specimens don’t get saved, including insufficient museum-based training among newer generations of scientists, poor funding of natural history collections and a lapse in data priorities from organizations that fund and disseminate scientific knowledge.
In a new paper published in the journal BioScience, we and our colleagues outline how existing loopholes in U.S. federal data policies, backward data priorities by scientific journals and a culture of data ownership have made it too easy for research specimens to be discarded. This problem stands to hamstring scientific progress. But, it’s not too late to change.
Museum specimens could help fight the next pandemic – why preserving collections is crucial to future scientific discoveries
Imagine yourself as the first naturalist to stand in a place where little recorded scientific knowledge exists, like Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago or Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas in the early 1800s. The notes you record will expand humanity’s scientific knowledge of the natural world, and the specimens of plants and animals you collect are destined to be used for centuries to describe past and present biodiversity and make new discoveries in biomedicine and beyond.
Now, imagine if those specimens were never collected.
That’s what it’s like if samples from the field are not archived. Natural history museums are the guardians of specimens, ensuring their future availability to the scientific community on shelves, in libraries and through curated online databases. Yet, despite scientists continuing to sample the natural world, many specimens are not ending up in biorepositories. If specimens are not archived, the next generation of scientists will inevitably have to reinvent the wheel, spending more time and money resampling the world’s species and geography to answer future questions.
There’s a variety of reasons that specimens don’t get saved, including insufficient museum-based training among newer generations of scientists, poor funding of natural history collections and a lapse in data priorities from organizations that fund and disseminate scientific knowledge.
In a new paper published in the journal BioScience, we and our colleagues outline how existing loopholes in U.S. federal data policies, backward data priorities by scientific journals and a culture of data ownership have made it too easy for research specimens to be discarded. This problem stands to hamstring scientific progress. But, it’s not too late to change.
Museum specimens could help fight the next pandemic – why preserving collections is crucial to future scientific discoveries