Libraries of life on earth
April 28, 2024 6:42 PM Subscribe
The Crucial Role of Herbaria in Science by Dr. Cassandra Quave. Podcast episode (on Youtube) includes Dr. Quave's WaPo opinion piece. In February, Duke University announced that it was shuttering its herbarium, to widespread dismay from scientists across the globe. With one of the nation's largest collections of algae, lichens, fungi, and mosses, Duke's herbarium is "highly unusual" for its depth and variety. It's also where the Lady Gaga Fern is held, named for the artist's outfit at the 2010 Grammys which looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte.
As a Duke Biology alum, this is a story that has kept me mad for a couple months now. Duke has one of the biggest endowments of a university in the US. They could keep the herbarium going indefinitely off of endowment funds and not even notice. They are choosing to close it for some petty reason--somebody pissed somebody off, some donor wants that space for something else, some administrator needs to put their stamp on something.
Unfortunately, that's how universities work these days. Shared faculty governance has become a myth, and decisions are made by administrators working their way to their next jobs based on personal grudges against faculty and programs that are standing in the way of trying to please donors who know little about the actual programs they are funding or destroying.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:42 AM on April 29 [15 favorites]
Unfortunately, that's how universities work these days. Shared faculty governance has become a myth, and decisions are made by administrators working their way to their next jobs based on personal grudges against faculty and programs that are standing in the way of trying to please donors who know little about the actual programs they are funding or destroying.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:42 AM on April 29 [15 favorites]
One of the points Dr Quave makes is that Princeton and Stanford shuttered their herbaria a generation ago because molecular biology was going to bring in more money. That's a false assessment of value. In the 00s, we got through €1.5million over 3 years investigating the immune system of chickens to better understand why Campylobacter jejuni was a natural commensal of chicken guts but a serious 'dehydrator' for humans. The university loved it because they got 40% overheads to help fund their infrastructure. €1.5m sounds a lot, and it is, but the project was still underfunded and underpowered (and so essentially a waste of money because it didn't answer the stated research questions one way or another). Molecular biology is just expensive, the equipment costs a lot, the consumables cost a lot and you still have to pay salaries.
My 1980s PhD in observational biology cost $1.5thousand. And wasn't less valuable for the sum of human understanding than the later venture. €1.5 million would probably fund a 10-year plan for Dr Quave's herbarium. Whether preserving specimens between sheets of acid-free paper is the best way to record botanical diversity is a topic for debate. But the rise and rise of molecular biology could get some side eye.
Anyway, what I really came to say was that I read The Naming of Names: the Search for Order in the World of Plants (2005) by Anna Pavord at the end of last year and strongly recommend it to anyone who clicked open this thread. Pavord's thesis is that Θεόφραστος Theophrastus of Lesbos (~371 – ~287 BCE), polymath and successor to Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the greatest and best of botanists from the classical times but all his original works slipped between the cracks of Dark Age sack and pillage. The plants the ancients described in careful detail [Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti doesn't trip off the tongue. But calling the same plant Plantago media = plantain allows my Austrian and Peruvian collaborators to know precisely what we're all talking about]. If we had the herbarium of Theophrastus there would be no confusion.
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:02 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
My 1980s PhD in observational biology cost $1.5thousand. And wasn't less valuable for the sum of human understanding than the later venture. €1.5 million would probably fund a 10-year plan for Dr Quave's herbarium. Whether preserving specimens between sheets of acid-free paper is the best way to record botanical diversity is a topic for debate. But the rise and rise of molecular biology could get some side eye.
Anyway, what I really came to say was that I read The Naming of Names: the Search for Order in the World of Plants (2005) by Anna Pavord at the end of last year and strongly recommend it to anyone who clicked open this thread. Pavord's thesis is that Θεόφραστος Theophrastus of Lesbos (~371 – ~287 BCE), polymath and successor to Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the greatest and best of botanists from the classical times but all his original works slipped between the cracks of Dark Age sack and pillage. The plants the ancients described in careful detail [Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti doesn't trip off the tongue. But calling the same plant Plantago media = plantain allows my Austrian and Peruvian collaborators to know precisely what we're all talking about]. If we had the herbarium of Theophrastus there would be no confusion.
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:02 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
Deliciously (or should I say 'pungently'?) ironic considering that part of a great fortune deriving from the exploitation of one particular herb — which just happens to be native to North Carolina — was instrumental in founding Duke University :
posted by jamjam at 9:33 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Duke University was founded in 1930 primarily due to funds generated from James B. Duke’s tobacco business. Duke achieved great financial wealth primarily due to the early application of machine rolled cigarettes, as opposed to hand rolled. This early adoption of technology allowed Duke Tobacco to out-produce other companies still selling hand rolled cigarettes. By making smoking more inexpensive and easier than pipe smoking, the cigarette formed the foundation for nicotine addiction in the 1900s, generating huge profits for the tobacco industry. At the time Duke University was founded, little was known about the connection between nicotine, cigarettes, and respiratory diseases such as emphysema and lung cancer.Duke is now a smoke free campus too, as I recall.
posted by jamjam at 9:33 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Ah, boo.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:26 PM on April 29
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:26 PM on April 29
This has been driving me nuts, too. I almost went to Duke to do my PhD work out of that herbarium. Instead, I went to a different school that, so far, has not gotten rid of its herbarium, but did store it in a chicken coop for a decade.
Herbaria are important. Since you can extract DNA from herbarium specimens, they are a time machine. The fungus I work with- it was given a name that didn't seem correct- Was it originally misidentified, or did one species get replaced by the other? Well, nothing easier than going to the herbarium and looking. Misidentified.
posted by acrasis at 6:24 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]
Herbaria are important. Since you can extract DNA from herbarium specimens, they are a time machine. The fungus I work with- it was given a name that didn't seem correct- Was it originally misidentified, or did one species get replaced by the other? Well, nothing easier than going to the herbarium and looking. Misidentified.
posted by acrasis at 6:24 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]
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