Bangham Jenny
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, CB2 3RH, UK.
BJHS Themes. 2019;4:123-147. doi: 10.1017/bjt.2019.14. Epub 2019 Sep 16.
Biological stock centres collect, care for and distribute living organisms for scientific research. In the 1990s, several of the world's largest Drosophila (fruit fly) stock centres were closed or threatened with closure. This paper reflects on why this happened, and uses the visibility of these endings to examine how stock centre collections are managed, who maintains them and how they are kept valuable and accessible to biologists. One stock centre came under threat because of challenges in caring for flies and monitoring the integrity of stocks. Another was criticized for keeping too many 'archival' stocks, an episode that reveals what it can mean for a living scientific collection to remain 'relevant' to a research community. That centre also struggled with the administrative and documentary practices that have proved crucial for sustaining a collection's meaning, value and availability. All of the stock centres in this story faced challenges of how to pay for care and curation, engaging with a problem that has been discussed by biologists and their funders since the 1940s: what are the best models for stock provision, and how could these models be changed?
生物种质资源库收集、保存并分发用于科学研究的生物有机体。在20世纪90年代，世界上几家最大的果蝇种质资源库被关闭或面临关闭威胁。本文反思了发生这种情况的原因，并利用这些种质资源库终结事件的显著程度，来审视种质资源库的藏品是如何管理的、由谁来维护这些藏品，以及如何使它们对生物学家来说保持价值并易于获取。一家种质资源库因果蝇饲养和库存完整性监测方面的挑战而受到威胁。另一家则因保留了过多“存档”库存而受到批评，这一事件揭示了对于一个有生命的科学藏品而言保持与研究群体“相关”意味着什么。该种质资源库还在行政和文档管理方面面临困难，而这些实践已被证明对于维持藏品的意义、价值和可用性至关重要。本文所涉及的所有种质资源库都面临着如何支付养护和管理费用的挑战，这涉及到自20世纪40年代以来生物学家及其资助者一直在讨论的一个问题：种质供应的最佳模式是什么，以及这些模式如何改变？
