The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank, Natural History,and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine

Today, the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciencesrelies crucially on the use of biological data collections, such asDNA sequence databases. These collections, in both their creationand their current use, are embedded in the experimentalist tradition.At the same time, however, they exemplify the natural historical tradition,based on collecting and comparing natural facts. This essay focuseson the issues attending the establishment in 1982 of GenBank, thelargest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental knowledgein the world. The debates leading to its creation-about thecollection and distribution of data, the attribution of credit andauthorship, and the proprietary nature of knowledge-illuminatethe different moral economies at work in the life sciences in thelate twentieth century. They offer perspective on the recent riseof public access publishing and data sharing in science. More broadly,this essay challenges the big picture according to which the riseof experimentalism led to the decline of natural history in the twentiethcentury. It argues that both traditions have been articulated intoa new way of producing knowledge that has become a key practice inscience at the beginning of the twenty-first century.