By “natural history,” I do not refer to the study of whole organisms—a recent meaning of the term—but to the different practices of collecting, describing, naming, comparing, and organizing natural objects, practices usually associated not with the laboratory but with the wonder cabinet, the botanical garden, or the natural history museum. Indeed, if there is any feature distinctive to the natural history approach, it is its reliance on collections, which have played a crucial role in natural history from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century, when Victorian sensibilities brought such collections to widespread popularity. In addition to being tools for display, they were often means for producing knowledge about the taxonomies of living organisms, their anatomies, and their histories. Bringing specimens together in a single place and organizing them in a system- atic way made comparisons among them possible and, by analogical reasoning, facilitated their identification and inscription into broader theoretical systems. Those who created the early modern cabinets of curiosity, the royal gardens of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the great zoological museums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all faced the challenges of bringing to a central location specimens that were often dispersed all over the world, securing the participation of individual naturalists, and negotiating the status of the specimens in the collection. The contemporary collectors of experimental knowledge whom I will examine here have been confronted with similar challenges, but in a very different context. They were operating in a community not of naturalists or savants, but of professional experimentalists who had widely different ideas about the epistemic value of collections, the ownership of knowledge, and, more generally, the moral economy of science.
from "The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine" by Bruno J. Strasser (Isis, March 2011)
In this article, Strasser details some important concerns about knowledge as property in the biotech field. GenBank, the largest DNA sequence database, is a central part of the conversation about who owns biological material, who gets credit for discoveries, etc. Individual rights and rewards come up against community values. The moral economy of experimental science, as Strasser explains, is about individual credit for discoveries (created through publication). However, as the process of collecting was revised for the modern era, open access to information gained a foothold. Further, from a historical perspective, the development of GenBank "also indicated that collections were no longer viewed as relics of an archaic past associated with natural history but, rather, as essential tools for the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciences."
