Libraries of Life: Microbial Culture Collections and the Chemical Order of Nature

Historians of science have long recognized the centrality of collections such as cabinets of curiosity, gardens, and museums to the study of natural history. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that, as the life sciences became ‘modern,’ the importance of such collections was eclipsed by that of experiments. Rather than collect, describe, and arrange specimens, so the story goes, investigators opted to experiment with strategically-chosen model organisms, using them to elucidate biological mechanisms present in wide swaths of the living world. In the meantime, scholars like Robert Kohler and Bruno Strasser have challenged this view, drawing attention to the pervasiveness of scientific collections throughout the modern life sciences. In this paper, I provide a panoramic view of microbial culture collections from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s, arguing that the curation of these collections was not only useful for taxonomic purposes, but also indispensable for shedding light on the biochemical mechanisms of living cells. Using these libraries of life, microbiologists compared and contrasted microbes’ metabolic processes, substantiating what I refer to as ‘the chemical order of nature.’ In conclusion, I suggest that further scrutiny of collections of laboratory-cultured life forms will help rectify an imbalance in the historiography of the twentieth century life sciences, which tends to foreground histories of genetics, evolution, and heredity, while neglecting those of physiology, biochemistry, and metabolism. When histories of the twentieth century life sciences focus predominately on a handful of standardized model organisms, they only tell part of the story.