Seed banking has emerged as a solution to the crisis of diminishing plant variety due to human and mono-culture agricultural encroachment. This paper is a small piece of a larger project that studies the conditions that led to the emergence of seed banking, the diverse practices of seed curation, and the challenges to cryogenic life. Here I consider a simple but real question: What happens when the system that has been idealized as the infallible fail-safe, is discovered to be compromised? How do scientists learn from disaster, adapt their techniques, and innovate around new needs in caring for precious dormant life? This paper follows the story of one such moment of crisis at a small but prominent seed banking facility, the C. M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center (TGRC) at the University of California, Davis. Based on collections made from the mid twentieth century onwards, and from the sites of the origin of Tomato family in Andean Peru and Ecuador, the TGRC contains the biggest collection of tomato variety globally and provides samples of their collection to any bona fide researcher. However, in the fall of 2015, researchers at Cornell University discovered a viroid pathogen on tomato plants that had grown from seed sent from the TGRC. Following the ongoing struggle to understand the spread of the pathogen, treat infected seed, and repair their reputation, this paper explores the intricate relations of care for specimens and responsibility to community that are held in tension in scientific spaces that are experiencing crises.

‘Laboratory animals’ and the infrastructure that sustained them were an integral part of the development of the twentieth-century biological and biomedical sciences. Until 1986, in Britain, the scientific use of animals was governed by the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. For 110 years—during a period of rapid techno-scientific change and exponential expansion of the biomedical sciences—a core part of twentieth-century scientific activity was shaped by Victorian legislation. This paper charts the reform of animal research governance in late twentieth-century Britain, exploring the social and scientific factors that shaped new legislation culminating in the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act (ASPA). Intended to balance the interests of scientific organisations, professional bodies, and animal welfare advocates, ASPA was driven by a combination of scientific recognition of the importance of standards of animal care and a societal re-invigoration of animal advocacy politics. By drawing on oral history interviews with animal technologists and veterinarians, as well as the recently opened Home Office records, we chart how ASPA contributed to the ‘professionalization’ of care, examining how emergent knowledges and practices of animal care informed the new legislation and were subsequently transformed by it. In doing so, we explain why veterinarians and ‘animal technologists’, absent in the original 1876 legislation, were ascribed prominent roles within ASPA as adjudicators of the needs of science and those of animal welfare. In conclusion, our paper reveals the conditions which allowed care to operate within the experimental sciences to productively align scientific and societal values.

“I can date very precisely the moment when I conceived the idea of maintenance methylation and its use to remember patterns of DNA modification and control gene expression” wrote John Pugh, a ‘father’ of modern epigenetics, in a letter: ”This was on 14 March 1973 at 5.20 pm in the seminar room at NIMR.” Histories of science have long dispensed with the notion of a solitary genius, showing the importance of work in a couples and laboratory teams. Expensive pieces of equipment in ‘big science’ fostered novel forms of labour organization and new communities. But what of those tools somewhere in-between – and in particular those less tangible and ephemeral? Using the case of early history of epigenetics (between 1970-1975) and drawing on the interviews with its founders, Arthur Riggs in California and John Pugh in London, I bring to light the invisible web of tools that sustained research communities: journal clubs and seminars. Often without a fixed location, they consisted of not much more than chairs, a slide projector and a pot of tea with biscuits; required no skills beyond reading, listening, conversing, storytelling. I examine the work and care invested into building and maintaining these tools, rules that guided them, and the ways in which they interacted with other places of research, in particular laboratory. By giving these ‘communities of storytelling’ their place in history, this talk will stress the need to approach scientific innovation through the lens of sharing rather than competition and priority disputes.

Geneticists rely on working collections of data and of living organisms. Databases capture, order and communicate standardized genetic information, while stock centres make available vast arrays of standardized yeasts, bacteria, viruses, plasmids, cell cultures, animals and plants. Collections of both data and living organisms require dedicated professionals and practices of on-going care, curation, and funding, all of which keep such collections valuable and accessible to their biologist users. This paper deals with the collections of data and animals used by fruit fly geneticists. Since the 1920s, Drosophila researchers have depended on institutions devoted to collecting and distributing living mutant and transgenic fruit flies. From the 1930s, a newsletter (Drosophila Information Service) distributed lists of mutant stocks held in labs around the world, and from the 1940s, researchers used on book-length ‘mutant catalogues’, which systematically listed all known information about Drosophila mutants. During the 1990s, these living and text-based resources were linked through ‘FlyBase’, an online database that made available cross-referenced tables of gene mutants, bibliographies, lab addresses, and resources for obtaining mutant flies. This paper explores the practices that Drosophila database curators, editors, stock keepers and collections managers deployed to keep such living and text-based ‘community tools’ valuable and accessible. It reflects on how those professionals interpreted and negotiated the needs of diverse research ‘communities’, and argues that the practices of care and maintenance that they developed in turn shaped scientific relationships and methods.