A century-old institution that was shut down in disgrace, and the silent demise of a group of scholars

Herbarium, as the name suggests, is a place to collect plant specimens. Properly preserved specimens will not be destroyed for hundreds of years, and they contain the memory of the earth belonging to all mankind. Now, the herbarium of Duke University in the United States has decided to close, and nearly one million specimens have been displaced. Behind the memory that has nowhere to go is a long-marginalized discipline and a group of scholars who are gradually dying in silence.

Written by Zhou Shuyi

Kathleen Pryer paused.

The lights were dim. In the crowded room, rows of lead-gray iron cabinets were silent. The cabinets, which were as tall as a person, were filled to the brim, reminiscent of a library: like stacked bookshelves, with book spines arranged in order. However, the shelves were not filled with books, but with various colored paper-bound herbarium specimens - this was the herbarium of Duke University.

Pryor has spent most of her life here. 34 years ago, she came here to study for a doctorate, fell in love, and became a biology professor. For the past nearly 20 years, she has been the curator here.

Soon, there will be nothing left here except an empty shell of memory. She received an email from Susan Alberts, dean of the College of Natural Sciences, informing her that the Duke Herbarium will be closed and the collections in the museum will be vacated within two to three years.

Two to three years is the countdown of the life of this herbarium. And it took a century to build it into its current appearance. In 1921, when Duke University was still called "Trinity College", botanist Hugo L. Blomquist brought the first batch of specimens in shoe boxes, which became the beginning of the collection. Today, the museum has more than 825,000 plant specimens, ranking second among private universities in the United States, second only to Harvard University. In addition to vascular plants such as flowers and trees, there are also the nation's leading collections of mosses, algae, lichens and fungi. Evolutionary biologist Pamela Soltis once lamented that the depth and richness of its collections are outstanding-"Duke has always been highly respected as the birthplace of global botanical research."

But now, Player can only watch the glory fade away and history end in his own hands. "It's unreasonable. I have my golden years here. I don't want to hand over my hard work to others... Why?"

Katherine Pryor | Duke Herbarium

Quagmire

The crisis had been foreshadowed. Before the shoe dropped, the specimen museum was already in trouble.

The first problem was the lack of space. The specimen museum is located in the Biological Sciences Building, which was built 60 years ago. About 400,000 specimens are stored here. As the number of collections grows day by day, the total storage area of ​​6,000 square feet can no longer meet the needs. The new collections have to be packed into specimen boxes and placed in the corridor outside the room. By 2005, more than 500 boxes of specimens had filled all five floors of the building.

These specimens were once moved off-campus for storage, but in hindsight, this was a bad decision. Pryor recalled that the collection suffered a terrible flood off-campus, "black mold everywhere." Moisture and mold are fatal to specimens - under high humidity conditions, fungal invasion can cause plant tissue to rot, making its features blurred, appearance damaged, and lose its research value.

In 2006, Pryor secured an $800,000 grant and additional space to bring the specimens back to Duke University. But it was only a temporary respite. Now, space is running out again, and the backlog of specimens waiting to be stored is growing.

Not only that, the Biological Sciences Building has been in disrepair for a long time, and the outdated HVAC often leaks, and the specimens already stored are also in danger. "The Biological Sciences Building and some other old buildings on campus... have been neglected." Rytas Vilgalys, a biology professor at Duke University, said, "They have serious water damage problems... I think everything is on the verge of collapse."

Currently, specimens are kept in two locations: the Biological Sciences Building and the Plant Growth Room.

In addition, the fragmentation of leadership was also a problem. Including Pryor, there were five people in charge of the museum. They were independent of each other and were in charge of different parts of the collection. Although the five people were all professors of biology, their subdivisions of research were not the same, and they had different opinions on the direction of the museum. The differences were difficult to reconcile over the years, and the museum was constantly in Brownian motion under the struggle of all parties, which was criticized by the school.

In order to improve the situation of the specimen museum, Pryor ran around. In 2022, her efforts seemed to have a glimmer of hope. Emily Bernhardt, the head of the biology department, told her that the renovation of the biological science building was in "early planning" and the school had learned that most of the collections needed to be temporarily relocated. Bernhardt asked Pryor to draw up a "strategic plan" to plan the future development of the specimen museum.

With the assistance of Deputy Director Paul Manos, Pryor completed the plan. In this 18-page report, she detailed the troubles facing the herbarium. Pryor proposed that the herbarium "needs to break the old and rigid model of the past 70 years and become more modern and sustainable." In response to the current situation, she listed a series of ambitious improvement suggestions: including unified management, centralizing leadership to one faculty member; finding new resource support for the herbarium; strengthening coordination with courses such as biology and environmental science; unifying fundraising agreements, and strengthening the herbarium's off-campus influence.

In February 2023, Pryor excitedly submitted the report to Bernhardt. But since then, the report has been like a stone thrown in the dark night, with no response.

It was not until three months later, during an unrelated meeting, that she heard a few words from Bernhardt: the plan "did not receive attention from the school management." After further questioning, Bernhardt suggested that Pryor prepare a "vision plan" to concretize the improvement measures and emphasize the important value of the specimen museum to the management.

Pryor made another plan. She taught herself architectural drawing, drew the floor plan of the new museum, and sent the plan to Bernhardt again. Unexpectedly or expectedly, the plan was once again ignored.

Sometimes, silence itself can speak volumes. In the year that Pryor was working to renovate the herbarium, the tide was turning.

The worst happened. On an ordinary afternoon on February 13, 2024, the five directors received an email from Alberts, which officially announced the closure of the specimen collection: "We have carefully considered the conditions required to maintain the specimen collection. We have concluded that due to the huge resource gap, it is in the best interests of Duke University and the specimen collection to find one or more new homes for these collections. These collections deserve to be stored in an institution that has sufficient resources to maintain them for future generations."

Player didn't expect that the renovation would turn into closure and the temporary relocation would turn into permanent moving out.

Zero-sum game

In an email to the media afterwards, Alberts explained that the main reason for the closure was a lack of funds and the school needed to invest resources elsewhere. "To responsibly collect such a precious collection, the Department of Biology and the school need to invest a lot of resources for a long time... and this will sacrifice many other urgent and important matters."

Bernhardt said she discussed various options for the future of the herbarium with Pryor, Manos and others, such as moving to a more modern location on campus, placing specimens off campus, and even seeking cooperation with other herbaria. She said that although she, like Pryor, supported the most "aggressive" options, "the university believed that the funding and internal partnerships required for Pryor's plan were unattainable."

This is different from what Pryor and others have said. They emphasized that the university had very limited communication with the herbarium in the previous year. "The administration never discussed it with us, never talked to us, said, 'Let's think about it together and see what we can do' or launched a crowdfunding campaign," Pryor said. As an alternative, she proposed to raise funds to build a new herbarium on campus, but the university ignored it.

"A Duke alumnus contacted me with a $3 million donation plan, and he pledged to donate the first $1 million. That's when Duke University showed its hand. Instead of seizing this good opportunity, they asked us to close the museum."

Alberts admitted that the donation plan was true, but it would cost at least $25 million to renovate the facilities and maintain the museum's daily expenses. This is beyond Duke University's ability to bear. She also emphasized that this decision should be seen as a "relocation" rather than a "closure." "Admittedly, the relocation of the museum is a loss for both Duke University and its faculty and staff... But in the long run, we sincerely believe that this is all for the sake of the collection."

"Some people feel that relocation is a denial of the value of the herbarium. This makes me curious, confused and a little frustrated... In fact, it's just the opposite. We recognize that these collections are unique and irreplaceable, and we know the amazing value they contain. It's just that we are no longer the right stewards of these collections. This is completely different from saying that the herbarium has no value." Alberts believes that plant specimens are best preserved by natural history museums.

Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of plant ecology at the University of Maine, countered that Duke University has an endowment of $11.6 billion by 2023, far more financially than many public universities. "Now this university is saying they are concerned about the future of their collection and want to sell it to another institution. I can't help but ask, if Duke doesn't have the resources, who can?"

Pryor added that the $25 million figure was "without basis." Faculty members told Duke's independent student newspaper, The Chronicle, that the renovation of the Biological Sciences Building led the university to re-examine the "practical value" of the herbarium, and that management decided to focus funds on "more effective" projects and sacrifice the herbarium. The university has always refused to comment on this.

In response to inquiries from The Chronicle, Duke University Vice President for Public Affairs Frank Tramble said that President Vincent Price and Provost Alec Gallimore were not involved in the decision to close the museum, but they fully support Alberts and Bernhardt in "prioritizing projects."

Apparently, herbaria are not a high priority. Alberts said that compared with general institutions such as libraries, herbaria are more like "research cores" in universities, serving only a small number of students and faculty. "This is in no way to devalue the value of herbaria, but no rational world can ignore this when discussing the fate of specimens."

“This is a zero-sum game,” Alberts added. “No one has unlimited resources.”

Wandering

Discussions about the relocation of specimens have already begun. One possible recipient is the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT). The Herbarium of Mycology (HMAS) of the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is across the ocean, has also extended an olive branch. However, industry insiders believe that such a large collection will be difficult to move in one place due to limited space and manpower. A more likely approach is to divide the collection and entrust it to many different institutions. In this way, the cost will be ridiculously high. Not only that, the specimens can easily be lost during the relocation process.

"It's going to be very chaotic. Things are going to get lost. No matter how careful you are, things are going to get damaged," Gill said in the podcast, adding that many specimens are one-of-a-kind and the loss is difficult to replace. "You're always going to lose some things when you move to a new place, right?"

These concerns are not new. The Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden in Claremont, California, has received relocated specimens many times. Lucinda McDade, the director of the botanical garden, recalled that during one of the relocations, a storm occurred and the specimens were dumped by workers at random in the loading and unloading area. "We had to drop everything and rush to rescue them."

In October 2023, when the Nara Prefectural University in Japan was rebuilding its school building, it mistakenly discarded more than 10,000 rare plant specimens as unclaimed waste. At the time, the on-site staff simply asked, "Does anyone want these specimens?" - After receiving no response, they hastily cleaned up the specimens as garbage. These discarded specimens also include some rare plants that have become extinct.

The problem is not just about moving the collection to another place. The herbarium is not an isolated paradise, but is in constant communication and connection with researchers and the place where they are located. In the process of accumulating specimens over the years, the museum has cultivated a group of professionals who are familiar with these plants; Duke University is located in the southeastern United States, which is a hot spot for biodiversity, and 60% of the Duke Herbarium's collections come from this area. There is no doubt that relocation will sever these connections.

There are many reasons not to move, but the reality is helpless. Professor Liu Xingyue of the College of Plant Protection at China Agricultural University told Fanpu, "From the results, given the limited resources, dispersing and preserving a large number of specimens to units with more suitable conditions is actually a scientific and reasonable solution."

Bai Ming, a researcher at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believes that this will obviously "reset the original academic accumulation to zero", but in the eyes of American universities, it is also a way to pursue efficiency and enhance innovation. "Of course, it is very detrimental to the basic discipline of taxonomy. As for the impact of this practice on future generations, only history can answer it, and it may depend on luck."

Displaced specimens are like drifting dandelions, and Duke is not the only herbarium that cannot take root. In 2015, the University of Missouri decided to close the 119-year-old Dunn-Palmer Herbarium, and more than 170,000 specimens were moved to the Missouri Botanical Garden 200 kilometers away. In 2017, the University of Louisiana at Monroe moved nearly 500,000 specimens to the Texas Botanical Institute in order to expand the stadium track. From 1997 to 2015, more than 100 of the more than 700 herbaria in North America were forced to close due to budget and space constraints.

“This is a long-standing problem,” said Scott Edwards, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. “The fate of many university museums and herbaria depends on whether their activities are taken seriously by their deans and local administrations.”

It costs money to store specimens, to maintain and repair them, and to hire faculty and staff to manage the herbarium. "The challenge is that compared to other hot emerging fields, funding for herbarium operations is close to zero," wrote Cassandra Quaif, director of the Emory University Herbarium, in a blog post. "If I see another article about artificial intelligence saving the earth, I might go crazy and scream!" She recalled that in the past 12 years as director, "I had to beg, borrow money, and threaten to quit my job to get funding and barely make ends meet. We even raised funds by selling T-shirts..."

One direct reason for the funding shortage is the university's operating model. For example, if the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides a grant of $1.25 million, $700,000 will be used to cover the basic costs of the research project (including staff salaries, consumables, equipment, etc.). The university will draw an overhead on this basis, which may account for 56% or more of the basic cost. Many universities have begun to rely on these overheads.

She pointed out that government funding agencies viewed herbarium operations as the university's business and would not provide funding support; while universities viewed herbariums as taking up space resources for nothing but not receiving management fees, which was equivalent to a net loss, so they naturally did not like them. Herbariums were thus left out in the cold.

"What on earth is this for?"

Blake Fauskee is a doctoral student in Pryor's lab. He believes that the university's so-called "limited resources" is just a cover-up, and the deeper reason is that botanical research based on the herbarium is not valued. "I can't get rid of the feeling that Duke University is gradually eliminating my research field."

Vergalis added that the function of the herbarium is essentially to record plants, which is not eye-catching enough and gives people an old-fashioned feeling. Outsiders often have the stereotype of "out of date". Many people don't know what the herbarium is for, unfortunately, including Duke University leaders. "They are confused about it." Pryor recalled, "Every time a chairman or dean came to visit, I had to spend several hours explaining it."

Explaining to outsiders "what is the use of this" is the fate of all unpopular disciplines, and it is almost doomed to be futile. Because this question often means that the questioner has abandoned awe and curiosity. You can even imagine how the other party waits for a brief summary that is more ready to use than instant noodles with a lazy and contemptuous attitude. Any effort at self-proof is vulnerable in the face of pragmatism-after all, everyone will die. The late botanist Vicki Funk once made a Don Quixote-like struggle. She listed a full hundred uses of the specimen museum and wrote earnestly: "I hope that lists like this can help people continue to fight to save those precious collections from being dismembered and destroyed."

Duke Museum of Herbarium could not escape its fate—nor could Pryor. As she was about to retire, she faced various media, repeatedly answered "what's the use", and stumbled on the podcast about "important value". She chose to charge at the windmill again and again.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Pryor showed reporters several specimens of the pink slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule).

The pink Cypripedium above was picked on May 16, 1936, from a low pine forest along the Tar River in North Carolina.

These pink orchids were picked in 1997 and were already in full bloom in mid-April, a full month earlier than 60 years ago.

By analyzing more than 200 specimens collected between 1886 and 2022, the study found that the flowering time of pink orchids is now an average of 12 days earlier than 150 years ago. According to this trend, they may bloom before pollinating insects such as bees are active, affecting pollination and reproduction. Pryor said that these specimens "represent specific plants at a specific time and place, carrying unique history."

The herbarium is a miniature natural archive that bears witness to plant evolution and environmental change. At Duke, some of the specimens date back nearly 200 years. The greenery once supported the weather for a century and drummed up hurricanes in the Atlantic. Now the fragrance has faded, leaving only the dried flowers that have faded away and become a distant memory. More than 800,000 frozen sections of time are placed here, just like the Latin name of the herbarium, hortus mortus, which literally means the garden of death.

"They don't need watering or care." During the interview, Pryor seemed a little embarrassed. "The plants are very happy here." She grinned, a long-lost smile showing on her face.

Nameless Thing

The role of the herbarium does not stop there.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez wrote: "When the world was born, many things had no names yet, and when they were mentioned, they still needed to be pointed out." However, until now, there are still only a few things with "names". According to statistics from the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in July 2024, we have discovered, described and named about 2.15 million species so far, accounting for only 7% of the estimated number of all species (30 million). A study published in Science in 2013 estimated that about 20% of known species have been duplicated - the actual number of species we know is even fewer.

Human beings are far more ignorant of species diversity than we can imagine. Even the question of "how many species are there on Earth" remains controversial to this day. In a 2010 article, Robert May, a professor of zoology at Oxford University, gave a broad estimate of 3 million to 100 million species; the most widely circulated study came from Camilo Mora and others, who came up with a number of 8.7 million species; more recent studies have shown that the number of species is in the order of 1 billion. Behind the huge disagreement, the definition of "species" itself has long been controversial. Charles Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species": "So far, no definition has been able to satisfy all naturalists; although every naturalist vaguely knows what he means when he talks about species."

In 1753, botanist Carl von Linné published Species Plantarum, establishing the first binomial nomenclature and artificial classification system. He wrote, "If we do not know the name, knowledge is difficult to pass on." In the nearly 300 years since then, taxonomy has gradually grown into a science of naming, describing and classifying organisms. The taxonomic position of an organism in a specific group provides key information about its characteristics, kinship and evolution. Only a small part of this information can be obtained from living plants, and most of it depends on the long-term collection of herbariums.

The plant entities collected by the herbarium are the starting point and purpose of taxonomy. When a new species is published, the main material is called a type specimen, which is a unique physical certificate. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature stipulates that the qualified publication of the name of a new genus or taxonomic group below the new genus must specify the type, and the name of the taxonomic group is permanently attached to that type - and the Duke Herbarium has nearly 2,000 such named type specimens. The discovery, description, definition and identification based on this are like a lighthouse that never stops turning, illuminating the ups and downs of the sun and moon in the ocean of species for us.

Unfortunately, many species have disappeared without a trace before they were discovered, and the tragic wind has not even heard of them. According to the "2023 State of the World's Plants and Fungi Report" released by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, about three-quarters of unknown vascular plants are threatened with extinction. Many plants are already on the verge of extinction when they are officially named and recognized as new species. This trend has intensified in recent years: 59% of the newly discovered plant species in 2020 are endangered, 24.2% are critically endangered, and the overall threatened proportion is as high as 77%.

In 2018, botanist Denise Molmou discovered an unknown plant on the rapids and shallows along the Konkouré River in Guinea, which she named Saxicolella deniseae. By May 2022, when the species was officially published, researchers checked satellite maps and found that six months earlier, due to the construction of a hydroelectric dam downstream, Saxicolella deniseae's original habitat had become a vast ocean. Now, the plant is also named after Denise: "Denise's Saxicolella" - Denise may be the first and last person to see it in person.

Extinct Saxicolella deniseae

“The simple truth is that you cannot save what you do not understand,” wrote botanist Rafaël Govaerts, not without sadness.
Taxonomists please answer

Against the backdrop of climate change and species extinction, the fate of the Duke Museum can be seen as a microcosm of the situation of related disciplines: biological taxonomy, which relies on the museum, has also entered the cold winter of its life cycle.

In 2022, Bai Ming, Liu Xingyue and 33 other experts jointly published an article titled "Taxonomists have become an "endangered species", saving biological taxonomy is urgent", pointing out that biological taxonomy is already "endangered". The article wrote that as the overall research of life sciences goes deeper into the molecular level, the development of taxonomy is in jeopardy. The status of many biological taxonomists is just like the endangered species they study, with their numbers shrinking rapidly, and some groups of taxonomists have even become "extinct".

Bai Ming told me that the opportunity for this article to come out was that the industry generally realized a problem: "It is difficult for our students to find jobs after graduation."

"Traditional taxonomic results are difficult to publish in high-impact journals, and taxonomic positions are rarely set up in top schools, so students see no future prospects after graduation." Bai Ming said that this has led to a large number of high-quality students being "persuaded to withdraw" and the quality of students has declined.

Even for those who stay, it is difficult to persist. Compared with scholars in other fields, biological taxonomists face greater difficulties in job hunting, promotion, research funding, etc. A large number of young taxonomists are forced to give up their expertise and change their research direction. In my country, more than 80% of taxonomy graduate students fail to engage in research in this discipline, resulting in a serious loss of talent and difficulty in maintaining echelons.

The current academic evaluation system mainly uses factors such as the influence of papers, economic benefits, and social impact as criteria, and the contribution and value of taxonomy are seriously underestimated. "It is precisely because biological taxonomy is so basic that other disciplines forget that taxonomy is not 'free' when using the research results of taxonomy and achieving practical results. Someone needs to 'pay' for it."

At present, it is almost inevitable that the mainstream of disciplines will turn to molecular biology. Many people are misled by the descriptive work of taxonomy, believing that taxonomy is simple and unscientific, and arbitrarily classify it as a discipline that only identifies species. But in fact, biological taxonomy is not a "craft", but a highly comprehensive science that requires multidisciplinary knowledge such as morphology, genetics, cytology, ecology, and molecular biology. New technologies such as DNA barcodes can quickly identify and classify species, but they cannot replace traditional morphological classification methods. Entomologist Quentin Wheeler used an analogy to say that thinking that DNA barcodes can replace serious taxonomy is no different from thinking that calculators can replace pure mathematics.

In October 2023, an article titled "The Silent Extinction of Species and Taxonomists" sparked widespread discussion in the industry. The article analyzed the root causes of the cold reception of biological taxonomy.

Ivan Löbl and others pointed out in the article that taxonomy requires a lot of time for revisions, and it often takes several years to publish a paper. This is obviously incompatible with the current evaluation system of "publish or perish". Moreover, taxonomic achievements are usually cited less in the first few years, but will continue to be cited in the next few decades or even centuries. Current publication indicators, whether journal impact factors or H-index, do not take this special citation pattern into account. This leads to low citations for taxonomic scholars at the critical stage of their careers, falling into a vicious cycle.

In addition, the open access publishing model has been gaining momentum in recent years, and well-known journals often charge authors high article processing charges (APCs). For example, PLoS Biology charges as much as $3,000 to $5,300. However, many taxonomic scholars are amateur scholars or retirees who do not have funding support. Even professional researchers backed by institutions are mostly short of money. Publication fees have become a threshold that cannot be ignored.

"What will the future be like?" At the end of the conversation, I asked Bai Ming and thousands of future taxonomists a question that only time will tell.

Bai Ming did not hesitate at all: "It is not enough to just wait for others to pay attention. The key is to use and develop new technologies to embrace change and promote the development of the next generation of taxonomy."

Will the future be good?

The story of the Duke Herbarium is far from over.

On February 16, someone launched a petition on change.org, calling on Duke University to withdraw its decision to close the museum. In just 10 days, the number of supporters exceeded 14,000; six months later, the number of supporters has reached... just over 20,000. A blockbuster is common in literary and artistic works, while mediocre is the majority of reality. But Pryor still did not give up: "Maybe a miracle will happen?"

The miracle may never come, or it may come tomorrow. Player gave it his all.

Standing in front of the silent iron cabinet, she could hear the ancient mood of the garden. Since the botanist Luca Ghini pioneered the technology of plant specimen preparation and established the first herbarium in the 1530s, this ancient research paradigm has always been at the forefront of technology. Now, the herbarium's collection includes not only herbarium specimens, but also liquid-immersed specimens, seeds, wood slices, pollen, microscopic sections, and even frozen DNA materials. We can extract DNA from specimens from 200 years ago, and use machine learning to analyze specimens to study the herbivorous habits of insects. What kind of technology will emerge in the next 200 or 500 years, and what kind of information will people at that time decode from the specimens? Many species have been lost in the long river of evolution, and specimens are the earth's memory belonging to all mankind.

Katherine Pryor

In the dim and cramped room, Pryor pulled out a red paper folder from the specimen cabinet. The red color represented that the specimen was collected from North Carolina. He opened the cover and found a southern maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris) pressed on the thick and hard paper.

“Collected by Frank Smith in Columbiana County, May 13, 1934.” She held the specimen up to the light. “North end of Lake Waccamaw.”

The figure is solitary, upright and stubborn, like a new bud rising from the gray cracks.

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