Pinning beetles, biobanking futures: practices of archiving life in a time of extinction

Abstract

Museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power and natures into an ordered whole for centuries, practices that have extended through to contemporary museums and their genetic collecting programs. Focusing on negotiations at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History between 2014 and 2016 I examine the integration of biotechnology into museums, exploring how life is being “archived” and for what imagined futures. Engaging the practices of making and organizing genomic collections, I examine a specimen’s ontological instability as it is created and circulated. Learning to pin beetles, take genetic samples and extract DNA, I contrast these processes with a debate over whether a genetic sample could serve as a voucher specimen – a permanently preserved physical reference. I argue that the capacities and limitations of materials are a vital part of understanding how cryo-collections are enacted into being through different practices and are framed by an orienting ethic of preservation in biodiversity biobanking.

Full text

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
387
Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving
Life in a Time of Extinction.” New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2018.1546573
__________________________________________________________________
Pinning beetles, biobanking futures: practices
of archiving life in a time of extinction
Adrian Van Allen
Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
Washington D.C., USA < adrian@adrianv.com>
(Received 31 January 2018; final version received 26 October 2018)
Museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power
and natures into an ordered whole for centuries, practices that have
extended through to contemporary museums and their genetic
collecting programs. Focusing on negotiations at the Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History between 2014 and 2016 I
examine the integration of biotechnology into museums, exploring
how life is being “archived” and for what imagined futures. Engaging
the practices of making and organizing genomic collections, I
examine a specimen’ s ontological instability as it is created and
circulated. Learning to pin beetles, take genetic samples and extract
DNA, I contrast these processes with a debate over whether a genetic
sample could serve as a voucher specimen – a permanently preserved
physical reference. I argue that the capacities and limitations of
material are a vital part of understanding how cryo-collections are
enacted into being through different practices and are framed by an
orienting ethic of preservation in biodiversity biobanking.
Keywords: practices; museums; biobanking; ontologies; genomics;
material culture
Introduction
With an estimated 50% of all species potentially heading towards extinction
by mid-century (IUCN Red List 2017), projects to preserve dwindling biodiversity
have taken on multiple forms. One such form is the emergence of genomic
biobanking projects in natural history museums, where the living world, from
plants and animals, to microbes and environmental samples, are being sampled and
frozen in liquid nitrogen, “archived” for uncertain futures. This paper is an
ethnography of one such project, the Global Genome Initiative (GGI) at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington D.C., a
project that strives to “preserve and understand the genomic biodiversity of life on

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
388
earth” (GGI 2013), working towards cryopreserving half of the taxonomic family-
level species known to exist within the next five years. Based on fourteen months
of fieldwork in the museum between 2014 and 2016, I followed scientists and their
specimens behind the scenes as they worked towards this goal, processing new
collected organisms into specimens, tissue samples and genomic data, and debating
the proper relationships between the “unbound biologies” (Helmreich 2009, 280)
of their increasingly molecular specimens. The Smithsonian is a site where
collecting practices and policies are rapidly changing with the integration of
genomic technologies in response to increasing extinction rates – a return to
encyclopedic collecting with biotechnological tools.
The collected life amassed worldwide in museums and herbaria is estimated
to be as high as 3 billion specimens (Bi et al. 2013), yet according to taxonomic
scientists only 5–12% of species have been collected, documented and preserved
(Winker 2004). To “fill the gaps” in biodiversity knowledge requires collecting
specimens, for “to know what is being lost, it is necessary to know what is here in
the first place” (Rainbow and Lincoln 2003, 11). Within museum communities this
has provided an ethical imperative to collect “all life” (as defined by taxonomists)
before it vanishes in the face of mass biodiversity loss. Coupled with the ever
cheaper and faster tools of biotechnology, this has created the condition of
possibility for genomic collecting projects in museums to emerge. However, it is
the larger cultural shift towards reducing life to the molecular, as many have argued
(cf. Franklin and Lock 2003; Rose 2009) that makes projects such as the GGI
conceptually possible.
As living things unravel into increasingly molecular forms the links
between pieces of an organism are a source of on-going negotiations between
competing disciplinary views within the museum. As these new kinds of museum
objects are produced, such as tissue samples and extracted DNA, museum
communities struggle to sort out the relationships between these new molecular
objects and the organism from which they originated. Through examining these
relational ontologies within museum genomics – that is, how each specimen or
sample is constructed as a new kind of object, by what audiences, and bound up
with what imagined futures of potential value and utility – provides a deeper
understanding of the co-constitutive social, technical and material aspects of
creating a biobank of “the genomic biodiversity of life on earth” (GGI 2013). In
doing so I open up the internal workings of a natural history museum’s biodiversity
biobank in order to highlight the multiple kinds of material and discursive work
that goes into transforming living things into museum specimens, from the
morphological (a pinned beetle) to the molecular (DNA extracted from a beetle

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
389
leg). I argue that genetic collections are made to matter as ontological
embodiments, and further that each of these ontological embodiments (pinned
beetle, genetic sample, DNA extract, genomic data) are enacted into being (Mol
2003) through the practices of their construction. 1 It is thorough a close attention
to these practices – that is, how they are created, the negotiations for their use, and
their continuing re-evaluation – that the ways they become increasingly vulnerable
and increasingly valuable objects becomes visible.
The goal of this paper is to ground an inquiry into the ontological instability
of genomic specimens in material practices, to engage with the materials of making
them first hand. To do so I bring together three ethnographic episodes from working
with Global Genome Initiative (GGI) scientists at the Smithsonian NMNH. I begin
by pinning beetles and pulling off their legs as genetic voucher specimens, tracing
a history of the connections between specimens and their parts as they are
distributed across the museum. I then turn to extracting DNA from a beetle leg
using a butterfly “primer,” or segment of genomic data used to assess different
characteristics. Through this I discuss the implications of “reading” life through
another species, exploring the impact of human biomedical techniques that have
migrated into the natural sciences. In conclusion I compare these material practices
of “molecularizing” life with the discursive practices in a debate at the Smithsonian
NMNH’s monthly genetics meeting. Discussion between administrators, curators,
biorepository and collection managers focused on the potential relationships
between original specimen, its genetic samples and genomic data.
Through these three episodes – comparing my experiences in the work
rooms of the museum with a different perspective gained from a policy meeting –
I ask, what are the relationships between specimen, sample and data and how are
each of these constructed as objects through the different museum practices? That
is, what are they articulated as being by different stakeholders, but further what are
the potential relationships between these new kinds of objects? As Mol (2003)
among many others1 has suggested, the ontological instability of an object does not
necessarily reflect different perspectives of a discrete, stable object, but instead
creates a multiplicity of objects. Following this concept, I argue that the different
views of genomic collections at the Smithsonian, rather than reflecting simply
competing visions of what they are and what they should do, are in fact
constructions of different objects made through different sets of practices.
Contrasting these views, from material and semiotic perspectives, provides
insight into the specific kinds of practices, imagined future uses, and shifting
ontological statuses of these specimens as they unravel into multiple objects. The
value of these unfolding objects shifts as new relationships emerge, not just in their

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
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immediate capacity to answer questions about taxonomic mapping or biodiversity
conservation, but most pointedly in their imagined future uses, in their envisioned
potential (cf. Jasanoff 2015; Svendsen and Koch 2013).The Smithsonian beetles,
whole and in pieces, can from one perspective be thought of as simply parts of one
organism, a view shared by many if not all of the Smithsonian scientists I
interviewed. Yet from another perspective the beetle pieces are being
fundamentally remade into entirely new kinds of objects, each capable of carrying
different value and meaning, with different visions for the future folded into the
practices of their making.
Practices of making an archive of life
Scholarship on the political nature of archives has emphasized the
implications of what is preserved versus what absent, the narratives these choices
create, and in doing so how they standardize the objects and information they
contain and maintain (cf. Bowker 2005; Derrida 1996; Stoler 2010). Archives both
reveal and hide, and in doing so “harbor their own tacit politics, histories, and
powers” (Waterton 2008, 4). I use the term “archive” here as a larger conceptual
category that includes different structures used to collect, inventory and preserve
both objects and knowledge for future uses. Archives, from this perspective could
include, as Waterton suggests, “forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the
species inventory, the computerized database, and the museum” (2008, 4). Natural
history museums, including the Smithsonian, are working to transform biodiversity
into stable, standardized objects to enable its collection, preservation, analysis and
use, in effect, to “archive” life in the cabinets, liquid nitrogen tanks and databases
of the museum. In these practices the rarity of the species, the high molecular
weight of the sample, and the analytical chain between vouchers and samples are
preserved for uncertain futures.
As biotechnology has entered museums it has reshaped the taxonomic
research going on in the hive of offices and laboratories behind the scenes, where
scientists continue to collect, classify, name and order “nature.” The Smithsonian
has recently articulated its role in the face of what has been called the current sixth
mass extinction (Ceballos et al. 2015) as being uniquely situated to “archive”
species before they disappear (Smithsonian Institution, Living in the Anthropocene
Consortia 2015). Within this framework of impending loss and the crisis of on-
going extinctions, Smithsonian scientists have framed their collecting programs
within an ethical imperative to preserve vanishing biodiversity before it
disappears.2 To do so, they combine the tools of taxonomy with those of genomics
to collect and preserve life for uncertain ecological futures. Although the “archive”

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
391
of biodiversity has been called into question as a problematic metaphor (Sayre
2017), it can still be understood as the underlying logic driving biodiversity
biobanking projects such as the GGI, with a goal to “capture and understand the
Earth’s genomic biodiversity, preserve it on ice in biorepositories worldwide, and
make it accessible to researchers everywhere – in perpetuity” (GGI 2013).
This on-going process of creating new kinds of museum specimens,
transformed into the molecular, has caused debate over the status of these objects
– what they are, how they should or could relate to the organism they were derived
from and what their future potential uses may be. In other words, museums
genomics is a site full of ontologically unstable objects. While various social
science scholarship has explored how realities are enacted into being (cf. Ingold
1993; Kohn 2013; Latour 1999; Law and Mol 2002) the goal of this paper is to
ground an inquiry into the ontological instability of genetic museum objects in
material practices, to engage with the materials of making genomic specimens first-
hand and in doing so understand how these different beetle-objects are enacted into
being. Mol’s work (2003) on diagnosing and treating atherosclerosis, described by
doctors as a gradual hardening of the arteries, does not produce a stable, fixed
disease but instead multiple iterations of both the disease and the bodies it affects.
This does not imply a fragmentation, but instead these multiples are made to cohere
through a variety practices such as consultations, medical imaging, and paperwork.
This focus on thinking through the creation of multiple objects through practices is
relevant to my thinking here about the practices of making beetles in the context of
biodiversity biobanking. I argue that as beetle bodies are transformed into different
kinds of specimens – pinned whole, a leg pulled as a genetic sample, or dissolved
into protein sequences as a DNA extract – new kinds of objects are brought into
being and made to cohere through the on-going labor of museum work. My point
here is that the museum object of a “beetle” is a distinct type of object that is created
through the processes of transformation as it is pinned, named, stored, sampled,
extracted into DNA and sequenced into a genome. Each of these aspects of a
museum-beetle-object is assembled into one “beetle,” but one that is called into
question as new technologies and accompanying ontological frameworks emerge,
that is, as museum communities question what objects exist within their ontologies
and the relations between them.
The importance of materials and an attention to techniques has long been a
part of STS (cf. Latour 1999) as well as anthropology (cf. Ingold 2012), particularly
in the following of the “operational chain” (chaine operatoire) of how materials
and ideas are wound together into processes (Coupaye 2009; Dobres 1999;
Lemonnier 2004). Examining the practices of making living things into data,

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
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scholars have studied of the evaluation of microbial life (Helmreich 2009), the
“obliteration of life” as it is transformed into genomics (Zwart 2016), and an
analysis of the shifting value of specimens as they are translated into DNA barcodes
(Ellis 2008). Scholars have also examined the debates on the relationship of
information to site from which it derived, including the “latent life” of futures made
in and through frozen samples of blood (Radin 2013), and an analysis of the
“circulating references” made by soil scientists as they move their samples from
field to museum (Latour 1999), or by botanists as they circulate plants and genomes
(Parry 2004). This paper is located at the intersection of these lines of inquiry,
however while I stress the importance of examining techniques and the practices
that reinscribe different ontologies, I also emphasize what the materials themselves
can communicate when experienced first-hand, what Tsing has called the “sticky
materiality of practical encounter” (2005, 12).
My approach is one of engaging with the material culture of museum
genomics in the “back of the house,” a place usually invisible and inaccessible to
the public. Instead of focusing on the negotiations for power and authority in the
public exhibit spaces of the museum (cf. Bennett et al. 2017; Karp and Lavine
1991), I moved into the behind-the-scenes workspaces where matter and meaning
were woven together in the daily routines, techniques and narratives. For this mode
of engagement I draw on concepts of learning-through-making, analyzing materials
as a method for thinking through things (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007) as
they are enacted into being. Becoming part of the daily work at the Smithsonian
NMNH I integrated myself into various communities of practice (Lave 2011) which
provided me with “a view from below” (Harding 2008), that is, access to the wealth
of mundane details and occasional moments of epiphany that constitute museum
work.
The Global Genome Initiative
Within the biological sciences “life” is increasingly understood as a
network of living things, systems, and processes (Bowker 2000; UNEP 2010).
Natural history collections have also transformed into networks, with vouchers
specimens, tissues, and data dispersed across the museum as well as dispersed
globally in museums, research centers, zoos, botanical gardens, and biorepositories
(Prendini, Hanner, and DeSalle 2002). The Smithsonian Natural Museum of
Natural History is one of the world’s largest museums with a collection of over 145
million objects, and through its extension via these global networks of collaborating
institutions it has expanded its collections and the power it can leverage for genetic
collecting projects.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
393
One such project is the Smithsonian’s Global Genome Initiative (GGI).
Begun in 2010 as part of a five-year Strategic Plan at the National Museum of
Natural History, the GGI is a project tasked with “preserving and understanding the
genomic biodiversity of all life on earth” (GGI 2013) within the next five years.
The GGI has positioned itself both within the museum and within a growing global
network of collaborating institutions (including museums, zoos, herbaria, research
centers), as the central authority that will collect and synthesize existing collecting
protocols and preservation workflows into one standardized document. With the
stated goal of creating an open-source genome databank to be utilized for nature
conservation and biodiversity research, the GGI has situated itself as a natural
progression in collections-based research – a move from studying anatomical to
genomic similarities in order to expand taxonomic knowledge. While the GGI seeks
to archive a synoptic sample of the “Tree of Life,” importantly it will also train the
next generation of genomics researchers in biodiversity science, contouring the
shape of future conservation genetics. The expanding technological and
computational capacity to sequence genomes has facilitated the increasingly central
role of DNA sequences in both evolutionary theory and ecological investigations,
and has in turn created the capacity for making a genomic archive of life.
The Global Genome Initiative (GGI) began with a six million dollar gift
from a private donor, with the total estimated budget of fifteen million dollars to
complete its goal of preserving genome-quality tissue samples of each family of
eukaryotic3 life on earth.3 The GGI staff have identified “family-level” as a
plausible number of samples to gather within their timeframe and budget.4
Classified between Order and Genus, “Family” is one of the eight major taxonomic
ranks in biology, with an estimated 10,000–20,000 on earth, and approximately
7500 currently biobanked by the GGI and its partner institutions (GGBN 2015)
[Figure 1]. Funding for the GGI has provided the means for genomic collecting on
a large scale at the Smithsonian NMNH, through creating infrastructure in the form
of freezers, liquid nitrogen tanks and salaries for technicians and administrators, as
well as providing resources for genomic collecting expeditions in accordance with
the GGI’s collecting protocol. In setting out to standardize collecting methods the
GGI is also standardizing biodiversity into comparable and computable units that
will fit precisely in their liquid nitrogen vats and databases. This can be understood
in a long history of specimens-as-data within museums dating back to early modern
cabinets of curiosity (Findlen 2002; Strasser 2012), as well as in the
molecularization of life in a modern era of genetics and biotechnology (Rose 2009).
These two threads – museums and biotechnology – converge in the project of the
GGI, a project to “archive” all life using the tools of genomics.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
394
In the following sections I unbind the biology (Helmreich 2009, 280) of
beetles in three ways, from pinning a voucher specimen, to pulling off a leg as a
genetic sample, to extracting beetle DNA. In following my beetle and its genetic
samples I examine the ontological instabilities of these objects and the kinds of
labor required for their creation and maintenance.
Pinning beetles, pulling legs: making specimens into multiple objects
Biological specimens and the natural orders they are held to represent are
key to taxonomy’s project of mapping life in order to preserve it, through
“meticulously observed chains of connections vitally linking the specimen to
information, to nature, and back again” (Ellis 2008, 173). These “chains of
connections” are built from data derived from the materials of the specimens, from
what is preserved versus what is discarded. Each discipline values and discards
different pieces of an organism as they craft specimens and take genetic samples.
For instance, a Smithsonian’s parasitologist defines her “field site” as the intestines
of birds, part of the specimen that would have been thrown away by the
ornithologists, categorized as biowaste (Van Allen 2017).
Figure 1. The Smithsonian Biorepository (December 2014). Photo by author.
When I met with a pair of Smithsonian entomologists who were testing genomic
collecting workflows in 2015 they detailed the practical matters they faced while
field collecting. This included tasks that ranged from obtaining liquid nitrogen in
remote parts of the world, to the extra labor required to fit non-standardized insects
into a standard 2 ml cryovial that had been approved for use in the Smithsonian
Biorepository. “Getting a butterfly in there is like shoving a damn wet bird into the
tube,” as one wasp-expert described it.5 Wasps fit easily in the tubes, but butterflies
wings did not, and had to either have their wings removed and glued onto a strip of
cardboard (a time consuming process), or rolled up to fit in the tube.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
395
Although the Hymenopterists (scientists who study wasps, bees sawflies
and ants) and Lepodopterists (scientists who study butterflies and moths) were in
the same Department of Entomology, the parts of their respective creatures that
they valued and preserved were radically different: “We trap our wasps, they fall
into the jar of ethanol below, great. Pin them or freeze them whatever … Pull the
butterflies out and they’re like wet birds, wings all over the place.”6 When
collecting unfamiliar categories of life they encountered the material capacities and
limitations of those species, some fitting neatly into workflows (tube-compatible
wasp bodies) while others overflowed (a butterfly like a “wet bird” that was not).
To understand how these different practices shaped the objects they created
I learned to preserve beetles myself, pinning and pulling legs as genetic samples in
the workrooms of the Smithsonian’s Department of Entomology in January 2015.
Walking through the corridor I passed rows of white metal cabinets that hold
millions of insects – from bees to beetles, flies to spiders, butterflies to wasps –
collected at every stage of development from pupae to adult. Though their subjects
are tiny, the Entomology collections comprise the majority of specimens in the
natural history collection, and along with the insects also include their nests,
cocoons, their food sources of leaves, flowers, tree sections riddled with holes. To
be able to do their research, entomologists collect not a few individuals but
hundreds or thousands of the same species and pin them, preserve them in ethanol,
or freeze them, depending on their intended or imagined future uses.
Sitting in a workroom in the Entomology Department I pass the pin all the
way through the beetle and into a foam block to hold it in place. Using the tip of a
pin I carefully arrange the legs and the antennae as evenly as possible, anchoring
them with more pins as the beetle dries. Key diagnostic features for the beetle are
the shape of the claws and the antennae. Tiny and brittle, I’m told legs, antennae
and even heads fall off all the time, but there’s a special insect adhesive and “you
can just glue them back together like a model airplane.”7 As I learn, the important
thing is to arrange specimens so that the key features – diagnostic attributes – are
arranged symmetrically so you can, in the words of a collections manger “see
variation by looking down a drawer.”8 Pushing the beetle a thumbs-width down on
its anchor pin, I leave space so it can be picked up without damaging the specimen
in the future [Figure 2].
Different preparators, different fingers, different spaces left at the top of
pins. I think about the millions of insects pinned in the collections, and the different
fingers that have grasped the top of each pin over a hundred years – an alternative
view of this archive, one of the measurements of the people who have made and

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
396
used the collections, measured out in finger-widths. The traces of human practices
left in the collections by generations of preparators mark time in different ways.
These histories are layered into the materiality of the specimens, and
highlight the value placed on the meticulous, the ordered, and the reproducible in
the museum workrooms. Through standardizing techniques to make perfect,
systematic specimens museum preparators have worked to make certain kinds of
variation visible by “looking down a drawer.” In doing so, the mark of human
hands is integrally bound up in every part of the collections–from thumb-widths on
pins, to handwritten labels on DNA extracts, to the intricately crafted structure of
databases and the biodiversity data they contain. Each of these objects not only
shows the mark of human hands, but it is precisely through the integration of
practices and materials that these objects are enacted into being as new kinds of
objects, with each embodying specific kinds of imagined futures.
Thinking through these various kinds of imagined futures, rendered
differently through making specimens, samples or data I returned several months
later in April 2015 to the Department of Coleoptera (Beetles) to learn how to take
a genetic sample from a preserved beetle. The workflows we were testing would
inform the first version of the GGI Genomic Collecting Module. “You can smell
the wax and honey on the floor with the bees,”9 one bioinformatics staff member
told me, though on this particular day the lingering smell was of mothballs, residue
from the pesticide in the collection cabinets. Some insects were deemed worth
preserving in perpetuity, while other living insects were intent on consuming them.
My own task was, in a sense, to destroy a precious insect but in doing so to produce
two new objects.
Figure 2. A beetle pinning workstation (Department of Entomology, Smithsonian NMNH, March
2015). Photo by author.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
397
In a room lined with microscopes and trays of pinned beetles we sit down to work.
By selecting a variety of specimens preserved at different times (from last year to
50 years ago), and using by different methods (pinned or preserved in alcohol) we
were learning how to remove the left hind leg while leaving the rest of the beetle
intact. This proved a meticulous task, as the carabid beetles that were our subjects
were about the size of a grain of rice [Figure 3]. The pinned beetle with its stack of
labels spun under the microscope as I tried to find the correct angle to carefully
extract a leg. As the creature loomed into focus, I learned how to see in a completely
new way. I was trying to see the beetle body as its parts, to see where it could be
broken apart into a set of discrete objects. A small crack and the leg of my beetle
split off cleanly.
Behind me voices mixed with the click of tweezers and glass as staff placed
their beetle legs into a 96-well plate, a container for genetic samples. Held at the
ends of our forceps were tiny valuable objects that we pulled apart to create new
valuable parts. These new, tiny objects would be labeled and tracked first in
Entomology database and then, as they were consumed and transformed into
genetic data, in the Laboratory of Analytical Biology database. Our current goal
was to keep the beetle body as pristine as possible, so that it could serve a voucher
specimen for the genetic samples that would be produced from the legs. Two
objects from one, and each created to carry specific kinds of data, value and
meaning.
This process of building futures into specimens was visible in other parts of
the museum practices. For example, during collecting expeditions the Entomology
Department amasses large quantities of specimens, filling jars of ethanol with
thousands of insects ready to be pulled out, identified and pinned. However, if
individuals of the species are very small, for example tiny wasps only a millimeter
Figure 3. Selecting a beetle for genetic sampling. (Department of Entomology, Smithsonian NMNH,
March 2015). Photo by author.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
398
long (e.g. microhymenoptera), multiple insects may be needed to obtain a viable
genetic sample. In this case another individual of the same species is collected and
serves as a so-called paravoucher. This means the preparator has to imagine various
future uses for the specimen and its associated genetic samples throughout the
process. The implication here is that the one-to-one relationship of individual
specimen to tissue sample to data is disrupted – an issue at the core of the debates
over genetic voucher specimens.
Importantly for standardizing practices across the museum, the key
difference is the relationship between a genetic sample and its origin, or voucher.
Within the museum community a voucher is literally what vouches, or “speaks for,”
the authenticity of that genetic sample, verifying the chain that binds it to its source.
For some museum genomicists vouchers tie all research results to specific,
permanently preserved specimens deposited in museums and as such, they are “the
basis of reproducibility, an essential part of the scientific method” (Funk et al. 2005,
127). Yet other museum scientists have different views of what constitutes a valid
relationship between specimen and genetic sample. For now I follow my
disassembled beetle across the Smithsonian, from the Department of Entomology
to the Laboratories of Analytical Biology, where I learn to extract DNA from my
carefully disarticulated beetle leg.
The unbound biologies of extracting beetle DNA
From pinning beetles and pulling a leg off as a genetic sample I now move
to the Laboratory of Analytical Biology (LAB) at the Smithsonian NMNH, where
in March 2015 I helped conduct tests to assess the “genomic potential” for museum
specimens, transforming a beetle leg into genetic data. Working with the GGI’s lab
technician we assessed the amount of DNA we could extract from beetle specimens
[Figure 4]. Some were pinned months earlier, while others were more than fifty
years old. Using one leg we would leave the rest as a voucher specimen, a reference
for the genetic samples and data we would produce. First dipped in liquid nitrogen
to make them brittle, we crushed the beetle legs with a mortar and pestle. The
resulting powder was mixed with a “buffer,” one of several types of acid that break
down the protein bonds, separating the hard outer casing of the beetles from the
DNA-rich muscle tissue inside. “We’re using a lep [short for Lepidoptera, or
butterfly] primer for these,” the lab technician tells me.
They were developed awhile ago and they’re pretty solid, they are
used for lots of things that aren’t actually leps. Must be some
conserved genes in there that cut across [taxonomic] families. …
I’m used to working with vertebrates–much better DNA.10

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Bundled into this conversation is a long and complex history of the flow of
biotechnology. From human-centered medical research, where a great deal of social
and financial capital concentrated, emerged a number of technologies and
techniques for extracting, sampling, sequencing and banking biological materials.
As categories of “life,” including biodiversity, are increasingly defined by
molecular biology11, DNA has been described as a text to be written or rewritten.
This has rearranged “nature” biotechnologically, with standardized human
biomedical data “overflowing” (Hoeyer, Tupasela, and Rasmussen 2017) into
techniques for collecting genomic samples of exotic biodiversity. Species, in this
conceptual framework, become their genomes in a sense – the protein sequences
extracted from frozen samples, “read” and sorted into a “book of life,” are ready
to be read or rewritten as needed with emerging technologies such as CRISPR
genome engineering (CRISPR/Cas9 Guide 2016;Wright et al. 2016). The Human
Genome Project – a “single-species mammal project,”12 as one Smithsonian
geneticist wryly described it – slowly spread to other contexts such as museums
and zoos, and then to other species, such as mammals, out to other warm-blooded
vertebrates such as birds, then to vertebrates in general including snakes, reptiles,
and fish, and then to invertebrate zoology with hard-bodied insects and soft-bodied
worms and snails, and finally to plants that proved useful as raw material for human
medical biotechnology.
The materials at work on the lab bench in front of me were bound up in
these specific histories of making the world – techniques from human biomedical
domains migrating into natural history laboratories, fundamentally shaping how I
transformed the beetle’s DNA into a new type of data object through the filter of
Figure 4. Cryo-tubes ready to be filled (Smithsonian Biorepository, March 2015). Photo by author.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
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another species. Carefully following the protocol scribbled in the lab notebook, I
used a pipette to distribute microliter droplets of DNA, buffer and stain into a tiny
grid on a plastic container. After going through the centrifuge, washed in ice-cold
ethanol, centrifuged again and then suspended in more buffer I had extracted,
amplified and stained beetle DNA floating at the bottom of each well.
Putting these precious droplets through an electrophoresis gel, I
photographed them under UV light and we used the resulting image to assess the
amount of DNA in each beetle sample. Beetle transformed from a leg, to powder,
to tiny protein bundles that were extracted, stained, expanded, photographed and
evaluated. In reassembling these forms of knowledge I was amplifying the DNA of
a beetle through that of a butterfly to assess the “quality” of that beetle (vis-à-vis
butterfly) DNA, to in turn deem it valuable enough as a genomic sample to be part
of the GGI’s collection.
As the beetle unbound into these increasingly disembodied objects – from
a leg to powder, from a droplet of liquid to lines in a lab book – the material qualities
of the insect receded. In parallel, the labor needed to transform it became
increasingly apparent; as did the continuing work to keep those pieces bound
together and render each of them meaningful. As I learned through this process and
many others, the material capacities and limitations of specimens are at the core of
different disciplinary ontologies within the museum. For example, Entomology
organizes the natural world and the relationships between beetles in a
fundamentally different way than Botany organizes relationships and differences
between plants. Each discipline preserves and discards different parts to form a
unique and coherent disciplinary ontology – that is, a world made up of a distinct
set of objects and the possible relations between them. As specimens are taken apart
into increasingly disembodied pieces, each new piece becomes a distinct entity
capable of carrying different values. As a new type of object, genetic samples begin
to trouble traditional relationships. For example, a beetle can be transformed into
an assemblage of parts including a pinned specimen, a beetle leg as a genetic
sample, extracted beetle DNA frozen in a tube and genomic data on a server. The
“proper” relationship between these parts, as well as their ontological statuses as
discrete objects, are under continuing debate as cross-disciplinary genomic
standards are developed and implemented, as I discuss in the next section.
How to build a biorepository: a debate on genetic voucher specimens
Classification can be seen as a system of cultural forms used to carry
meaning – one that requires its collective construction as well as multiple kinds of
labor to maintain the relationships between classes of things (Bowker 2005; Daston

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
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2004). Making collective meaning continues across cultures (Bell 2017; Bleichmar
and Mancall 2011), but changes in the materials, forms and details of how a
classification system is “anchored” over time, for example in what counts as a
“proper” voucher for the genetic samples and data derived from a specimen. A
voucher specimen ties all tissue samples, DNA extracts, data sets and the resulting
research results created from that data to a particular preserved specimen
permanently deposited in a museum. As such, voucher specimens are mutually
agreed upon conventions that enable the taxonomic natural sciences to function.
Collections of voucher specimens deposited and preserved in museums around the
world serve as the material guarantee of the evolutionary structures proposed by
taxonomists as they collect, describe, categorize, and order life using specimens, in
whole or in part.
However, the ontological status of voucher specimens is neither “natural”
nor stable, as many have argued (cf. Daston 2004; Waterton, Ellis, and Wynne
2013), but requires meticulous work to render it meaningful. What a beetle pinned
in a drawer is, versus what it does (Hayden 2003) has been continually changing
apace with the discipline of taxonomy as it is transformed by museum genomics.
The shift towards disarticulating specimens into genetic samples – such as beetle
legs and DNA – continues to demand the re-articulation of a specimen’s state of
being (what it is) and its instrumentalization (what it does), two distinct objects that
are bound together by the threads of data between a specimen and its parts.
To contextualize these molecular specimens I now turn to debate at the
Smithsonian NMNH in 2014 centered around what constituted a “proper” voucher
– the traditional reference for all things derived from that specimen – from physical
characteristics to tissue samples, from extracted DNA to genomic sequence data.
The lack of providing voucher specimens for molecular samples has been a source
of increasing concern in the “museomics” community13, and multiple definitions
of “voucher” were in circulation at the Smithsonian [Figure 5]. “We don’t really
speak the same language as IZ [Invertebrate Zoology],” a Botanist told me, “Their
ontologies aren’t our ontologies … Why should they be?”14
It is important to note that several versions of “ontology” were at work at
this moment. The “ontologies” the Botanist referenced are informatics ontologies,
a branch of information science that builds a stable set of terms and the relationships
between them to facilitate knowledge transfer. These intentionally reductive views
of the world are designed to represent certain aspects for a specific purpose, and are
used by, for example, by computer scientists designing data types for a database,
bioinformaticians defining types for lab repositories, or taxonomists describing
categories of life in the natural sciences.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
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Another kind of “ontology” at work in this context is a philosophical
ontology that is concerned with the “nature of being,” or what the world consists
of and the ties that bind it together. With branches in science and technology studies
(cf. Barad 2007; Pickering 2010) and anthropology (cf. Descola 2013), among
others, it is a systematic account of existence that describes criteria for types of
objects (such as concrete or abstract, real or ideal) and the potential relationships
between them (such as relational or dependent). The ontological instability of the
genomic specimens and samples hangs somewhere between these first two
definitions, where different disciplines in the Smithsonian define their samples and
the relationships they have to voucher specimens in distinct and often incompatible
ways – some firmly grounded in a representative taxonomic ontology while others
described sets of objects that were fundamentally different from other disciplines.
As a new a type of object genetic samples complicated these disciplinary
understandings of the objects that existed within the natural world in profound
ways.
Figure 5. Optimal relationship between a voucher specimen and the samples derived from it, based on
interviews with Department of Entomology staff at the Smithsonian NMNH, 2014–2016.
Illustration by author.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
403
The friction between these different, layered and intersecting visions of
genomic collections unfolded in one particular episode. In February 2015 during
the monthly Genomics Meeting a discussion began about how to define a
standardized “genetic voucher” specimen across the different disciplines at the
Smithsonian. Questions were raised about whether a genetic sample – or indeed an
even more abstracted piece of amplified DNA – could serve as a voucher specimen.
The following is a transcript of the conversation that ensued in the meeting between
ten individuals who represented key stakeholders in the museum’s genomics
projects. These included curators in Birds, Botany, Mammals and Invertebrate
Zoology, a collections manager from Entomology, project directors for several
large-scale genomic projects at the museum, and staff from the Bioinformatics
department who were trying to synthesize these different practices into a coherent,
ontologically-stable and mutually-agreed-upon whole:
Invertebrate Zoology Curator 1: “Can DNA or tissues be vouchers? I certainly
think so. I’ve done it.”
Mammal Curator and Bird Curator in unison: “A voucher is a voucher.”
Bioinformatics Staff Member: “We’re figuring out what you actually do—a
paravoucher in IZ [Invertebrate Zoology], versus a phenotype voucher in
Entomology … We want to choose one.”
Invertebrate Zoology Curator 2: “On a coral you take one polyp and sequence it,
then use the polyp next to it as the voucher.”
Botany Curator: “We do population sampling too, but we don’t voucher like you
do.”
Genetics Project Director 2: “If Botany isn’t going to quite agree with IZ’s
[Invertebrate Zoology’s] definition then we’re just sitting here gilding the
taxonomic lily. If it’s propagated and then split up as individuals, then
they’re different vouchers.”
Genetics Project Director 1: “We’re talking about concepts specific to different
collection methods. The member/set relation is different than the part/whole
relationship … Member/set is a clone organism such as a tree or a coral;
part/whole is a bird, fish, insect, etc. Clone, exemplar, voucher: we’re here
attempting to define the usage within each Division.”
Invertebrate Zoology Curator 1: “So, the parent of the DNA is a tissue sample, but
that often gets consumed.”
Bioinformatics Staff Member 2: “You have a parent at every single level, but the
highest level might not be a whole organism, it might just be a tissue or even

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
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just a DNA.”
Genetics Project Director 2: “We’re reinventing something taxonomists spent a
hundred years trying to erase and decided was obsolete … I also don’t
personally see the use of ‘living voucher.’ Some vouchers are living, some
are dead. Sooner or later that organism will be dead and it will be a dead
voucher. Then your records will be wrong.”
Entomology Collections Manager, making air quotes around the word “Living”:
“‘Living’ is just another preparation type–it’s just walking around instead
of pickled in a jar, pinned in a drawer, or glued to a page.”
Genetics Project Director 1, with a smile: “So herbarium pages [botany specimens
pressed on sheets of paper] are ‘catch and release’? Plants just don’t get
away very fast?”
Genetics Project Director 2: “Let’s not go back to the idea that you need a pristine
whole organism just as God made it to be a voucher. We’ve moved beyond
that—a DNA can be a voucher itself.”
Entomology Collections Manager: “If it’s going to be completely consumed then
it can’t be a voucher because the point is to be reproducible.”
Genetics Project Director 1: “What we’re talking about is the record of a thing in
the collection. If there’s nothing in the collection left, then there’s no
voucher.”
Genetics Project Director 2: “There’s the record of its use in the records.”15
From this exchange between the different stakeholders in the Smithsonian’s
project to standardize its objects, a view of the very different objects each discipline
both creates and privileges comes to the fore. Some voices were adamant that
“they” (meaning the institution of the Smithsonian, and further the discipline of
biology as a whole) had moved beyond “whole pristine organisms” as vouchers.
Others were adamant that “a voucher was voucher” – that is, an organism, in part
or preferably whole, was pinned, “pickled” in alcohol, stuffed or frozen
somewhere, preserved as an enduring, tangible reference in perpetuity. From this I
suggest that for these assembled scientists genomic sequences on servers existed in
a different ontological category than the extracted DNA, with digital files of genetic
code as an inherently different type of object than that same (unprocessed) genetic
material bound up in a frozen tube of DNA. What constitutes a “proper” voucher
continues to be negotiated not just at the Smithsonian but at other institutions the
world over that serve as repositories–museums, herbariums, botanical gardens,
zoos, and, increasingly, laboratories and biobanks (Rocha et al. 2014).

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Within a long history of museums making living things into scientific tools,
the practices what was left out what just as important as what was left in for making
specimens as much as for making data. While this perspective is not new –
exploring how humans make and remake their worlds has been of enduring interest
to anthropologists, sociologists and historians16 – I would argue that their form in
the genomic “archive” of life is new in the materials and tools they employ as well
as the specific visions for the future that are bundled into the process. In the
discourse of the museum what is preserved now will provide the materials for future
research and continuing preservation efforts, and forms a vital part of the museum’s
self-described role in preserving an increasingly endangered natural world.
Conclusion: crafting specimens, biobanking futures
Collections articulate “nature” in specific ways based on the materiality of
the life they utilize in the context of their distinct disciplinary histories. Through
pulling beetle legs, extracting their DNA and following the debate on the
relationship within genomic collections between these objects, I have examined
how museums are transforming living things into multiple kinds of new museum
objects that assembled together constitute an “archive” of life crafted in response
to the threat of on-going extinctions. Focusing on the material practices for making
these collections has highlighted the ways that the daily practices at the workbench
directly shapes not only policy debates about their use, but further constructs
multiples of that object that together constitute the specimen. Choices made in what
to preserve, how to preserve it and for what kinds of uncertain futures shape the
collection and the specimens they contain. Tracing the ontological instability of
these genomic collections as they shift between contexts and domains I have
underscored the skill, thought and negotiations required to make and maintain these
objects. Yet these practices also render possible specific kinds of futures.
Each specimen–be it a pinned beetle, a tissue sample or extracted DNA –
reflects for the scientists who create them a complex and evolving genomic Tree of
Life and an imperfect and dwindling biosphere. Practices of “archiving” of life in
natural history museums have always broken down individual creatures into pieces
and parts, such as a skin and a skeleton. However the move towards molecular
specimens shifts these practices into new types of abstraction and disembodiment,
transforming individuals into tangled webs of data and matter where discrete
subjects become increasingly difficult to locate. As one collections manger said,
“Tissue tubes don’t have much, well, personality … its just a little bit of meat or an
insect part or a leaf, or sometimes just powdery dust of some kind … you just never
know what you’re looking at.”17 Examining how materials and practices shape

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
New Genetics and Society 37 (04): 387–410.
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genomic collections requires thinking through the capacities and limitations of what
the collections are made from – a beetle leg that dissolves into a viable droplet of
DNA, or the dozen tiny wasps needed for similar genetic sample – and what visions
for the future they are built for. Making specimens, I argue, also makes new kinds
of museum objects that are enacted into being by this complex web of relations and
practices.
Each specimen’s life history can be seen as a collection of moments,
important events as it is collected, prepared, accessioned, and sampled–events in
the “afterlife” of the specimen that begin after death but reach into imagined futures
uses for each new object. Following Mol’s (2003) analysis of how objects are
multiply constituted by the practices through which they come into being, I suggest
that these moments of un-making and re-making in a specimen’s trajectory combine
with the materials it acquires or loses in these processes, an on-going assemblage
that consists of multiple objects bound into one. For as much as the different
disciplines within the Smithsonian were struggling to integrate standardized
genomic collecting protocols into their ways of doing things – as seen in genetic
sampling techniques or standardizing terminology around vouchers – each
discipline also continued to modify practices.
Figure 6. A pinned insect assemblage includes: [1] Entomology pin; [2] Insect; [3a] Label with
collection data (locality, date) collector and species identification; [3b] Second half of information
from 3a if it won’t fit on one label; [4,5a, 5b] Other “life histories” of the specimen, which may
include re-identification of species, genetic sampling or movement between museum collections.
(Department of Entomology, Smithsonian NMNH, March 2015). Photo and illustration by author.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
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Changes accumulate over time and eventually naturalize different methods into a
set of codified practices, transforming shared knowledge into standardized
workflows and sets of objects.
In making and naming genomic specimens I have sought to clarify their
ontological instability, underscoring their contingent and constructed nature – such
as a pinned beetle contextualized by its stack of labels [Figure 6]. Small details
locate the specimen in a particular moment, as a product of a web of unfolding
relations, from the metal of the pin (stainless or spring steel), to the quality of the
paper for the labels (cotton rag or cardstock) to the information on the labels
(handwritten or printed). These relations include the techniques of different
collectors, changes in industrial production such as the cost and availability of
stainless steel and paper, and the pressures of global economies in granting
collecting permits before and after policies such as the Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD 1992).
In the practices of the museum formerly living things are transformed into
multiple kinds of objects, made into unique assemblages that combine biological
materials (such as beetle legs, extracted DNA), concepts of nature (such as species
and trees of life), the skilled labor and tools used to make them (such as tissue tubes
and entomology pins), and the regimes of value they embody (such as “banking”
precious biodiversity and global collecting networks). These assembled specimens
circulate within the museum and beyond to other museums, institutions, and
research sites. In doing so they carrying with them visions for the future being
constructed in museums, one beetle leg, DNA extract and genome at a time.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Fabien Milanovic, Perig Pitrou, Noemie Merleau-Ponty,
Frederic Keck, Joshua A. Bell, William Francis and the two anonymous reviewers
for their comments. This paper is part of ongoing research and collaborations with
staff at the Smithsonian Institution, I owe much to their generosity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author
Funding
Funding was provided by a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Peter
Buck Predoctoral Fellowship, a Wenner Gren Foundation Research Grant (#8977),
and a Musee du quai Branly Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Van Allen, Adrian. 2018. “Pinning Beetles, Biobanking Futures: Practices of Archiving Life in a Time of Extinction.”
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Notes
1. Work on the ontological instability of objects has been widely developed in the social sciences,
see: Latour and Woolgar (1979), Haraway (1997), Rheinberger (1997) and Law and Mol (2002).
2. Genetic collecting programs at the Smithsonian include the Global Genome Initiative (GGI 2013),
part of an international coalition, the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN 2015), as well
as DNA barcoding projects such as the Barcode of Life Initiative (BOL 2017) and the Genome 10k
Project that is gathering genomic data for 10,0000 vertebrate species (Genome 10K Project 2016).
3. Eukaryotic “life” is defined by the natural sciences as multi-cellular organisms, characteristic of
all life forms except bacteria and other primitive microorganisms.
4. From interview notes with GGI staff, 3 March and 10 April 2015. All interviews took place at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C., with an approved human
subjects protocol from the Smithsonian Institution and UC Berkeley.
5. From interview notes with two Lepidoptera curators, 2 February 2016.
6. From interview notes with two Lepidoptera curators, 2 February 2016.
7. From interview notes with a Coleoptera collections manager, 27 January 2015.
8. From interview notes with a Coleoptera collections manager, 28 January 2015.
9. From interview notes with a Bioinformatics staff member, January 2015.
10. From interview notes with a GGI genomics lab technician, 19 April 2015.
11. For human genomics projects see Rabinow (1997), Fortun (2008) and Radin and Kowal (2017),
for non-human genomics see Parry (2004) and Waterton, Ellis, and Wynne (2013).
12. From interview notes with a genomics project director, 12 April 2015.
13. On museum vouchering and genomics see: Astrin, Zhou, and Misof (2013) Coddington et al.
(2007) and Nachman (2013).
14. From interview notes with a Botany curator, 12 February 2015.
15. From notes during Genomic Meeting, 12 February 2015.
16. On classification practices see: Durkheim and Mauss (1963), Bowker and Star (1999), and
Lampland and Star (2009).
17. From interview notes with a Mammal collections manger, 20 February 2015.
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