The stuff of memories: planning hindsight in animal cryobanks

  • Biobanks are becoming ubiquitous infrastructures in zoology and other non-human life sciences. They promise to store frozen research samples for the long term for future use. That use remains speculative but nevertheless needs to be anticipated. Following the establishment of a physical and digital infrastructure for frozen samples in an animal biobanking project, this article explores how the future is anticipated to remember the past, and how frozen objects are shaped accordingly. Situating the biobank between mundane freezing routines in a research lab and the ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ collections of natural history museums, I argue that frozen research objects need to be conserved in two separate ways. The unavailability of cryo-objects in cold storage forces researchers to store materials independently of metadata, while retaining a link between them that allows for their reunion after thawing. The result is a split object, leading a double life at sub-zero and room temperature, linked only through the surface of special plastic containers. Following the making of such split objects, this article offers an elaboration of Radin’s ‘planned hindsight’ as well as a reflection on the universality and particularity of biobanks as standardized scientific memory.

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Metadaten
Author:Veit Moritz BraunORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-896590
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241252081
ISSN:1460-3659
ISSN:0306-3127
Parent Title (English):Social studies of science
Subtitle (German):an international review of research in the social dimensions of science and technology
Publisher:Sage Publ.
Place of publication:London [u.a.]
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2024/05/15
Date of first Publication:2024/05/15
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2025/02/03
Tag:CryoArks; biobanks; cryopreservation; laboratory ethnography; memory; natural history museums; planned hindsight; zoology
Volume:54
Issue:5
Page Number:21
First Page:728
Last Page:748
Institutes:Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Gesellschaftswissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International