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Chapter 2. Evolution and Adaptation: A Short History of Biological Resource Centers
- Brookings Institution Press
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The life sciences revolution is still in its infancy. But compared with other scientific and technological pursuits, the life sciences have grown dramatically over the past few decades. Most media coverage focuses on particular scientific discoveries or on the ethical and economic concerns raised by such breakthroughs. However, the impact of scientific and commercial research depends crucially on the presence of institutions to facilitate the growth and use of knowledge over time. Despite the lack of headlines, these institutions—and the policies that nurture their growth and development —are essential to maintaining an effective research system. The role of biological resource centers in supporting scientific progress is more than an abstract concern. Indeed, their impact cannot be understood without appreciating a practical but central challenge for life sciences research: maintaining the integrity of shared biomaterials. Without an effective system for ensuring that materials used in experiments are the materials that researchers believe they are using, microbiological research could not advance. But this deceptively simple problem has bedeviled the research community since the advent of transportable biomaterials in the 1950s. While the most well-known cases of misidentification were uncovered during the so-called HeLa scandals of the 1970s, contamination and misidentification of biological materials remains a 9 Evolution and Adaptation: A Short History of Biological Resource Centers 2 02 8148-2 ch02.qxd 10/18/2004 10:34 AM Page 9 10 A Short History of Biological Resource Centers 1. MacLeod and others (1999); Masters (2002). 2. Jong (2003). 3. Cypess (2003a). central problem (box 2-1). According to recent estimates, perhaps more than 20 percent of all cell lines remain misidentified, and thousands of articles based on misidentified cell lines are published every year.1 The history of BRCs is inextricably intertwined with these authentication problems. This chapter offers a brief glimpse into that fascinating history in order to begin to identify the impact of BRCs on the research process itself. It is important to emphasize that maintaining the fidelity of research materials is not principally a technological or scientific problem; instead, it is a problem of incentives. Scientists have few incentives to engage in replication and validation of others’ research, but individual scientists may have strong incentives to ensure their own financial advantage and professional prestige by thwarting the process of validating (or not) their own previous research. Thus although maintaining a robust system for validating experimental research is in the interest of all scientists, individual researchers may have little stake in contributing to this outcome. The integrity of the scientific process is a public good, and in large part BRCs are an institutional response designed to overcome this conflict between public goods and private rewards.2 The remainder of this chapter explores biomedical research centers as economic institutions, first by surveying the functions of biological resource centers, then tracing their evolution and adaptation over time and highlighting the challenges they face. What Is a Biological Resource Center? A BRC is an institution dedicated to the investigation of the structure, functions , and applications of biological systems by developing cooperative activities for sharing validated biological material and data among government agencies, industry, academia, and the public.3 As a key element of the life sciences research infrastructure, the centers maintain large and varied collections of biological materials—including cell lines, microorganisms, recombinant DNA material, media, and reagents—and provide the information technology tools that allow researchers to access these materials. During the past quarter century, BRCs have come to play an increasingly important role in scientific and commercial research. For example, since the 1980s, certain centers, such as the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), have been critical in protecting intellectual property rights by serving as international patent depositories for all patented living organisms. 02 8148-2 ch02.qxd 10/18/2004 10:34 AM Page 10 [54.146.154.243] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:55 GMT) A Short History of Biological Resource Centers 11 4. Stevenson and Hatt (1992, vol. 1, p. 15). 5. Cypess (2003b, p. x). 6. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2001). The concept and operation of BRCs evolved from the development of culture collections, also referred to as cell banks. Robert Stevenson, a former director of the ATCC, defined culture collections as officially constituted organizations “acquiring, preserving, authenticating, and distributing microorganisms or in vitro cultured cells to qualified scientists.”4 Since the early 1980s, the level of investment in life sciences research has skyrocketed, and increasing importance has been placed on the...