Glass Pasts, Genetic Futures: Fluid Legacies of Ocean Biodiversity

• In Event: Collecting the Sea

Abstract

What is a legacy? A treasure sustained across generations, a philanthropic bequest, an outdated system? I here juxtapose two ocean collections proclaiming legacy status to consider how their uses, aims, and values—scientific, economic, political, and otherwise—change over time, and consider how both collections enact their namesake in different ways.

The glass models of marine invertebrates crafted by the father-son duo Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka in the 19th century for scientific study fell into obscurity in the 20th. But the invertebrates had life in them yet: they are now being restored and reconfigured as a “time capsule of the ocean of 160 years ago” by Cornell marine biologist Drew Harvell. In a project called Fragile Legacy, Harvell is embarking on a voyage to find “living examples” of the Blaschka invertebrates in their natural habitats, in the process documenting the comparative state of life in today’s oceans—now considered as fragile as Blaschka glass.

The world’s largest marine genome bank, the Ocean Genome Legacy, likewise understands marine biodiversity as fragile. It aims to accumulate the biological material of threatened marine species so that future scientists might study them, identify their useful properties, and perhaps even reanimate them. Yet the questions of justice and exploitation raised by terrestrial bioprospecting are still more complicated in the expanses of ocean where sovereignty is uncertain, and latent biological potential is conditioned by political struggles past and future. While marine genomes sit frozen, contestations over property in both life and the ocean continue.

I ask: what kinds of knowledge, labor, capital and technology are required to create, maintain, and revive these collections? Who owns them and decides how they should be used—and who might dispute such claims? How do they relate to their source organisms and geographies? What legacy, and whose, is at stake in collecting the sea?

Author

• Alyssa Battistoni, Yale University