Her Career Was Ending. What to Do With Her Worm Samples?

We're guessing you don't think about parasitic flatworms very often. Not the dazzling "Fuchsia Flatworm" or its cousin, the ruffly "Pleasing Flatworm." Dr. Marian Litvaitis spent a career thinking about them, researching these and other members of the order Polycladida for over 30 years, collecting tissue and DNA samples from 466 worms along the way. Then it came time for her to retire. The samples must be stored at -80°C in specialized freezers, and parking them in her basement wasn't a good solution. But "there are often no systems in place to ensure that irreplaceable collections of scientific arcana don’t end up in a dumpster," reports Sabrina Imbler for the New York Times. Litvaitis' solution: She connected with the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, whose aim is secure, store, and "distribute genome resources from marine environments."

The center has since created the Genome Resource Rescue Project, which hopes to be a destination for retiring researchers' samples; it thus far has such samples from Litvaitis and two others, including H. William Detrich. There's a real potential benefit to doing so. As Imbler writes, "collecting fresh biological samples can be expensive, time consuming, and environmentally unfriendly, as researchers may need to disrupt ecosystems in the process." Should future researchers want to know more about the icefish and its transparent blood, for instance, they won't have to plan a whole icefish-fishing expedition to Antarctica. Detrich's collection, which cost millions to compile, is already waiting for them, perfectly preserved. (Read the full story here.)