Sir

Your report1 on the move by the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture to become independent of the University of Washington, Seattle, because of a lack of financial support from the university, illustrates one of the threats facing university biodiversity collections.

The Burke museum has the advantage of size to make plausible its becoming an independent institution. But curators of smaller, yet important, collections often face a similar financial crunch that cannot be solved by becoming independent. They have the option of minimal management of the collections, sometimes through out-of-pocket support, or of allowing the collections to become orphaned.

If orphaned collections are not transferred to an institution interested in their care, the result is a tragic, irreplaceable loss of biodiversity data. That is certain to hasten the decline of university training in systematic biology, which depends on collections. These and other factors contribute to what is aptly called “the crumbling infrastructure of biodiversity”2.

It is to be hoped that universities will recognize that their biodiversity collections are as important a component of the infrastructure for biological sciences as electron microscopes and ultracentrifuges.