ABOVE: SCOTT WISEMAN
On a balmy December day in Jupiter, Florida, chemist Ben Shen led the way into a standalone, shed–sized cold room that sits just outside one of the three buildings at the Scripps Research Institute’s East Coast campus. Six-foot-tall racks hung from metal rails on wheels, each with hundreds of cubby holes filled with clusters of glass ampules containing freeze-dried microbes. Along the back wall of the room were tiny drawers with more samples. And this was just half of the collection. Back inside the closest building, more than 30 freezers held thousands more samples of bacteria and fungi.
In total, Shen now oversees a biobank of 217,352 microbial strains, more than 210,000 of which came to Scripps late last year from the drug company Pfizer, which had established and maintained the historic collection since the early 20th century. Microbes produce compounds that have already yielded or inspired ...
