Passing the Torch and the Samples: When microbiologists retire, what happens—or should happen—to the resources they have amassed over their careers?

I was at a meeting recently and one of my younger colleagues referred to a group of us as “microbiologists of a certain age”—a polite way of saying that many of us not only are getting older, but that several are clearly in that category. It is true: a surprising number of currently active microbiologists were born between 1940 and 1950. We lived through the heyday of molecular biology. As a former department chairman, this group showed up on my radar screen as a large group of faculty who could retire en masse over the next few years. As I talked to other department chairs around the country, it was clear we all were looking at a similar situation. While various administrative buzz phrases were used to describe this phenomenon (e.g., changing of the guard, energizing the faculty, removing dead wood), many people began to realize that this group of a “certain age” had amassed some valuable resources that could disappear with them. I refer not only to knowledge and experience, but also to culture and mutant collections, virus stocks, plasmid and vector collections, and information of their provenance and curation.