GoKawiilFrank Hemmings collects, catalogues and preserves plant specimens for research.Credit: David Eldridge
In the scorching heat and across the rugged landscapes of southeastern Australia, Frank Hemmings has conducted vegetation surveys for more than 27 years. He has collected and documented thousands of plants from grasslands, forests and some of the nation’s driest regions. As a curator at the John T. Waterhouse Herbarium at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, he carefully dries, identifies and catalogues every specimen, adding each one to a vast archive of plants lining the shelves. His work, which began with roadside field trips to collect weeds, eventually produced specimens that would become indispensable to researchers globally, across a wide range of scientific fields. “I didn’t realize early on how managing a collection of biological specimens means that the samples I collect or identify could lead to work for someone else years down the track,” Hemmings says.
As a scientist in a research-support role, he doesn’t independently write academic papers or conduct experiments. Instead, Hemmings meticulously gathers and preserves the samples that other scientists use to collect data and make discoveries. “I’m not obligated to produce research from these data,” he explains. “My responsibility is to make them available so others can use them in their research.”
Research is powered by technical talent — and recognition is finally on the rise
Hemmings has collected 3,782 specimens and helped to identify more than 10,500. The leaves that he has pressed have contributed to studies in fields such as pharmaceutical chemistry, phylogenomics, ecology and climate change. “Even though I’m listed as a co-author on 27 papers,” he says, “it blew me away to learn that at least 93 other studies were built on the thousands of specimens I collected and identified.” He says that sharing specimen data and metadata is the core of his mission. He vividly recalls a tense discussion with a representative of his university’s legal department, who wanted to impose strict restrictions on distributing collected specimen data. He responded with resolve: “You have to understand — this goes against the very essence of science.”
Hemmings is part of a vast number of research-support specialists working at scientific institutions around the world, often in the shadows. As the ‘stagehands’ of science, they are mostly invisible to the audience but essential to the show. Even though their fingerprints are all over many data sets, they’re rarely recognized as full contributors on projects, as co-authors and in other ways that are formally rewarded by the scientific establishment. In publications, they often appear only in a short phrase in the acknowledgements section. Their hidden labour and expertise can be difficult to measure.
Simon Hettrick, the chair of the Hidden REF initiative, a campaign launched at the University of Southampton, UK, in 2020 to highlight and celebrate these crucial roles, says that “this lack of recognition translates into significant difficulties for people in these roles: in getting support, finding positions and progressing their careers”.
Nature’s careers team interviewed research-support professionals to hear how their work helps to shape the course of modern science, and how recognition — or the lack of it — has influenced their careers.
Hidden hands
“I knew from the outset that I wasn’t born to be that kind of scientist who lives between papers and peer reviews,” says Marten Schöle, a fossil preparator at the Berlin Natural History Museum. As a teenager, he was drawn to the craft of fossil preparation. Schöle made an early, deliberate choice to step away from academic research, which he found overly narrow because scientists often spend years focused on a single question or fossil. At the Walter-Gropius-Berufskolleg, a vocational college in Bochum, Germany, he trained for three years to become a fossil technician. “What keeps me going in this career is the freedom to explore an extraordinary range of fossils and time periods — from a tiny Cambrian worm that lived half a billion years ago to hominin remains a few thousand years old.” That diversity, Schöle says, brings constant excitement and a renewed sense of discovery.
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