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“Before I was 11 I wanted to be David Attenborough, but even at that age I knew the job was filled and there were no vacancies,” he says. “So I decided I wanted to work in museums.” Boot spent 17 years as a curator at Exeter Museum. Few people achieve the goals they set themselves at age 11, even fewer today actively want to work in a museum; after all it’s hard enough even trying to persuade an 11- year-old to visit one.Yet museums are more than just a place to take the kids on a rainy holiday. “We have a huge amount of information about what occurs, when, where and how its changed,” says Dr Paul Henderson, Head of Science at the Natural History Museum in London. “We have specimens collected by captain Cook that were brought back from New Zealand 250 years ago. We know the distribution of many animals and which species have gone extinct.”Henderson cites topical examples of how museums can help to solve real problems in today’s world. There are 3,200 species of mosquito, but only 80 carry malaria, which kills about two million people each year.

The museum and its specialists could help to identify which ones are the dangerous carriers.Another example is recent research conducted by Dr Rhys Green of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Cambridge University. He has shown that the egg shells of thrushes collected over the decades have grown steadily thinner for reasons he cannot explain. Yet we may never have been aware of this without museum collections.This type of research addresses another point raised by Henderson who says that collections are worth maintaining and preserving precisely because this is a heritage we do not always fully understand – yet. In the future new demands will be made upon it and new questions asked which we cannot begin to guess at now.”Museums are repositories, which I like to think of as being like coral reefs or the rainforest – containing undiscovered information,” says Boot. Just as the cure for cancer might reside in an undiscovered rainforest plant, museum collections could hold the key to breakthroughs for a range of diseases.

Collections are increasingly important in this respect because of the rate with which we are losing our wild species through man-made extinctions.”We’re going through a biodiversity crisis It’s going on imperceptibly and we don’t take much notice We only know 15 per cent of the species. Intellectually we need to know the rest to help unravel the evolutionary tree, but they could have uses, and we need to know how they interact with the habitat and how they interact with other species,” says Henderson.At present we may be losing up to 50,000 species per year, many of which have not even been formally described by scientists. “They are of the non-friendly, non-cuddly variety,” says Henderson. “The role of the Natural History Museum is to make people aware of all the animals and plants that are disappearing and their potential impact on gene pools, their biomedical impact, how their loss will affect the life cycle of other animals.