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Last year, Australian bureaucrats facilitated the destruction of a priceless, irreplaceable, scientific collection of plant materials on loan to their country's scientists from France. Apparently the actual destruction was carried out by an "external contractor", but that in no way absolves the bureaucracy.
Jeanson had received a message from the director of the Queensland Herbarium in Australia that was abrupt to the point of being blunt. It told him that a package of 105 botanical specimens of Australian plants owned by the Jardin des Plantes – and gathered by an intrepid French botanist more than 200 years earlier – had been destroyed by Australian biosecurity officials.
To this day, Jeanson can't quite believe what happened, and nor can scientists and museum directors from around the world who have followed the story with horror.
The specimens were both priceless and irreplaceable. How could anyone, let alone government officials, incinerate such artefacts? It was simply beyond Jeanson's comprehension. It remains so, even after post-mortems and investigations conducted in both countries, by scientists and bureaucrats, after diplomats stepped in and compensation negotiations were undertaken.
The specimens destroyed were part of the catalog of the world's plants and were a part of a base for pharmacy, agriculture, and any kind of science based on plants.
Source : 'Would you burn the Mona Lisa if it was sent?': Our horror bureaucratic bungle
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by RamiK on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:10AM (1 child)
Won't be surprised if the collection got destroyed during this 15years long purge of indigenous heritage sites and museum artifacts. The rules and regulations for that have been reduced to something like "burn and/or level anything older than your granny that isn't specifically white-listed (point intended)..." to avoid making things too obvious. Basically it's like sending cops to a street protest with the pretense of "maintaining the peace" while arming them with automatic rifles, tanks and grenades: When you give enough executive power to low-level clerks to destroy stuff without requiring oversight or a court order, you're effectively playing the odds until everything you didn't specify by-name gets demolished. With the odd collateral damage or two as in this case...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @02:15PM
Wasn't all this in the amnesty and UN reports? You make it sound like some conspiracy theory when you put it all together like that without hyperlinking.