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Shakespeare & Beyond

In the News: In Rare Books, Centuries-Old Proteins Can Reveal the Past

Sample of book dust being removed from 17th-century Bible. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Sample of book dust being removed from 17th-century Bible. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Sample of book dust being removed from 17th-century Bible, Folger Shakespeare Library.

Sample of book dust being removed from 17th-century Bible. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Just before the holidays, Folger director Michael Witmore appeared on Washington, DC, public radio station WAMU on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, where he joined Nnamdi, NIH geneticist and senior investigator Julie Segre, and New Yorker staff writer Sam Knight in an extended, lively, but somewhat curiously titled program: “Did Shakespeare Have Acne? What Historic Texts Can Tell Us About the Past.” We’ll explain all the parts of that title below.

As Nnamdi told his listeners, Knight had just written in The New Yorker about a burst of projects around the world that use “proteomics”—the study of proteins and their interactions—to learn about the past. In essence, such projects examine proteins which are on or within archaeological finds, works of art, rare books, documents, and other historical objects. Proteomics research is still rapidly developing, with the likelihood of vastly expanded capabilities in the years and decades ahead. But Knight found that individual projects are already pioneering a new and almost untouched field of study, in what he called “a heady, chaotic atmosphere of possibility.”

Among the many efforts that he described was one that took place at the Folger, irreverently known as Project Dustbunny, in which the Folger teamed with Segre and her colleagues at NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute to see what could be learned from the dust in a 17th-century book. With Knight’s article putting the project in the spotlight, Nnamdi assembled Witmore, Segre, and Knight to delve deeper into the Project Dustbunny story, as well as the broader impact and opportunity of proteomics research in the humanities.