As a young lad, I was fascinated by stories of the Great Library of Alexandria and the Mouseion (House of the Muses), its associated center of learning. In 295 BC, the Macedonian general, Ptolemy I Sotor, commissioned Demetrius of Phaleron to embark on what was the most ambitious accumulation of knowledge in the Ancient World.

Stories told of the lengths to which this was carried out. There are semi-apocryphal stories of demanding each ship that docked to present manuscripts to be copied. There was such a rapid accumulation of manuscripts that a “branch” library was founded at a temple devoted to Serapis, which lasted until it was destroyed by the followers of Theophilus in 391 AD.

There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were at times housed in the library and the research institute. There is also no doubt that the vast majority were lost in wars, social upheaval, and fanatic devotion to ideology. Who knows what secrets were thrown away or discarded? What could be applicable to exploring questions that vex us even today? Could the secret to decoding Linear A have been in the library? Would we learn more about the Sea Peoples and how they figured in the collapse of the Bronze Age Civilizations?

The Knowledge Cycle in medicine is such that at times, seemingly novel problems can only be understood by human memory of prior cases that showed similarity. The ability to go back and review the past data, which had not yet been converted to information, let alone true knowledge is critical. It would have been simple and inexpensive to digitize this data before it was destroyed, recognizing the potential goldmine that could be thrown away. But that was not done.

It would have been one thing if my experience was unique, but a colleague at a nationally known institution (you would recognize it if I told you) had the exact same experience. Decades of data were just thrown away by an administrator who did not have the capacity to know the magnitude of their actions yet had the power to do it. If you were to ask them if they would give their grandfather’s early 20th century coin collection to their child to spend on candy in vending machines, they would have thought you were joking. Yet they had no compunction about doing the same thing with intellectual capital!