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I ONCE nearly burned down the Smithsonian鈥檚 natural history museum in Washington DC. This was many years ago, when scholars were allowed to smoke pipes while studying the collections kept hidden in the vaults. Indeed, scholars were almost expected to smoke a pipe. Foolishly, I had tapped mine out into a bin full of bits of paper when it wasn鈥檛 really dead. A janitor with a good sense of smell saved my reputation, not to mention most of the national collections of the US. Had it been otherwise, I doubt very much whether I would have been permitted to rejoin my own institution in London: the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.

Which is just as well, or I would never have met some of the remarkable people lurking behind the scenes at the museum. These professional curators and researchers are the conscience of the biosphere. They know what species exist in the world; they have ideas about what remains to be discovered. These scientists deserve to be celebrated, and their stories curated.

Among the little-known heroes in the vaults is Martin Hall, whose unrivalled knowledge of extremely unpleasant flesh-eating flies may well have saved the African continent from a plague of American screw worm. This insect, which burrows into wounds and then eats its host alive, had inadvertently been introduced into north Africa in the 1980s, from where it would almost certainly have spread across the continent, destroying cattle and wildlife alike. Luckily, while Hall was on a visit to Libya, he found screw worm larvae in a herd belonging to the agriculture ministry. The officials took some convincing that action was required, and Martin was forced to raise some of the maggots in his hotel room. Eventually, and thanks to his prompt recognition of this interloper, an eradication programme entailing the release into the wild of millions of sterile male flies succeeded in eliminating the pest before it could get established.

Then there鈥檚 Geoffrey Tandy. During the second world war, Tandy, a seaweed expert, found himself at Bletchley Park among the encrypters and decoders. Not that he was expert in such things: he had ended up there thanks to a functionary not knowing the difference between cryptogram and cryptogam (a little-used term for organisms that reproduce using minute spores). But when sodden German notebooks written in code were rescued from a submarine and brought to Bletchley, Tandy knew what to do: treat them like seaweed. After laying them out between the right absorbent paper, vital information could be read, the Enigma machine could get cracking, and the rest is history.

Discovery often has such serendipitous corollaries. In 1977, the museum鈥檚 herring expert, Peter Whitehead, found more than he bargained for when he hunted down a 16th-century collection of manuscripts that turned out to contain not only the early illustrations of the Brazilian herring that he was after, but also works by composers both obscure and illustrious. After much dogged research, Whitehead traced the collection to the Jagiellon library in Krakow, Poland, and was rewarded by also unearthing a lost Mozart score. Sadly, Whitehead鈥檚 end was less glorious. Diagnosed with a brain tumour, he disappeared to exotic climes 鈥� and women. His office was said to have been kept locked by the head keeper because it held too much incriminating evidence of his love life.

鈥淗erring expert Peter Whitehead was rewarded for his hard work 鈥� by finding a lost Mozart score鈥�

A life sequestered in the vaults does tend to breed egotism 鈥� and eccentricity. The early 20th-century writer W. N. P. Barbellion (a pseudonym of Bruce Cummings) wrote The Journal of a Disappointed Man, which earned an introduction by H. G. Wells and praise from Marcel Proust and James Joyce. His painful, accurate account of a slow decline from multiple sclerosis illuminated by ecstatic flashes is so vividly written that it comes as a surprise to learn that Cummings was the expert on lice. It is beyond irony that his life was also so lousy. He deserves new admirers.

Absent-mindedness is an occupational hazard of museum work. Mosquito specialist Peter Mattingly was once so distrait that he appeared in the office pursued minutes later by his desperate wife. Apparently the family had been sitting waiting for Mattingly in the car, ready to go on holiday, when they spotted him racing to the train and his mosquitoes.

A few other true solitaries spiralled into actual lunacy. Zoologist Rudolf Kirkpatrick privately published several books in which he attempted to show that all rocks were made of small fossils called nummulites 鈥� even rocks that had cooled from molten magma. It鈥檚 an idea of such extravagant preposterousness that it becomes almost attractive.

There is something rather wonderful about an institution that can harbour such eccentrics alongside world authorities on bees and bananas. After three decades there myself, doubtless I too have become more eccentric as years devoted to the study of trilobites passed in scholarly seclusion. But the people who work on the shop floor are the substance of any institution; the business of what happens behind the scenes, the social history, this is the real work. When I retired a couple of years ago, I wanted to make my own collection of the people and stories I had gathered.

I called the collection Dry Store Room No. 1 after an obscure store I had discovered not long after joining the museum, a place where dried fishes and human remains were kept alongside turtles and skeletons. In the vast rabbit warren that lies behind the public facade, few employees ever found their way to Dry Store Room No 1, though it is said to have been the site of several trysts among the bones.

It struck me that our own lives are a kind of storeroom, a collection we curate using our memories. Some things we might rather forget but, like it or not, they remain lodged in this deep archive. The Dry Store Room seemed an appropriate metaphor, a good way to encapsulate a personal view of the museum and my life there.

But I quickly realised I needed to set these tales in the context of science going on right now. Molecular work has transformed how we look at classification, and global climate change has imparted an added urgency to the work of the Natural History Museum: the job of naming and describing the natural world sometimes feels like a race against the clock. Moreover, diseases don鈥檛 stand still, and new techniques combating parasites are one of the few success stories in recent human history. So my collection of stories and science ended up dedicated to demonstrating the importance of museums of natural history 鈥� and their human fauna.

Humans have a great capacity for forgetting, and as our species grinds on and on, wiping out natural habitats and the species that live in them, I predict there will be deniers who will claim that some species never existed in the first place. Natural history museums, together with their own social history, may provide the only way we can answer future generations when they ask what we did to the life on our planet.