[Snippets of past medical research: worth saving?]

Medical researchers and physicians are not trained in the care of their written or digital past. Here, a scientific historian and a clinical epidemiologist reflect on possibilities for archiving the records of medical research in order to safeguard scientific legacies. In addition to the use of so-called witness seminars, which may suffer from interpretation by 'hindsight', archival material is necessary to understand and interpret the past. A particular problem is how to establish archives of day-to-day scientific undertakings that rely almost entirely on digital media for measurements, communication and publication. The recently developed conviction that good scientific practice encompasses an obligation to store all relevant information about medical research projects at the time of publication - for future replication or verification - might dovetail with the goals of medical historians, and thus might become a rich source of historical data in the future.