![]() "But people get a perception of the magnitude of the loss when I tell them that at the end of the 1800s, 7,000 named apple varieties were grown in the United States," he says. But in most cases there are no big headlines when a variety is irrevocably lost," he says.Ĭonvincing the world of the problem hasn't been easy, Fowler says. ![]() "Of course there is also a risk of wars and other catastrophes wiping out a whole institute. Rather, it is annual budget cuts at plant institutes and their gene banks around the world, as well as the occasional power failure that thaws seeds so that they fail to germinate. ![]() Work has begun on an agricultural "Noah's Ark" designed to preserve the genetic diversity of the world's crops beneath the Arctic permafrost for thousands of years.ĭr Cary Fowler is the mastermind behind the so-called doomsday vault which will be carved deep in the side of a mountain in the Svalbard archipelago, 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole.Ĭonstruction of the vault began this week.īuilt with top security, the A$4 million (US$3 million) depository will preserve around three million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops at sub-zero temperatures.įowler is executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international non-profit organisation that supports the world's most critical crop collections currently scattered among some 1,400 gene banks.Īccording to him, the main threat to the world's crops is probably not a nuclear war. First farmers grew figs for sweet treats, Science Online,.Gene laws survive review, Science Online,.Humans took 1000 years to tame wild plants, Science Online,.
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