Endangered Plants Having Their Seeds Banked

Delicate, exotic orchids billow like pastel clouds in the back room of Harold Koopowitz’s greenhouse, filling the shelves and dripping into the aisles with their pink, yellow, white, lavender and orange blossoms.

But the beautiful and abundant blooms are insignificant compared to another orchid, this one a mere clump of scruffy green leaves, which Koopowitz is also nurturing.

This orchid, which will eventually sprout orange flowers, had its start as a cryogenically preserved seed, planted in soil after several years in the bottom of a deep freezer.

The process is still in the research stages, but if his success with the frozen-seed Mexican orchid, insiclia, is any indication, cryogenic preservation could be a key to preventing thousands of species of endangered orchids from becoming extinct in the coming years, Koopowitz believes.

Koopowitz, director of the University of California, Irvine, arboretum, is also keeper of the university’s gene bank, one of the world’s few preserves of frozen seeds and pollen designed to help protect the world against plant extinction.

Plant extinction is not a hypothetical concern. Ten years ago, when Koopowitz first began planning the gene bank, one or two plant species became extinct every week. Today, one or two plant species disappear every day, he said. Within 10 years, it is not unlikely that a species will become extinct every hour.

They are the victims of another species, Homo sapiens , who cut down the rain forests for firewood, farming, mining and development.

Aside from the aesthetic loss, plant extinction also robs mankind of valuable resources, including medicines yet to be discovered, according to Koopowitz, a professor of developmental and cell biology. But it is hard to generate people’s enthusiasm about saving plants; they have no furry faces and expressive eyes to tug at the public’s heartstrings, he observed.

“At the time we got into this, we were the only people who were talking about plant conservation. Everyone was talking about animals, and no one was giving plants any press at all,” said Koopowitz, who wrote a book, “Plant Extinction: A Global Crisis,” three years ago with local writer Hilary Kaye.

“When I started this in 1976, I was a lone voice crying in the wilderness. It’s taken a full 10 years of jumping up and down and screaming to really get things going.”

Still, gene banking has its critics. Faith Thompson Campbell, a senior research associate with the Natural Resources Defense Council of Washington, said the main goal of conservation should be to keep endangered species thriving in the wild, “where they belong.”

Seed banks “can be useful as insurance,” to re-establish a species after it has been wiped out, she said. “But they are not a substitute.”

Besides, she said, even if a gene bank holds the seeds of an extinct species, “where are you going to plant them?” A plant grown from frozen seed is not part of and contributing to its natural ecosystem, and it is not evolving as it would have in the wild, she contended.

“Having a particular species in a botanical garden or even a private home is better than not at all, but only marginally,” she said.

Habitat Considerations

Koopowitz recognizes the need to conserve the endangered species in the wild. Preserves for endangered species are being set up, he said, but they rarely are big enough and numerous enough to guarantee the species’ survival. At the same time, there should be efforts to restrict trade and development so that species can thrive in their true natural environment, he added.

But since the rain forests are disappearing as the issue is being debated, gene banking is a necessity, he argues.

“Unless we get these things into cultivation and gene banks, we aren’t going to have anything to conserve,” he said.

Koopowitz’s gene bank is hardly glamorous, just a used-looking, chest-style freezer jammed against an office wall at the arboretum, located along the San Diego Creek channel a mile outside the campus.

It holds tiny sealed capsules of about 900 species, mainly lilies and irises, which have seeds that can be dried, frozen for years and then planted.

And if future research proves the freezing technique successful, Koopowitz plans to expand the bank to include rare orchids from the diminishing tropical rain forests.

‘They All Need Protection’

“I see the orchids as a symbol for the rain forests themselves,” he said. “There are other groups in the tropics that also need saving, everything from the trees and the small herbs and the palms and the ferns. They all need protection.”

There is some question whether orchid seeds in general can be used after freezing. In 1980, a group of researchers at Kew Gardens in Wakehurst, England, planted several orchid seed samples that had been frozen for about a decade, “and the samples were found to be dead. We don’t know what happened to the seed. Obviously, we’re quite concerned.”

Why did he choose orchids?

“Orchids are like jewels in the crown,” Koopowitz declared. “They are the most highly evolved of the flowering plants. They are the most exotic,” he said, and their beauty and mysticism may help garner public support for his project.

Besides aesthetics, though, plants have medical, sometimes life-saving, uses, he said.

Nearly 50% of the chemicals and drugs people use are derived from plants, which evolve and produce these chemicals for self-preservation, Koopowitz said.

For example, birth control pills originally were derived from a yam-like plant, dioscorea, which produced a chemical that mimics progesterone, he said. If animals ate the plant, it would “really mess up their reproductive cycle,” and there would be fewer offspring to feed on that plant, he said. “It’s really a scruffy little plant too,” but if it had become extinct 50 years ago, mankind would have suffered, he said.

Case of Quinine

During World War II, a synthetic drug, Atabrine, was made to combat malaria, replacing quinine, which is made from the bark of a tree that grows in Central America, he said. The synthetic drug was used heavily for many years, but the malaria parasite now has grown immune to the synthetic drug, Koopowitz said, so people have gone back into the Peruvian forests to collect and breed the tree, cinchona, for better yields of quinine.

“We’d have been in a real fix if that tree had gone extinct,” he said.

“You can’t foresee when you’re going to need a plant. . . . The way discoveries tend to work is that you find things by chance,” he said.