SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Seeds of All Types Repose in Huge Bank--Just in Case
Warm winds have begun to sweep down from the Continental Divide, melting the remnants of snow on Colorado’s high eastern plains. Already, it looks like a bountiful year for winter wheat, which farmhands will begin harvesting in July.
Just a few miles west, more than 37,000 varieties of wheat seeds sit in giant freezers where they remain viable in their subzero slumber for generations.
Wheat represents a fraction of the quarter-million plant varieties kept at the National Seed Storage Laboratory here. It is the single largest collection of plant germ plasm in the world, including everything from avocados to zinnias.
Not for Sale
This federal stock is not for sale. They are strategic seeds--ammunition in the geopolitical war against famine, pestilence and blight--much like the national petroleum supply or the gold at Ft. Knox.
When a new fungus or a mutant weevil threatens to wipe out an important food crop, agricultural scientists worldwide turn to this genetic storehouse and its gatekeeper, Steve A. Eberhart.
Eberhart, 55, lends seeds from his frigid vaults to universities, agribusiness and foreign governments only when solutions cannot be bought commercially or found in the wild.
“We don’t expect to use these seeds. They back up the system,” said Eberhart, who spent four years as an agricultural consultant in Kenya and 11 years as a research director for Ciba-Geigy Corp.
Extremely Vital
“They are extremely vital,” Eberhart said, “especially if there was a fire or a natural disaster--or even a riot, in this day and age--that destroyed seeds.”
The seed bank concept has been copied in nearly 60 locations worldwide to ensure biological diversity--agriculture’s traditional first line of defense--as millions of acres of plant habitat are lost to development and hybrid crops replace native cultivars in poor countries.
Seed banks allow researchers to remain at home rather than to travel to the remote regions where hybrids’ ancestors originated to collect more varieties that have new and stronger traits.
The seed banks range from a Scandinavian collection buried deep within a coal mine 800 miles from the North Pole to a rice research center in the Philippines and a corn and wheat repository in Mexico.
Half of World’s Food
These collections appear enormous, considering that wheat, corn and rice provide more than half of the world’s food.
But scientists must often cross hundreds of varieties to develop a new seed generation. Their efforts provide a cornucopia for a few seasons before highly adaptable bacteria and bugs overcome the crops’ inbred defenses.
That is what happened in 1970 when the nation’s corn came from just six hybrids and a surprise blight, which started in the Southeast, wiped out 15% of the crop. Within months, scientists rallied to stop the blight and develop new resistant strains of corn. Now the seed bank stores more than 16,000 varieties of corn.
However, the basic problem of a vulnerable food supply persists.
Native Foods Lacking
The United States has no major native foods. Wheat originated in famine-stricken Ethiopia, corn immigrated from Mexico and potatoes started in Peru via Europe. Even your morning cup of Colombian coffee came from the African highlands.
Ironically, Third World nations provide the genetic base for more than 95% of the world’s food. For several years they have been unsuccessfully demanding compensation from the United States and other industrialized nations for the primitive genes that have been hybridized.
It is not just the number of seeds in laboratory freezers that counts, but the spectrum of variation within the species that is represented in the collection.
According to a National Academy of Science study to be published early next year, the Ft. Collins laboratory and the global seed network must fill in the gaps in their collections.
30,000 Rice Varieties
Those gaps can be huge. In India alone, more than 30,000 varieties of rice have been grown over the centuries. How many remain today is unknown.
“You could have 100,000 packets of corn seeds, but you may not represent the total variation in the genome,” said John A. Pino, director of the National Academy of Science germ plasm study. “What we want is the minimum number of seeds to represent the total variation. That’s a mammoth job.”
Many environmentalists condemn such collections as a backhanded way to prevent genetic erosion.
Biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin and others filed a federal lawsuit against the $14.5-million Ft. Collins laboratory in 1985, charging that seeds are not tested with sufficient frequency and the facility is “so poorly managed and underfunded that thousands of rare (seed) samples are being irretrievably lost.”
Campus Site
Located within 50 miles of a federal nuclear weapons factory and a nuclear power plant, critics said the seed bank, which occupies a drab concrete building on the Colorado State University campus, is “not exactly the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“They have been laboring with minuscule resources for a long time,” said Jack Doyle of the Environmental Policy Institute in Washington and author of “Altered Harvest.” “The problems are still not addressed.”
Federal agriculture officials dispute charges that seeds are spoiling but conceded that the lawsuit has focused congressional attention on the obscure laboratory’s plight.
Opened in 1959, the facility has scarcely been modernized in the nearly three decades since. Its $12-million operating budget has been essentially static for two decades.
Plan to Go Underground
“We’re looking for a $10-million expansion in 1989,” Eberhart said. “We want to take the collection underground to protect it.”
The seed bank contains nearly 250,000 varieties representing 1,300 crop species and their wild ancestors. But they do not begin to cover the estimated 7,000 plant species that have been collected and grown for food throughout history.
More than half of the seeds in the bank are cereals, including 48,718 varieties of wheat, 22,500 varieties of sorghum and 19,300 varieties of oats.
Vegetables and oil crops each represent another 15% of the collection, with the rest forage, fiber, sugar and ornamental seeds.
The collection grows by about 20,000 varieties every year, primarily through the efforts of plant scientists who roam the world’s jungles, Alpine meadows and bustling Third World bazaars.
Computer Data Base
When new seeds arrive, Eberhart’s research staff screens them for disease, dormancy and duplication. They are coded with an identification number for inclusion in the lab’s new computer data base that will be accessible by plant scientists worldwide.
Seed samples are then tested in a germinating chamber that cradles them in a moist 85-degree environment until they sprout.
“A 98% germination rate is very good,” said biological technician Bill Prange, who sits at a workbench under the glare of fluorescent lights, sorting through tiny seeds with tweezers, much like an electronics assembler picks at microchips.
“I’ll go through 150 samples in an average day,” Prange said. “Some days, all I do is count. The grasses are the toughest because they’re so small, and they have a lot of empty pods.”
Careful Storage
The new additions are placed in moisture-proof bags and taken to one of 10 freezers. They are grouped by species in boxes that are stacked on adjustable steel shelves in a subzero, 5% humidity environment. Ten years may pass before the seeds are supposed to be tested again.
Eberhart said several varieties are test-cooled by liquid nitrogen that keeps them at minus-300 degrees. Cereal seeds and others could be kept viable that way for a projected 100 years, he said.
Scientists are considering two long-term alternatives to seed banks.
The first, championed by University of Wisconsin botanist Hugh Iltis and endorsed by the National Academy of Science, would require plant-rich nations to set aside untouchable parks to preserve native varieties.
Cloning Research
The second is gene research in which plants get cloned into new hybrids from their DNA on a cell-by-cell basis.
Scientists at Escagen Corp. in the Silicon Valley are working on ways to produce fresh produce and natural flavorings without growing the plants by culturing their cells in laboratory flasks.
But researchers are still years--perhaps decades--away from replacing the Ft. Collins seed freezers with racks of test tubes.
“The standard procedures of saving seeds will still be with us for a long time,” Pino said.
