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Norway to Build Doomsday Seed Bank
Kagu writes "According to the BBC, Norway is planning to build a Seed Bank in the Artic Permafrost to protect all known variations of seeds in case of worldwide disaster." From the article: "Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment."
As far as I know, the arctic permafrost is already melting - which implies that the seeds will not remain frozen for very long.
And I'd suppose there would be flooding issues involved where there is a lot of melting water. So, they will probably succeed in creating an underwater chamber of moldy grains then?
More elaborate article on this can be found at NewScientist.com. Some sketches (2) over the vault available on the online Norwegian newspaper TV2 Nettavisen.
Also, I'm a bit disappointed that BBC missed out on the whole "security-details provided by roaming polar bears"-thing.
-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-
The smartest thing we can hope to do probably is map out the DNA for every endangered species, in the hope that one day we will be advanced enough to synthesize this DNA again "de novo" in a lab and bring the species "back" if we ever need it.
This probably wouldn't be enough. Although in a sense an organism's DNA has all the information needed to construct the organism, the DNA sequence is just a string of data. Construction of the organism requires (very, very complex) interaction between this data string and a "reader" (the cell). While the fundamental code of the DNA (translation to proteins) is fairly consistent across most organisms, the regulatory mechanisms (among other things) which are essential for life vary pretty widely. If you had cells from a closely related organism, you might be able to make it work, but then if you had a closely related organism, it probably wouldn't be so important in the first place.
An (admittedly poor) analogy: If you had a single jpeg file and no knowledge of the jpeg format, how easy would it be to recreate the original image?
Anyway, my point is that it's important to keep in mind that there may be as much information content in the "reader" as in the the "data", even when the data has enough information for the "reader" to construct duplicate "readers".