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The Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault
Anonymous Cow writes "A giant refrigerated genetic bank built into the island of Svalbard has been brought online. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway is designed to house up to 4.5 million seeds in the case of a catostrophic event. The bank is funded by the Norwegian government, Monsanto Corporation, and the Gates, Rockefeller, and Syngenta Foundations. The Global Crop Diversity Trust has completed construction of the doomsday vault and is getting the facility ready to preserve the genetic heritage of the world's agriculture for future generations. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault's relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring human activity. Spitsbergen was considered ideal due to its lack of tectonic activity and its permafrost, which will aid preservation. Locally mined coal will provide power for refrigeration units which will further cool the seeds to the internationally recommended standard 20 to 30 C."
Crud, when I pasted that correction from the Wikipedia article, it eliminated the negative signs before the degrees. That should read "-20 to -30 C".
Also, I've just skimmed the article, and it has little or no mooring in reality. Consider this, from fairly late in the article:
Holy cow! That's a pretty serious allegation. The article provides a reference at that point. But the reference is a link to somebody's Yahoo mail Inbox. Huh??? In my world, that's not an acceptable standard of evidence. Particularly since it's not even publicly available.
I've never complained about editorial oversight on Slashdot, and it seems fairly pointless to do it now. It just seems weird that they can't even be bothered to filter out the obvious wackos.
There's a lot of difference between -20 to -30 (TFA) and 20 to 30 (summary).
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IAA plant biologist, so I guess I should answer this one.
It depends how exactly they are made "terminator". You can make plants sterile in several ways, and one way used is for example making the male flowers (of corn) sterile. Now such a plant cannot cross-pollinate other plants. However, it is possible (though a bit unlikely) that a wild-type male flower cross-pollinates with your terminator plant. In that case, you would get off-spring. Unless of course, you also made the female flower sterile, or added something that kills off the seed in early stages of development.
Now, suppose that, for some reason, your terminator gene spreads to another strain. This would IMHO have not a big effect. In most crop species, cross-pollination is rare, and if it happens, the offspring will be carrying a gene that makes it less fit (by definition, it makes the plant sterile, or kills the seed). So the changes are very high that such a (artificial) "mutation" (its a transgene actually) goes extinct quickly (there is a high selection pressure against such a gene).
If the gene is recessive (ie, if a wild strain cross with the terminator plant produces viable offspring) it may still survive for some time, but it doesn't do anything.
So it's not dangerous in my opinion, it is quite a good technique. It is just has the lame side-effect (but good for the company) to create a monopoly on the seeds. Of course, if you pay me a *lot* of money, I can find ways around that:P
(which makes me wonder if this is legal. I mean, it is illegal (but stupidly so) to copy their construct that makes the seeds worthwhile, but it is probably not illegal to work around the sterility).
I guess, the ethically sound way of doing this would be to create an inducable fertility. I do not think it has been done yet (but i am not in that field anymore). But in theory it is (relatively) easy nowadays to create genes that are switched on under circumstances. So in other words: if you spray your plant with some alcohol, it becomes fertile.
This would allow you to get a few batches of plants with seeds.