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."

Comments

Monsanto...

[locokamil]

... in charge of saving our agricultural bacon? The same people who tried to bring agricultural holocaust to the developing world with their you-can't-save-our-seeds-for-next-year's-crop shenanigans?

Hopefully their influence will be counterbalanced by some of the less evil groups participating in the project.

Re:Monsanto...

[alshithead]

"... in charge of saving our agricultural bacon?"

Let's be fair. It is their best interests (and ours) to save specimens of original seed stocks. It's always good to be able to look back to see how you got from there to here...and maybe try and fix some huge mistake so you don't get your ass sued into oblivion. Or, worse case scenario, save the world from your "innovations". We should look at this as a plus.

Re:Monsanto...

[svnt]

It's a brilliant plan. After Armageddon the seeds from the vault will produce plants that don't go to seed, and then next season we'll all be forced to buy them from... wait a minute.

Re:Monsanto...

[locokamil]

Please understand that I have no issue with Monsanto making a profit... as long as they do so by creating and selling progressively better products.

Yes, the new drought-resistant, high-yield strains are wonderful things that allow the starving masses to feed 'themselfs'. But by throwing in a genetic time bomb and neutering the crops, Monsanto is in effect resting on its laurels and obviating the need for further innovation.

In fact, it's nothing more than genetic DRM. And in this case, the "DRM == bad" meme is fully and wholly applicable.

Re:Monsanto...

[king-manic]

Let's be fair. It is their best interests (and ours) to save specimens of original seed stocks. It's always good to be able to look back to see how you got from there to here...and maybe try and fix some huge mistake so you don't get your ass sued into oblivion. Or, worse case scenario, save the world from your "innovations". We should look at this as a plus. It's like a back-up of your thesis project just before you attempt to rewrite the kernel after 8 beers.

Re:Monsanto...

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Though I'm a seed saver myself, and thus am at odds with Monsanto's terminator technology (and GM in general), terminator seeds are probably quite a useful way to stop GM seeds spreading into the rest of the environment. I mean, that's one of the main arguments against GM: that GM crops may breed with other crops and weeds, creating unwanted effects, or exposing effects that might not have been apparent in the short period of testing available. Making GM crops sterile reduces the validity of this argument.

Re:Monsanto...

[wizardforce]

... in charge of saving our agricultural bacon? The same people who tried to bring agricultural holocaust to the developing world with their you-can't-save-our-seeds-for-next-year's-crop shenanigans?

If we are ever stupid enough not to build up a back up vault and Monsanto is our only hope, then shame on us.

Re:Monsanto...

[spud603]

Genuine question:
Can terminator plants cross-pollinate with other strains? What effect does/would this have?
Is it at the pollen step or the seed step that they are sterile?

I'm not a biologist by any stretch, so I'm really just curious.

Re:Monsanto...

[spud603]

Reduces, but does not eliminate. Everything living can evolve.

Sorry, this is just not true. Two conditions are needed for evolution, neither one of which is life:

1. reproduction
2. mutation

Re:Monsanto...

[alshithead]

"Do I want Monsanto goons having access to the only safe seed left? Hell no. Ever hear of blackmail? What if the only viable unmodified corn was here, and Monsanto 'kidnaps' it. Maybe not for ransom, but for power."

Wait while affix my tinfoil hat...okay, I can agree to a certain point. If you're really that worried then buy some Monsanto stock. That way you win too.

"Now that I think of it, if you wanted to preserve DATA about the DNA, that would be easier maybe than preserving the actual DNA."

With tinfoil hat still firmly in place...how does that save you in an apocalyptic scenario? Where does the technology come into play that gives us a good starting point with seed stock if the technology to manipulate DNA isn't available because of the collapse of civilization? :)

Re:Monsanto...

[ockegheim]

Putting Monsanto in charge of the last remaining anything is like putting Kirstie Alley in charge of the last remaining cookies. Except that Kirstie Alley isn't pure evil.

Re:Monsanto...

[spud603]

Fair enough. I'll amend to:

1. Reproduction of traits
2. Mutation of traits
3. Selection on traits

Good catch. Without selection you just get, well, change.

Re:Monsanto...

[riker1384]

Something could happen to prevent the farmers in other coutries from getting new seeds from Monsanto. A war, embargo, natural disaster or other event could cut them off from America or the Western world, leaving them unable to grow more food and dooming millions of people to starvation. It would be insane to let this become a widespread method of farming. If something happens in one part of the world you want the rest to be able to carry on.

Re:Monsanto...

[nebosuke]

I have no love for 'Monsatan', but the benefit of biotech research for, e.g., corn is undeniable. Do a quick google search on the subject, and you'll see tons of graphs like those contained in this article.

Ironically enough, organic farming is only economical because of the biotechnology developed and funded by the likes of Pioneer Hi-Bred, and the companies that were amalgamated into Syngenta or Monsanto. Their research is what produced the varieties with such productive genetics compared to the wild progenitor that organic farms of commodity crops can even have a chance of being economical.

Re:Monsanto...

[timmarhy]

You people are unbelievable at times.

This isn't aimed at you personally, but you just confirmed WHY the anti GM food movment is insane.

There was all this bull about GM crops cross pollenating "organic" crops when GM crops were first planted. Monsanto said no, we have engineered the crops so that they can't seed or pollenate to avoid this.

And now your trashing them for the exact thing that everyone jumped up and down and wanted in the first place.

I mean fuck whats a billion dollar company to do? you people want the impossible.

Re:Monsanto...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Monsanto...

[Creepy Crawler]

It was never so simple.

The case you refer to is the African Golden Rice. There were about 70 patent rights locked between 32 companies and universities. Along with that were the Bag Agreements (seed EULAs... Material Transfer Agreements). When seed was sent over to Africa, if they had used them, they would have been bound by MTAs and owed patent rights. If they refused to pay for the patents, they would have been sanctioned by World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

They instead did the proper thing and burned the seed and waited for the 32 groups to settle it themselves. hey did, after they agreed to transfer a non-profit version of a license to Astra-Zeneca so that Africa would not be in violation.

Source: Gepts, Paul."Who owns biodiversity, and how should the owners be compensated?" Plant Physiology 134 (2004): 1295-1307. 28 Jan. 2004

Re:Monsanto...

[timmarhy]

nothing you have said there has anything to do with GM crops, and everything to do with patent law, which i readily agree is fucked.

Re:Monsanto...

[Anonymous Coward]

---your posting as AC so your argument loses a lot of it's weight right there, but lets say your protecting your job....

Not insomuch as to protect my job, but to make sure that the companies I work for don't see my name on this.

---1. whats the enzyme they use?

There's plenty of enzymes used in these procedures. The repressor gene is Tn10 with a CMV 35S promoter. Tetracycline inhibits reprssor binding, allowing expression of the cat(chloramphenicol acetyltransferase) or gus(beta-glucuronidase) gene.

What they use before they sell to farmers is tetracycline... Last I checked, that is not an enzyme.

---2. you still don't explain how sterile plants are going to pollenate anything.

I'll have to get back with you on that. I've lost the reference in which describes a pathway in which terminator genes can be continued. I'll soon post the link to the article in which I cited.

Re:Monsanto...

[CFowler]

I hate to be the one to spoil a good rumor, and just when it was just taking off....but, there are several factual errors in the report that started this thread. Let me just cite the one that has gained the most traction on this board: Monsanto is NOT involved in funding the Seed Vault, directly or indirectly. Not a penny. The Vault is being built by Norway and paid for by the government, 100%. The operating costs will be paid by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Norway, 100%. (at a MUCH lower cost than reported in some media) How do I know all of this? I am the Executive Director of the Trust. We receive NO funding from Monsanto, neither does the Norwegian government! Monsanto has had no involvement in the planning, implementation or funding of the facility. None. I am not even sure they know about it. No one I know has ever talked to them about it, or gotten communication from them about it...and I have been involved from the beginning. The Seed Vault has been endorsed by more than 165 countries at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. There will be an international advisory council. The aims, the operating procedures, etc. are all quite public. The Seed Vault's purpose is to provide insurance against the loss of biodiversity held in seed banks around the world, such as the loss that took place last year when a typhoon severely damaged the national seed bank of the Philippines. (I am visiting that facility at this moment - the Trust helped the Philippines rescue what remained of their collection last year.) I can only urge people to do their homework, and not be quite so quick to jump to conclusions, not be quite so quick to fall back on conspiracy theories, and not be quite so quick to condemn one of the few positive initiatives in this world to safeguard the diversity of an important natural resource for future generations. As hard as it might be to believe in these troubled times, some people really are looking ahead and trying to do positive things to safeguard humanity. For more information, see: www.croptrust.org Thanks for taking the time to consider the situation.

License required

[fabu10u$]

Will Monsanto's attorneys survive the apocalypse to collect license fees for the patented GM technology in the seeds?

Coal - refrigerate & coal - global warming

[alexandre]

Coal to refrigerate seeds against a catastrophic worlwide ecological disaster in part caused by a large amount of coal?

makes sense... :P

Re:Coal - refrigerate & coal - global warming

[edwardpickman]

Of course it makes sense. You don't want all that time and money wasted. Why not graze some cattle on the land to help spike the ball with some methane?

Biased Article

[myrdos2]

That article seems a little over the edge. He calls molecular biology a pseudo-science, dismisses the nobel peace prize, and claims the the green revolution was an under-handed plot by the US to turn foreign workers into a cheap labor pool. It's full of insinuations and hints towards a sinister secret agenda. I didn't bother to read the whole thing, as the craziness level was far beyond acceptable thresholds.

Summary Incomplete

[Selanit]

The summary has been partially copied from the linked Wikipedia article, but it cuts off unexpectedly. The summary ends with "cool the seeds to the internationally." Which makes no sense. The full version from the Wikipedia article is "cool the seeds to the internationally-recommended standard 20 to 30 C."

Re:Summary Incomplete

[Selanit]

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:

Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, 'we want to exterminate the Negro population.'

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.

Re:Summary Incomplete

[kartiknarayan]

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

There's something screwed up with the hyperlinks in the superscripts (all of them). But if you scroll down all the way to the references, then number 11 references to: http://www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html, a legit (if somewhat right-leaning) website.

Good idea but...

[canuck57]

Good idea but who is going to be around to plant them?

Re:Good idea but...

[halcyon1234]

Exactly. This is something that should have been built into the system.

I'd much rather see some sort of fail-safe built into this vault. Humans have to periodically check in on the vault and press the button. If they don't press it after, say, 1,000 years, the vault goes into "reseed" mode. It assumes that:

a) Humans are dead, dying, or incapable of reaching the vault

b) Whatever knocked down the humans has dissapated over the last 1000 years, so it is safe for "human friendly" life.

Of course, the 1000 years is arbitrary. I'd let a team of nuke'n'germ warfare folks come up with a number that was greater than the life expectency of thier most powerful kabooms. You could also hook up a Geiger counter to the release switch for an extra layer of protection.

So, after the 1000 years is up, the vault springs into action. It barfs out whatever bacteria is needed to fertilize the land. The it starts shooting seeds-and-spores-and-stuff deployment packages across the globe. The SSS packages burst over land, raining seeds. This may have to be done in stages. Seed the keystone species of plants first, then once those have grown, fire off the strawberries and lilacs.

The objective is to load up the vault with enough human-friendly stuff as possible. Plants that put out oxygen. Trees that have leaves, fruit, roots that are edible by human. Environmental engineer species. If humans are alive, life will get better for them. If humans have been wiped out, the packages should recreate an environment condusive to human life once more. Sure, humans might not be a dominant species for hundreds or hundreds of thousands of years, but the scales would be tipped in their favour.

Heck, while we're at it, we might as well put as much data into the vault as possible. The complete history of humans in as many languages as possible (including all the screw-ups that lead to extinction). Put in as many Rosetta Stones as possible. Put frozen humans in there, too, so future generations (hopefully) don't think aliens seeded the planet.

Re:Good idea but...

[halcyon1234]

I don't see why there'd need to be too much power for the full 1000 years. The countdown "watcher" could be just a simple logic switch with a stop watch attached to it. My digital watch runs for a year on a tiny little battery. Throw a big huge battery in the Watcher and let it run. Hook it up to something that will trickle-charge it for good measure-- solar, or geotherm, etc. Or do away with electricity all together. Have it hooked up to 100 clockwork devices that will run down in 1000 years if not wound. If 2/3s of them stop, Seed activates. Or get something with a half-life of 1000 years and put it on a pressure switch that will trigger at half-mass.

The trigger mechanism, I concede, would take more power to run, but since it will only turn one once to blow its load, the power source doesn't have to be too plentiful, and it doesn't have to last the full 1000 years. A whole bunch of fuel-powered generators that are turned on by the Watcher. They fire up, expend their energy getting Seed going, and then die.

Now, the real bitch of it all would be if disaster hit, and all the surviving humans knew of the vault was legends of old-- every ten years, valiant warriors must trek to the north to the devise that is to keep the Earth full of life, an wind the Magical Switch to keep The Great One going. =)

Re:Good idea but...

[antdude]

I suggest 4 8 15 16 23 42 numbers to reset every 108 minutes. :D

Re:Good idea but...

[tchdab1]

The seed vault needs to be constructed in a polar area (for cooling) and just downstream of a large water body, a river/lake, that has been dammed up. The dam must be built to need human maintenance every 100 years or so.

Should humans disappear, the dam breaks, busting open the seed vault and washing them out to germinate and get dispersed.

Or something.

Re:Good idea but...

[tm2b]

First, there are over 6 BILLION ppl on this planet. What would it take to wipe us all out?

Good virtual sex and a hundred years. Less, if food delivery can't be automated.

Re:Good idea but...

[LordLucless]

There also has to be enough oompf to power the preservation systems for 1000 years. Temperature and humidity control along are going to be big drainers, and you really don't want all your carefully-stored seed sprouting and dying twenty years after you pack em all away.

Old news and FUD

[drunken_boxer777]

This is old news.

The linked article in the summary looks like a lot of FUD to me. Read at your own risk.

From the article:

The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. ... There will be no full-time staff...

My question is, if there is a doomsday event, how do we get in?

Re:Old news and FUD

[chill]

What is the Elvish word for "friend"?

What about moisture damage?

[PrescriptionWarning]

I recall reading about a vault made in the 50's that was recently opened, and stored inside was some vintage car that had turned into a rust bucket due to the moisture which somehow got into the vault... now maybe technology of today is a little better for sealing things off but how long can you really keep a seed safe from the damage that the mere passing of time can cause unless you put it in cryo stasis with a power source that will last a very long time?

Re:What about moisture damage?

[Scrameustache]

how long can you really keep a seed safe from the damage that the mere passing of time can cause unless you put it in cryo stasis with a power source that will last a very long time? Thousands of years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed

I remember reading about this...

[KefabiMe]

They hope to have a couple packets of seeds of at least 100,000 plant species. It's supposed to survive most anything, being underground and out of the way. The place is fully automated with live video feeds being able to be viewed off-site. This thing is quite literally a refrigerated gigantic robotic filing cabinet with heavy-duty security!

Re:I remember reading about this...

[Derek Loev]

What about more controversial seeds, like Marijuana?

"Well, fuck, it's doomsday! What'll we do now?"

[Junior J. Junior III]

"Don't worry, don't you remember that slashdot article about that vault?"

"What vault?"

"The doomsday seed vault! It'll save us all, we'll have plenty to eat as soon as we can get some crops planted."

"That's great! Where is it?"

"The Arctic circle."

"What?"

"Well, they needed to keep the seeds cold so they'd stay viable."

"How in the fuck are we going to get to the north pole?"

"Um, oh yeah. Peopleburgers it is then."

Re:Global Warming?

[weighn]

What if the doomsday involved global warming, permafrost perma-gone? I guess the assumption is that the "catostrophic event" doesn't render the entire earth a wasteland.

Locally mined coal will provide power for refrigeration units Supreme irony!

The Onion

[p3d0]

You've seen this I hope?

Svalbard = bad idea

[schmidt349]

Svalbard is not exactly the choicest site in the world for something as important as a doomsday seed vault. The island is run by Panserbjørnen and witches!

Re:Svalbard = bad idea

[moosesocks]

The island is run by Panserbjørnen and witches!

One person's witches are another's alternative remedy practitioners.

"Svalbard is completely controlled by the Kingdom of Norway and is part of it. Svalbard has a population of approximately 2,400 people as of 2005. Approximately 70% of the people are Norwegian; the remaining 30% are Russian, Ukrainian and Polish." -- wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

That sound you're hearing is the reference passing straight over your head....

Re:Svalbard = bad idea

[coldcell]

Good, I'm not the only one thinking this "high security seed vault" is really a cover for slicing daemons from children...

I hope it will never actually be needed

[FudRucker]

and i hope they keep Monsanto's genetically modified seed and intellectual property separate from natural seeds, thats all we need in the future is for Monsanto having a monopoly on global food crops...

Re:"Well, fuck, it's doomsday! What'll we do now?"

[weighn]

"Um, oh yeah. Peopleburgers it is then." "Monsanto Seeds are PEOPLE!"

FEED ME COAL

[Todamont]

So what happens when all the people who are supposed to be mining the coal die? No one thought, "hey maybe this thing should run on solar power"?

Plan for Global Domination

[weighn]

...all we need in the future is for Monsanto having a monopoly on global food crops... 1. Acquire patent for nature;
2. Usher in the apocalypse;
3. Rebuild the world under license
4. Name it Monsanto-World (TM)
5. Bwa-hah-hah-hah-hah !!

Who gets access?

[TheLink]

OK say its doomsday or "really really crappy but not enough to be dooms" day.

Who gets access? Only Monsanto, Microsoft and friends?

Not to worry...

[msauve]

Microsoft is in charge of security. Anyone will be able to get in if they want to.

Wait...

[popo]

I can't remember anyone asking *me* to donate. WTF?

Like I'm not important or something?

Margaret Sanger

[Harmonious Botch]

Actually, if we cut them a little slack for a munged link, and for misspelling 'rabid', the article is basically correct. Sanger was a follower of Robert Malthus, who is best known for prophecying overpopulation doom. What he is less known for is his proposed solution to the alleged problem. He suggested that the 'inferior races' be prevented from expanding. Only wholesome, Anglo-Saxon christians would reproduce.

Where's the minus sign?

[ChrisMaple]

There's a lot of difference between -20 to -30 (TFA) and 20 to 30 (summary).

It's -20 to -30 C you stupid monkey!

[ugmoe]

It's -20 to -30 C not +20 to +30 C you stupid monkey!

Are you so stupid that you can't even read Wikipedia?

I've got an idea

[ILuvRamen]

Let's dump a backup of all Slashdot stories and all seasons of Stargate SG-1 in there too. You know, just in case.

Re:Old News

[boarder8925]

But as a poster above pointed out, this story has been on Slashdot twice already.

Maybe for now, but...

[Valdrax]

Yes, the new drought-resistant, high-yield strains are wonderful things that allow the starving masses to feed 'themselfs'. But by throwing in a genetic time bomb and neutering the crops, Monsanto is in effect resting on its laurels and obviating the need for further innovation.

Maybe for now, but patents expire. Someone's going to make a small bundle by making terminator-free varieties once the patents on them expire. Of course, by then, we'll have an entire generation of farmers used to paying the piper for their seeds, and I'm sure that Monsanto will have something new to offer by the end of 20 years.

Re:Maybe for now, but...

[Opportunist]

Who will? Developing countries that have hardly the means to develop their own crops, not to mention reverse engineering ones that exist?

This is, if anything, creating more dependency for those countries on the seed vendors. Now they have seeds that will create more seeds next year. It's not high yield, but it does at least give them some independence. With terminator crops, they become fully dependent on the company selling them the seeds.

I wouldn't really call that an improvement.

It's all relative

[NotQuiteReal]

One species' "doomsday" is another species chance to thrive. I don't see any giant reptiles bitching over their fate now, do I?

Just think how pissed you'd be if a bunch of velociraptors popped out of some jurassic "doomsday" vault next week and started chomping down on your homo sapiens brethren?

Think about the long term. Modern Humans have been around for as few as 6000 years according to some folks, as long as a few hundred thousand years, maybe a bit more, according to more rational minds.

The same rational minds that put the age of the universe several orders of magnitude greater.

One way or the other, what's the difference?

Flaws

[thatskinnyguy]

I see many many flaws with this.

First off, Svalbard? How in the hell would anyone, if anyone exists, post-epoch get to such a remote place?

Second, coal-powered? I mean, sure the Soviets mined it there for years and the Norwegians still do. But if we are at a point to use the doomsday seed thing, the Norwegians would have been long extinct along with the rest of the world. No coal, no perfectly conditioned environment for keeping dormant seeds.

I've read some people offer the suggestion of solar power. That's nice and all. Except there is the nuclear winter doomsday hypothesis. So that might be out of the question.

Nuclear power would require too much maintenance to power the refrigerators. And with no people left, totally out of the question.

Geothermal would probably be the most reliable source of power for the facility. But that brings me to my next point...

If there are going to be a doomsday apocalypse, why even bother with seeding the planet?

Seed stores already out there.

[esocid]

There are seed stores all over the world, some refrigerated, some not. Most governments do it to prevent the genetic variability of our world's crops from dropping to zero, as well as restoring our crops if there does happen to be a disease outbreak that targets specific species of plants, especially those which are so genetically similar.
So much of the world's cereal crops are dangerously similar, due to the fact that everyone wants GMOs (genetically modified organisms) that are disease resistant, insecticide resistant, drought resistant, or infused with certain genes to deter insects. The downfall to that is the fact that you get practically no variation to select for survivability to future diseases, weeds, and insects, or to withstand pandemics or epidemics of disease.
Last I heard, Mexico banned the use of GMOs for corn farmers so that the huge staple of their diet would be reliable in the future, however since corn is an airborne pollinator some crops had been germinated from US GMO corn crops and were burned. They are pretty strict on that, and I'm just hoping a blight doesn't destroy our corn and soybean crops, the two least genetically variable crops that we grow here.

Stupid Location

[E 99]

IMO the most likely scenario where the seed bank would be needed is when the human race eventually tries to restart agriculture after the start of the next ice age. Yet when that happens, it's very likely that this island could be under a mile-thick ice sheet. That doesn't seem like the best location.

20 to 30 C??

[amper]

Wait, this place is only about 1100 km from the North Pole, and they have to run refrigeration to get the temps down to 25 degrees Celsius? Man, that global warming is brutal!

I assume you meant to say 20 to 30 K, no?

And reseed to what end? Just for the hell of it?

[SuperKendall]

If they don't press it after, say, 1,000 years, the vault goes into "reseed" mode.

And totally fuck up whatever plant life is around 1000 years from now. If there are no humans, what the hell do you need to go throwing noxious weeds like strawberries around, choking out one thousand years of evolution and bringing disease from our time in the form of mold spores to things that have had a thousand years to forget everything they knew about THAT particular strain.

If there are humans around, they can intelligently manage the revival of whatever species might exist. If not, they it makes a nice collection for an alien botanist who happens to land here. Just going into reseed mode without thought is like use sending up the contents of my vacuum bag with the next Mars mission and dumping it all over the ground there.

And before you dream about something that wakes up in 1000 years and starts throwing packets "all over the globe", you should really read The Clock of the Long Now and reconsider what you are saying.

I always thought that when digging that thing

[dominux]

it would be rather ironic if they discovered a gigantic underground vault full of Jurassic plants left by the dinosaurs for future civilizations in the event of a large extinction event.

just great

[SoyChemist]

Monsanto is involved with this, so after the apocalypse, Indian peasant farmers will still be taking it in the shorts from big corporations.

Re: Craziness Level

[giafly]

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the 'defining gene sequence' which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler's eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.

That article seems a little over the edge.

All it needs is the block capitals.

Pollenation

[deets]

What happens to the plants once all of the pollenators are gone? Also, a lot of seeds require special conditions to be viable (i.e. passing through the digestive track of animals).

Seed potatoes are potatoes but potato seeds aren't

[douglips]

Apparently you can use true potato seeds to grow seed potatoes.
http://www.growseed.org/potato-breeding.html
Quote:

TPS-true potato seed-is harvested from the berries that grow among the foliage of potato plants. An average plant produces dozens of berries, each of which contains hundreds of tiny seeds. Similar in appearance to tomato seed, TPS is usually sown in seedbeds three or four weeks prior to the potato planting season. The plants in the beds produce small tubers, sometimes called tuberlets, which farmers plant in the field much as they would conventional seed tubers.

This practice sidesteps much of the drudgery involved in handling heavy seed tube[r]s, provides farmers with vigorous disease-free seed, and eliminates the need to store part of the previous year's crop for following year's planting. Many of the production problems that potato farmers experience result from the deterioration of the seed tubers they save for planting, storing them for eight to nine months in inadequate storage facilities.

Cool or Hot Seeds?

[carsurf]

Preserving the seeds at 20-30 degrees C seems a little bit hot to me are you not sure its -20 to -30 degrees C?