C. Flower
30-08-2010, 01:22 PM
http://www.physorg.com/news201546645.html
Haven't time to do justice with this, but a bad post is better than none - a Russian seed bank dating from the 1920s is under imminent threat to housing development - In WW2, the seed bank was saved even though people were starving to death. Defenders of the seedbank say that it is an irreplaceable source of biodiversity, needed more than ever as climate change is putting pressures on crops.
Bioversity International, also based in Rome, said its general director wrote to Medvedev asking him to intervene.
"The fruit and berry varieties that have been stored and studied at Pavlovsk since it was founded have a vital role to play in the future of Russian and global agriculture," Bioversity general director Emile Frison said on the organization's website.
"Russia is currently being ravaged by the hottest summer on record," he said. "That is just a taste of changes to come, and crop diversity will be a vital weapon in the fight to produce enough food in future."
Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said it was "a bitter irony that the single most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity could be about to happen in Russia of all places - the country that invented the modern seed bank."
"The casual decision to destroy Pavlovsk station would forever tarnish a cause that generations of Russian plant scientists have lived, and quite literally, died, to protect," Fowler said on the foundation's website.
The station was founded in 1924 by Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist and geneticist who created the idea of seed banks as repositories of plant diversity that could be used to breed new varieties in response to threats to food production.
During World War II, a dozen Vavilov scientists who had access to the seed bank died from starvation but did not touch the seeds of grain and other crops that could have sustained them, institute spokesman Sergei Alexanyan said. Hundreds of thousands of residents of St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, died during a 900-day siege.
Vavilov himself died of malnutrition in prison in 1943, having criticized the anti-Mendelian genetics concepts of Trofim Lysenko. But Russia has since elevated him to hero status.
Haven't time to do justice with this, but a bad post is better than none - a Russian seed bank dating from the 1920s is under imminent threat to housing development - In WW2, the seed bank was saved even though people were starving to death. Defenders of the seedbank say that it is an irreplaceable source of biodiversity, needed more than ever as climate change is putting pressures on crops.
Bioversity International, also based in Rome, said its general director wrote to Medvedev asking him to intervene.
"The fruit and berry varieties that have been stored and studied at Pavlovsk since it was founded have a vital role to play in the future of Russian and global agriculture," Bioversity general director Emile Frison said on the organization's website.
"Russia is currently being ravaged by the hottest summer on record," he said. "That is just a taste of changes to come, and crop diversity will be a vital weapon in the fight to produce enough food in future."
Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said it was "a bitter irony that the single most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity could be about to happen in Russia of all places - the country that invented the modern seed bank."
"The casual decision to destroy Pavlovsk station would forever tarnish a cause that generations of Russian plant scientists have lived, and quite literally, died, to protect," Fowler said on the foundation's website.
The station was founded in 1924 by Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist and geneticist who created the idea of seed banks as repositories of plant diversity that could be used to breed new varieties in response to threats to food production.
During World War II, a dozen Vavilov scientists who had access to the seed bank died from starvation but did not touch the seeds of grain and other crops that could have sustained them, institute spokesman Sergei Alexanyan said. Hundreds of thousands of residents of St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, died during a 900-day siege.
Vavilov himself died of malnutrition in prison in 1943, having criticized the anti-Mendelian genetics concepts of Trofim Lysenko. But Russia has since elevated him to hero status.