Doomsday Vault for Seeds

It's nice to have a safe repository for millions of seeds, but it won't amount to much if no humans are around to retrieve them, and at the rate Homo fatalis or Homo funestus (the species formerly known as Homo sapiens) is going, there won't be much left but seeds, and insects.

This from the BBC:

Almost 90,000 food crop seed samples have arrived at the "doomsday vault" in the Arctic Circle, as part of its first anniversary celebrations.

The four-tonne shipment takes the number of seeds stored in the frozen repository to more than 20 million.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built 130m (426ft) inside a mountain, aims to protect the world's food crop species against natural and human disasters.

The £5m ($7m) facility took 12 months to build and opened in February 2008.

"The vault was opened last year to ensure that, one day, all of humanity's existing food crop varieties would be safely protected," explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT).

"It's amazing how far we have come towards accomplishing that goal."

The arrival of the latest consignment of seed samples means that the vault, deep inside a mountain on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, is now storing a third of the planet's most important food crop varieties.

Among the anniversary arrivals are 32 varieties of potatoes from Ireland's national gene banks.

It was a lack of diversity among Ireland's potato crops that was believed to have caused the deaths of more than one million people when blight wiped out the nation's potato harvests in the mid-1800s.

The vault, operated by a partnership between the GCDT and the Norwegian government, stores duplicates of seeds held in national collections.

It acts as a fail-safe backup if the original collections are lost or damaged.

"We are especially proud to see such a large number of countries working quickly to provide samples from their collections for safekeeping in the vault," said Norway's Agriculture Minister Lars Peder Brekk.

"It shows that there are situations in the world today capable of transcending politics and inspiring a strong unity of purpose among a diverse community of nations."

As well as the consignment of seeds, experts on climate change and food production have gathered in Longyearbyen for a three-day anniversary conference.

They will examine how climate change threatens global food production, and how crop diversity will improve food security for people in regions that are going to be worst affected.

Frank Loy, an environment adviser to President Obama, said: "When we see research indicating that global warming could diminish maize production by 30% in southern Africa in only 20 years' time, it shows that crop diversity is needed to adapt agriculture to climate change right now.

Bring In Your Dead!

And clone them! Scientists in Japan have cloned mice dead and frozen for sixteen years. Coming up: the Wooly Mammoth, stuff trapped in amber, Walt Disney. The New Scientist has the story, excerpted here [emphasis mine]:

Healthy mice have been cloned from cells from dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years, raising the possibility that endangered species could be cloned from old carcasses that have been tossed in freezers, rather than from living cells frozen using elaborate techniques.

The finding also raises hopes of one day being able to resurrect extinct animals frozen in permafrost, such as the woolly mammoth, . . .

. . .

Despite the excitement surrounding the technique, more research will be needed before it can be used on endangered species, . . . .

What's more, most conservationists agree that cloning should be considered only as a last resort for species such as the northern white rhino, where all other attempts at conservation have failed, says Paul Bartels, manager of BioBankSA at the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa in Pretoria. Nonetheless, he says, he will be asking biologists to start freezing the bodies of endangered species that have died.

"We intend to bring this [finding] to the attention of as many biologists working on endangered species as possible, through circulars, e-mail, newsletters, and talks," he says. . . .

Resurrecting extinct animals would be far trickier. Woolly mammoth carcasses would most likely have frozen and thawed several times over the aeons, which would cause far more damage to the nucleus than a one-off freezing.

Potentially easier would be cloning cryogenically frozen humans, though the consensus among cloning experts is that it would be unethical and dangerous to clone a human. In any case, people who sign up to be cryogenically preserved usually hope to be resuscitated rather than cloned.

Whom to clone, whom to clone (please note grammar). . . . Here's a preliminary list:

Lenin. Hey, these days this guy would be a maverick.
John McCain. Don't you think he's kind of frozen. Maybe his clone would have another chance. Maybe his clone would be a Democrat!
Walt Disney. D'Oh! Turns out he wasn't frozen.

Coming Soon

• Have Your Say: Vote for Candidate Clonees. And . . .
• Whom do we freeze for future cloning? And . . .
• Would you want to be cloned?

Links
The New Scientist | BBC | The Guardian

Homo funestus — The End of Life on Earth

One quarter of all mammalian species on Earth face extinction. One quarter.

So it's an overstatement to say humans are destroying all life on Earth — so far. Still, the narcissistic Homo sapiens may be interested to learn that it is on the endangered list. The BBC has the story on endangered mammals.

My own view for some time has been that Homo sapiens would be better named Homo funestus or Homo fatalis.

We are a modern equivalent of the sabre tooth cat. Our massive brains are the product of competing and incompatible selective pressures. On one hand, a brain well-suited to problem solving, tool creation, etc., serves well to advance the survival of an organism — us — that is otherwise quite ill-adapted — weak, slow, poor vision, poor hearing, poor olfaction, easily hunted. . . .

But, as the history of the past two or three thousand years makes clear, this large brain has also enabled a war-like self-destructiveness. No other species so rapidly annihilates not just one habitat but all of them.

See also

• the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
• CNN story
• New York Times
• Scientific American
  

Rate of Fires in Amazon Rainforest Continues to Increase

The Guardian runs a story on the efforts of Brazil's environment minister to combat the burning of the Amazon rainforest. Biologist E.O. Wilson, among others, have made the case that there is more biodiversity in the Amazon than in the rest of Earth combined.

- Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

- If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

- The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

— E. O. Wilson

(See also this Audubon Magazine article.)