The work is in the hands of Prof. Vavilov. . . . In his travels through Turkestan, Afghanistan and neighbouring countries and by a vast correspondence, collections of seeds of wheat, barley, rye, millet, flax, etc., have been brought together on a great scale. The central office is in Leningrad and occupies a very large building, in great measure a living museum of economic plants as represented by their seeds.
—William Bateson, Science in Russia (1925)
Horsetooth Reservoir fills a six-and-a-half-mile canyon due west of Fort Collins, Colorado. Four dams hold back the water, their high earthen walls clearly visible from various parts of town. Should one or more of them fail, floodwaters would reach the city center in less than thirty minutes, too soon for any organized evacuation. A government study concluded that all or parts of the city, as well as several other communities downstream, “would be severely damaged or destroyed.” Reconstruction and recovery estimates top $6 billion.
There is one building, however, that is expected to do just fine. It lies on the edge of the Colorado State University campus, wedged between the ROTC center and a track-and-field facility. The name on the door reads National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, but most people still know it by its former name: the National Seed Bank. A casual observer would never guess that its nondescript cinderblock walls house laboratories and cryogenic vaults built to withstand earthquakes, blizzards, long-term power outages, and catastrophic fires. And on the off chance that the Horsetooth dams should burst, the building is designed to float.
“There’s a double foundation,” Christina Walters explained as we passed through a wide interior door. “It’s like a building within a building.” The seed collection lies inside that central core, safe from as much as ten feet of floodwaters. “They were thinking about tornadoes, too,” she added. “The walls are reinforced concrete. You couldn’t hurt this place with a Cadillac going 75 miles per hour.”
It’s not clear why anyone would assault the National Seed Bank with a Cadillac, but I laughed at the image. I did a lot of laughing with Chris Walters. An energetic woman of middle years, she talked about seeds with a charming mix of intensity and humor, and after every joke her eyes kept smiling long after the conversation had moved on. “Let’s go in,” she said, and another door whooshed open in front of us. Inside, lights brightened automatically as we walked by rack after rack of long, movable shelves, the type that libraries use to save space. And with more than 2 billion specimens in the collection, space is at a premium at the National Seed Bank.
“We’re part of the Department of Agriculture, so crops are definitely a focus,” Chris explained. The collection includes varieties of every imaginable food plant as well as samples of their closest relatives from the wild. The idea isn’t just to stockpile popular crops, but to save the range of genes that make them useful—from subtleties of flavor and nutrition to drought tolerance or resistance to disease. Seed banks store their thousands of varieties with a larger goal in mind: preserving, and better understanding, diversity itself. “What’s this?” Chris asked, snatching a silver foil bag from the nearest shelf. “Ah, sorghum,” she said. “I love sorghum.”
It’s safe to say that Chris Walters loves more about her job than the sorghum. She started at the seed bank as a postdoctoral fellow in 1986 and worked her way up to supervising the entire research program, from germination to genetics. Like Derek Bewley, she credits her passion for plants to a grandfather who had a farm. Her own family moved a lot and never even planted a garden, but she remembers begging her mother to buy her the little ornamentals sold at grocery stores. “They were just coleus plants,” she said, laughing. “You know, the ones with the purple leaves!” In college, her botanical interests began to focus on seeds, but it wasn’t always smooth sailing. One professor suggested she’d be better off studying “real plants.” But Chris persevered, specializing in desiccation, longevity, and physiology. Thirty years later, there are few people in the world with a better understanding of just what goes on (and what doesn’t) inside a dormant seed.
“I’ve been in here long enough,” she said suddenly, putting the sorghum back and heading for the door. I was happy to follow. Seeds last a lot longer if they’re cold, and massive refrigeration units keep the collection room chilled to a constant 0°F (–18°C). We exited shivering, with clouds of vapor swirling around our feet, and I now understood why the coat rack outside was draped with parkas and winter jackets. The tour continued to another vault below, where seeds were kept even colder in steel vats of liquid nitrogen. “Seeds have different personalities,” Chris told me, and explained how manipulating two critical storage factors, temperature and humidity, helped them find the best fit. When they got it right, the results could be dramatic. A grain of rice might stay viable for three to five years in nature, but could live for two hundred years at the seed bank. Their wheat specimens did even better, on track to last twice that long. “There’s no such thing as immortality,” she qualified. “Nothing lasts forever.” But seeds in a facility like the National Seed Bank come pretty darn close.
When we reached her office, I asked Chris to explain how seeds do it—how a seemingly inert object could survive for so long. Like every other expert I talked with, she immediately pointed out how little we really understand about seeds. But then she honed in on the things that scientists do know. “When a seed dries out, the enzymes slow down and the molecules stop moving,” she explained, shifting piles of books and papers from two chairs so we could find a place to sit down. “Metabolic activity basically grinds to a halt.” Then she produced illustrations, diagrams, and even an electron micrograph of desiccated seed cells. With the water gone, they looked like crumpled plastic sacks clumsily stuffed with lumps. If you’ve ever let your three-year-old bag the groceries, you’ve seen something similar. “It’s a mess in there,” Chris said, “and very hard to study because you can’t see anything.” But Chris’s work does show that the reactions necessary for a plant cell to function, the very basics of metabolism, rely on water. Take out the water and everything stops. Put it back in, and the seed comes alive.
I asked her if a packet of dry soup mix might be a good analogy—it’s just a jumble of stuff, but when you add water you end up with a tasty meal. “Yes, to a point,” she said, and then frowned. “The difference is what happens when you put the water back in. Soup mix gives you soup, a bunch of ingredients floating around at random. In a seed you get organized, functioning cells. Somehow, desiccated seed cells have the ability to remember and regain their structure. That’s unusual. Most cells can’t do it.” Then she looked across at me and the laughter was back in her eyes. “If we dried your cells out and then added water, we’d get soup.”
Luckily for me, and for most members of the animal kingdom, life and reproduction don’t require surviving desiccation. But there are a few creatures who have learned this trick: certain nematodes, rotifers, tardigrades, and a group of tiny crustaceans familiar to generations of comic-book readers. Though they don’t actually wear crowns or lipstick like the pictures in those famous back-page ads, the brine shrimp sold as Sea-Monkeys are no less remarkable. Like seeds, their dried eggs can survive for years—in the wild or in mail-order packets—and their cells remember exactly how to reassemble themselves as soon as they land in a fishbowl. Experts now think that desiccated seeds and Sea-Monkeys have a lot in common, preserving vital functions in a glass-like state within their cells. Medical researchers recently mimicked this system to create the first stable dry vaccines for use in places that lack refrigeration. “Desiccation was definitely the inspiration,” one measles expert told me. They started with brine shrimp, he explained, but had their best results when they suspended live vaccine in myo-insitol, a sugar extracted from rice and nuts.
FIGURE 7.1. A brine shrimp (Artemia salina), one of the few animals whose life cycle includes desiccation and dormancy similar to that found in seeds. Photo © by Hans Hillewaert/CC-BY-SA-3.0. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
The biology of dormancy has implications for everything from pharmaceuticals to space exploration. NASA scientists study seeds to develop new storage and survival strategies for long missions. When astronauts bolted a case of basil seed to the outside of the International Space Station, the dormant little pips did just fine, germinating normally after more than a year of exposure. At the seed bank, however, most research has a more earthbound goal: keeping people fed in a rapidly changing world. Seed banks act as giant libraries of variation that farmers and plant breeders can turn to when certain crop traits are needed. After the 2004 tsunami flooded coastal rice paddies from Indonesia to Sri Lanka, seed banks quickly provided salt-tolerant varieties to replant the fields. And when the Russian wheat aphid threatened America’s grain crops in the 1980s, researchers screened more than 30,000 seed-bank varieties to find the strains with natural resistance. With commercial agriculture increasingly focused on a few, mass-produced crops, seed banks provide an important hedge against disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and the steady loss of food-plant diversity around the world. In the years ahead, they’re also expected to play a vital role in our adjustment to another global trend.
I visited Fort Collins in the middle of May, but it could have been August. The thermometer hovered around 90°F (32°C), setting a string of daily records 20 degrees above the average. Two weeks earlier, another weather record had been set—for snowfall. In that context, my conversation with Chris Walters naturally turned to climate change. “It’s already affecting how we collect and what we collect,” she told me. I asked for an example, and she replied in a flash: “Sorghum. It’s going to be huge.” She explained how this tall, African grass was naturally adapted to a warm climate. “It’s the hot, dry grain, and we’ll all be growing more and more of it.” Planning for that future, the seed bank’s collection already contains 40,000 different sorghum samples.
FIGURE 7.2. This experiment on the International Space Station exposed 3 million basil seeds to the cold vacuum of space for more than a year. Later dispersed to scientists and school groups, the seeds sprouted successfully. PHOTO NASA MISSE 3, COURTESY OF NASA.
If Chris is right, then seed banks will play a key role in the era of climate change, easing our transition to alternative, warm-weather crops. But they also protect agriculture against catastrophic events—wars, natural disasters, or political upheavals that can bring whole farming systems to a halt. In 2008, scientists unveiled a new international seed repository in the Norwegian Arctic. Carved deep into a mountainside in the Svalbard archipelago, it preserves seeds in cold, dry darkness with little need for additional refrigeration or other support from above. “If there are any big problems on the outside,” its founding director noted, “this is going to survive.” Dubbed the “Doomsday Vault,” its opening made headlines around the world.
FIGURE 7.3. Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). A hot-country grain native to Ethiopia, sorghum is expected to become increasingly important as the world adjusts to climate change. The kernels can be ground into flour, fermented to make beer, and even puffed as an alternative to popcorn. ILLUSTRATION © 2014 BY SUZANNE OLIVE.
“Fear sells,” Chris quipped when I mentioned the Svalbard project. But she quickly added that everyone in the seed community was grateful for the publicity. The attention raised the profile of their work and provided a needed boost in the constant struggle for funding. And running a seed bank is anything but cheap. While words like “vault” and “bank” imply simply turning the key and walking away, managing a seed collection requires constant activity. Even in cold storage, the samples steadily degrade and must be checked continuously to make sure they’re still viable. “The original plan was every seven years, but we don’t have the budget for that,” Chris told me when we toured the germination lab. We stopped by a bench where a technician showed us trays of bean seedlings, each sprout carefully wrapped in damp paper towel. “So now we’re on a ten-year cycle . . . but we don’t have the budget for that either!”
Without regular germination tests, the seeds in any given sample could wink out before anyone noticed. “They die from an accumulation of insults,” Chris explained. Small problems add up over time, like the aches and pains that everyone starts to feel as they age. Taken separately, none of these is serious, but when seeds pass a certain threshold their viability suddenly drops off to nothing. The trick lies in catching a sample before that happens, so that the seeds can be planted, grown to maturity, and then harvested to restock the collection. Regenerating older samples can keep a seed collection viable in perpetuity, but with varieties ranging from tropical cashews to winter-hardy kales, no single facility can handle all that planting.
“We don’t do that part here,” Chris said, sounding relieved. Instead, she and her team partner with over twenty regional seed banks and research stations in locations (and climates) as diverse as North Dakota, Texas, California, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. They also collaborate with the seed vault at Svalbard and with an impressive facility for wild species managed by Kew Gardens. In fact, the number of seed banks worldwide is growing rapidly as governments, universities, and private groups recognize the threats posed by declining crop diversity and the loss of native plants. “There are over a thousand of us now,” Chris announced toward the end of our day together. “It’s becoming a movement!” Like any movement, seed banking has its villains and heroes. The villains tend to be faceless—large-scale patterns of habitat loss or trends in global agriculture. But in one case the role of “seed enemy” was played by a very recognizable historical figure: Joseph Stalin. Because when Stalin turned against the scientific community and began jailing Soviet scholars and intellectuals, his victims included the movement’s first and most enduring hero, a brilliant botanist whose work influenced crop breeding for generations and paved the way for every seed bank that followed.
Though he is little known outside botanical circles, many regard Nikolai Vavilov as one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. The son of a wealthy industrialist, he survived the Bolshevik Revolution by virtue of his expertise. V. I. Lenin may have deplored the educated “intelligentsia,” but he also believed in a science-based approach to modernizing Soviet agriculture. During the crippling grain shortages of 1920, Lenin diverted scarce funds from relief efforts to found the Institute of Applied Botany. “The famine to prevent is the next one,” he famously told a colleague, “and the time to begin is now.”
As the institute’s first director, Vavilov received generous support for his plant breeding research and, by extension, his passion for seeds. He traveled widely and gathered samples by the ton, gaining a deep appreciation for how crops such as wheat, barley, corn, and beans varied from place to place—maturing early or late, surviving frosts, or resisting pests and disease. Better than anyone else in his generation, Vavilov understood how these traits could be stored indefinitely, in the form of seeds, and used to breed new varieties. He dreamed of developing crops specifically tailored to Russia’s harsh climate, varieties that would end his country’s persistent and deadly food crises. Within a few years, he transformed a tsarist palace in downtown Leningrad into the world’s largest seed bank and research facility, supported by a staff of hundreds working in field stations across the country.
Unfortunately, Stalin did not share his predecessor’s enthusiasm for scientific crop breeding, and he showed little patience for Vavilov’s time-consuming methods. Soon after Lenin’s death, the seed-bank program—and the Mendelian genetics on which it was based—fell out of favor. When another famine struck the country in 1932, Stalin threw his support behind the “barefoot scientists”—a cadre of untrained proletariat agriculturalists who promised quicker results. Vavilov found his research increasingly thwarted, and he was eventually arrested on trumped-up charges of sabotaging Soviet agriculture. He continued to write about seeds and crop plants in prison until his strength finally failed him. Neglected by his jailors, this champion of feeding the hungry suffered a final irony: he died of starvation.
But while Vavilov languished in prison, his ideas took on a life of their own. Soon seed banks based on the Russian model began springing up around the world. The United States broke ground in Fort Collins at the height of the Cold War, after the Sputnik launch inspired a widespread effort to “catch up” with Soviet science. Nazi Germany pursued a more direct route. During the siege of Leningrad, Hitler dispatched a special commando unit with instructions to secure Vavilov’s seed bank at all costs and bring the collection home to Berlin. The city never fell, but the seed bank still faced a constant threat of looting by the starving populace. At least four devoted workers died from hunger without ever touching the thousands of packets of rice, corn, wheat, and other precious grains in their care.
Surprising stories of seed heroism continue to the present day. As US troops advanced on Baghdad in 2003, Iraqi botanists frantically packed samples of their most important seeds and shipped them to a facility in Aleppo, Syria. Everything that stayed behind was destroyed. Ten years later, the Syrians did the same thing, evacuating their entire collection mere days before Aleppo became a battleground in their own burgeoning war. Unfortunately, no amount of courage can save some collections. Somalia lost its two seed banks during the 1990s; Sandinista rebels looted Nicaragua’s national collection; and invaluable strains of wheat, barley, and sorghum disappeared from Ethiopia’s seed bank during the 1974 war that toppled Haile Selassie.
In light of this history, the high security and Cadillac-proof walls at Fort Collins start to make more sense. But while few people would argue that seeds aren’t worth protecting, I hadn’t heard Chris Walters or anyone else mention a fundamental irony underlying the whole seed-bank movement. Until very recently, crop diversity pretty much took care of itself, maintained by the same farmers, gardeners, and plant tinkerers that developed it in the first place. Wherever people farmed, they bred local varieties and kept them “banked” in their fields, replanting and refining them season after season. Saving that diversity only became an issue after the advent of industrial agriculture, with its focus on high yields from a few varieties grown on a massive scale. As impressive and necessary as seed banks have become, they are in many ways an elaborate fix to a problem of our own making.
“I agree completely,” Chris said when I posed this dilemma. “The best kind of conservation is in situ.” For crops, that means in a farmer’s field; for wild species, it means in a healthy expanse of natural habitat. “But that’s not always possible,” she went on simply, showing the pragmatism that makes her such a good scientist. “Seed banking is something we can do, and so we should. It’s a way of buying time.”
Because of dormancy, boosted by refrigeration, seed banks can indeed buy a great deal of time. But while they will always be a vital resource for plant research and breeding, there is still the question of what they’re buying time for—what changes in human activity would lead to the kind of in situ conservation that Chris was talking about? Part of the answer lies not in a laboratory or a cryogenic tank, but on a small farm outside the town of Decorah, Iowa, population 8,121. There, for nearly forty years, a group of dedicated gardeners have kept thousands of different vegetable varieties growing, not just in their own fields, but in garden plots around the world.
“Our collection is a living collection,” Diane Ott Whealy told me. “Heirloom vegetables aren’t like heirloom furniture or jewelry—you can’t just take them out once in a while and dust them off. The best way to preserve these seeds is to plant them.”
I reached Whealy at her office on the farm, an audibly busy place where people interrupted our conversation regularly to ask questions or schedule meetings. Like Fort Collins, the facility at Decorah boasts climate-controlled rooms generously stocked with seeds. But unlike the government establishment, Whealy’s group also runs an 890-acre farm, operates a mail-order seed business, and coordinates a growing global network of “backyard preservationists.” If Chris Walters can call 1,000 seed banks a movement, then the 13,000 members of the Seed Savers Exchange should count as a revolution. “We’re a people’s seed bank,” Diane said simply, “dedicated to identifying, preserving, and distributing heirloom vegetables.” But while she and her colleagues do maintain a traditional collection (with duplicate samples at Fort Collins and Svalbard), their overarching goal is to reconnect seeds with people, helping gardeners and farmers collect, trade, and, most importantly, plant heirloom seeds, year after year.
Diane and her then-husband, Kent Whealy, founded Seed Savers in 1975, inspired in part by the seeds of an unusual purple morning glory she inherited from her grandfather. (“That morning glory has a lot of personality,” she told me. “Just like grandpa.”) From a card table in their living room, the project quickly grew into a worldwide network of passionate seed collectors. “There’s a great emotional attachment to seeds,” she explained. “When people started sending us samples, they often included a recipe. Yes, they wanted their varieties preserved, but they also wanted them to be grown, harvested, eaten—celebrated as food!” From the beginning, people also joined the exchange to meet other seed savers. An annual picnic evolved into a three-day seed conference and festival, and the exchange’s first seventeen-page newsletter grew into a tome the size of a phonebook listing more than 6,000 varieties for sale or trade, many of them available nowhere else.
From a biological perspective, Seed Savers provides a vital complement to the effort at Fort Collins. The larger facility holds a vast diversity, but it’s one that rarely changes—the seeds are only grown when the staff needs to restock the shelves. “Keeping seeds planted allows those varieties to continue adapting,” Diane explained. “Even without climate change, plants need to adjust to local conditions.” By virtue of their constant gardening, the seed savers do more than maintain garden diversity. They’re allowing the plants to evolve, helping create new variation that will stock the gardens and seed banks of the future.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Diane if she could envision a time when the work would be through, when enough people would be planting enough varieties to make seed banks unnecessary. “No, it’s never done,” she said, and laughed with the ease of someone who has found her calling. “We’ll be seed pushers forever.”
Part of the success of the Seed Savers Exchange lies in the willingness—even eagerness—of its membership. Any gardener, or anyone who has lived with a gardener, knows that planting and harvest are only part of the process. In our household, one of the most exciting gardening moments of the year comes in the dead of winter, with the arrival of the seed catalogs (including the hefty Seed Savers Yearbook). For Eliza, this marks the official start of a new season. While cold rain and windstorms rage outside, she pages contentedly through thousands of different vegetable and flower varieties, choosing the next year’s crops. Noah loves these catalogs, too, and it’s not unusual to find a few well-thumbed copies mixed in with Goodnight Moon, Make Way for Ducklings, and the other classics tucked beside his bed.
Though fascinated by anything to do with seeds, I consider myself less a gardener than a garden “enabler.” For Eliza (and now Noah), gardening is both passion and pleasure, a fruitful addiction that I’m happy to support. If I focus on splitting firewood, cutting grass, and other household chores, it frees up more time for them to spend in our ever-expanding garden. And since we all share in the harvest of delicious fruits, vegetables, and berries, the arrangement works quite nicely. There is one patch of ground, however, that I help cultivate every year.
Like Eliza, my mother had a passion for gardening, and like me, my father always played a greater role in eating the produce than he did in the watering and weeding. But since Mom died, Noah and I have visited my dad every springtime to help him replant her garden, at least in part. Dad and I take solace in tilling and sowing the same soil she once worked, and in Noah’s unbridled enthusiasm for the whole affair. It’s a ritual of remembrance enriched by the curious biology of seeds—by dormancy, and the desire to coax life from something that appears so lifeless. That abiding mystery often brings even the most serious discussions of seed science to a place where fact meets philosophy.
Before leaving Fort Collins, I asked Chris once again to help me understand the metabolism of a dormant seed. Carol Baskin had told me that the cells were still active, but at a very reduced level. Chris held a different view. Dormant seeds do change over time, she admitted, but it wasn’t necessarily a sign of cell activity in the traditional sense. “I think what we’re seeing is just the natural breakdown of organic compounds,” she said, her years of chemistry coming to the fore. “It’s like an expiration date on a prescription medicine. The chemicals in the drug simply degrade until they stop working. Seeds are the same way.”
I knew Chris was speaking from experience. She had an entire research program devoted to measuring the air around seeds, documenting changes in the chemical signatures they give off as they age. But it still bothered me. How could seeds be alive without any discernable metabolic activity?
“I’ll answer that question with a question,” she said immediately. “Does metabolism define life? If seeds are alive but aren’t metabolizing, then maybe we need to rethink our definition of what it means to be alive.”
After decades of study and thousands of years of planting and harvest, seeds retain the ability to challenge our most basic ideas. That makes them fascinating not only as a research topic, but also as a metaphor for life and renewal. It’s no coincidence that “seed” appears in more than three hundred English words and phrases, from the obvious seed-corn (grain saved for planting) to the less intuitive hag-seeds (the children of a witch). In fact, you could say that Chris had left me with a thought-seed, the kernel of a notion that may yet sprout, blossom, and bear fruit. I’m still thinking about what she said, because the only way to really know if a seed is alive, even at the National Seed Bank, is to plant it and see if it grows.
While people may speculate about the life contained in seeds, the flowers, shrubs, herbs, and trees that produce them have no room for doubt. Their faith is evolutionary and absolute. Nothing shows that better than the topic we’ll turn to next, the incredible (and incredibly useful) ways that plants defend their seeds. That spark of dormant life may be hidden and hard to measure, but mother plants will do almost anything to protect it.
