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In a climate-controlled bunker in an unremarkable building in rural Aberdeen, Idaho, there are shelves upon shelves of meticulously labeled boxes of seed. This vault is home to many of the United States’ more than 62,000 genetically unique lines of wheat, collected over the past 127 years from around the world.
Though dormant, these seeds are alive. But unless they are continually cared for and periodically replanted, the lines will die, along with the millenniums of evolutionary history that they embody.
Since its establishment in 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System and the scientists who support it have systematically gathered and maintained the agricultural plant species that undergird our food system in vast collections such as the one in Aberdeen. The collections represent a towering achievement of foresight that food security depends on the availability of diverse plant genetic resources.
In mid-February, Trump administration officials at what has been labeled the Department of Government Efficiency fired some of the highly trained people who do this work. A court order has reinstated them, but it’s unclear when they will be allowed to resume their work. In the meantime, uncertainty around additional staffing and budget cuts, as well as the future of the collections themselves, reigns.
This should unnerve every American who eats. Our food system is only as safe as our ability to respond to the next plant disease or other emergent threat, and a strong N.P.G.S. is central to our preparedness.
To the unkept mind these seem like a waste of space and time and money.
Why genetic material is so important especially today?
I like to think of samples as books, the gene-bank as a library. Today we are inefficient in GM of crops, at least not to the point where we can pick and choose and everything comes out squeaky clean. Complicated process ya know. But with AGI, and general tools in the future, we might be on course to have a pick and choose approach to how we want our crops to act and how to produce, what and in what quantity.
The more samples, the more books, the more data and unique genetic pathways to produce the food, the higher the level of refinement.
Basically these samples are like the data we scrape now and teach the LLMs, but in biology.
Plus, phylogeny (the study of how the genetic code changes) collected between species and over time allows us to paint pictures of past historical trends, such as pollen counts, average CO2, average temperature, and find evidence of drought, eruptions etc, and disease. That can help us with predictions for current and future disasters, can help us explain human and geographical history, and allows us to try to reconstruct what life may have been like.
Plus, seed banks are designed to keep safe a small 'starter' in case of apocalypse, crop failure etc and even without LMMs or GM, we simply want a choice to replenish the crops if we have a disease/climatic change, so we can choose which one seems the most likely to survive in new conditions.
Finally, seed banks seem not a direct victim, but rather a symptom of a wider problem that comes from a spree of firings, shake ups and never-before-seen executive meddling at the level of direct impact. From Pepfar to USAID to WHO to FDA and CDC comms and funding, to NIH grants being revoked, to cancelling the vaccine advisory panel, to H5 and H1 surveillance cuts.... none of these are necessarily 'direct victims' (though science is being attacked from high power officials), but have fallen prey to disinformation and tyrannical cuts- the ramifications are already being felt, disease and health knows no borders, and resistance and outbreaks can't be reversed.