We might need to preserve seeds again due to climate change. Impressive to read about those who literally sacrificed their life during a siege for science and the future of humanity. Thanks for sharing.
Seed banks are mostly self-refreshing. Seed viability decline during storage is measured and modelled for. A sample of seeds is taken out of storage and grown to breed a new batch of seeds after an amount of time based on the rate of decline of that sample.
So a batch that loses 20% viability every 5 years will be regrown to seed after a shorter amount of time than one that loses 2% viability every 5 years.
Source: was a seed germination and dormancy researcher at the Millennium Seed Bank
I'm the context of this comment chain, you're agreeing with the parent comment with a tone of disagreement. Yes, seed banks need periodic attention (whether you call that refreshing or self-refreshing or whatever), so you couldn't stick a bunch of seeds on the moon and just leave them there.
My understanding is you could have a fantastic apple seed, grow it into a fantastic tree with fantastic fruit, but then the next generation grown from its seeds might be nearly inedible. And that all the delicious fruit we eat comes from grafted trees as a result of this.
Also, more generally, lots of trees are huge, so presumably you aren’t growing them in a cave or mine shaft. How is that handled?
Yeah but even if the viability decline was quite slow on the moon, you would still have to refresh _eventually_, at least that's how I understand what you wrote.
Are we going to have robots on the moon doing the refreshing? That would be cool.
There are relatively serious plans for permanent habitation on the moon. Transporting seeds occasionally hopefully won't require launching a lot of mass, but I don't know how many seeds they store.
Ideally yes but scientists have grown crops from single seeds that are thousands of years old so as long as the facilities passively maintain a low temperature, many of them will be viable for a very long time.
um, a normal one? it looks exactly what I've seen on my grandmother's garden patch in my childhood. It's just that size is not very practical for supermarkets and a small family consumption, so current selection and harvesting methods go in the opposite direction.
ah yes, the Soviet Union that turned a country that was still feudal in the 20th century into a country that sent the first human to space 50 years later for sure was very against science.
I actually overall agree with your point, but to be fair the off topic remark probably was targeted at this bit of pseudoscience that unfortunately dominated Soviet politics for decades, and its influence in Soviet and Chinese agricultural policy ultimately contributed to the death of millions of people
Note that Nikolai Vavilov, a scientist that preserved the seedbank cited in the Guardian article, was actually purged due to Lysenko's crusade against genetics
> Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. In 1955, his death sentence was retroactively pardoned under Nikita Khrushchev. By the late 1950s, his reputation was publicly rehabilitated, and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.[4]
Turing was punished (effectively tortured to death) for his sexuality. While awful and indefensible, the difference is that he was not punished for his scientific / engineering work. There are countless examples of soviet scientists exiled or executed because their research agenda or conclusions conflicted with state ideology in a given period. You'd be hard pressed to find similar examples in the West. Although there have been examples in recent decades of scientists being silenced by right wing administrations - particularly around climate change related public communication. Funding can of course be politically directed and denied. But imprisonment or execution for studying the 'wrong' thing? Not one of the many flaws of Western hypercapitalism.
>But imprisonment or execution for studying the 'wrong' thing?
This is extremely simple. Israel openly and proudly kills Iranian scientists, at least 5 were killed in last decades, precisely for the reason of their scientific work.
What, there are other reasons why this is a very right thing to do, am I right? I guess you will present me with lots of reasons why these scientists should have been killed.
We clearly got Good and Bad scientists in this world. The ones that the West kills are Bad.
The ones that USSR once killed are Good.
> This is extremely simple. Israel openly and proudly kills Iranian scientists, at least 5 were killed in last decades, precisely for the reason of their scientific work.
Israel and Iran are antagonistic nations in an active military conflict - this is a really bad counterexample. I'd never defend Israel's actions militarily, but all countries attempt to disrupt the military programmes of their adversaries in secret. Often violently. This is absolutely not comparable to murdering their own scientists for carrying out research.
Side note - the assumption that the opinions of others will neatly fall into a packet of predictable (and hence easily refutable) tribal signifiers, is itself a forms of defensive tribalism. 'See you expressed opinion x, you obviously believe y and z, therefore your perspective is on no value'. This approach avoids engaging with the discussion itself and achieves little.
Specifically to the point you mention - I'm not American, and hence outside the media bubble disguising / legitimating Israeli genocide. That should have no impact on our discussion, as its in no way relevant - except as a tribal signal as described above.
If he was punished for his sexuality while being a genius scientist do you really think that makes the UK/West as an example of being pro science and valuing it? Think about it.
