Abstract
Ensuring the salvage of future sources is a challenge for plant geneticists and breeders, as well as historians and archivists. Here, this suggestion is illustrated with an account of the emergence, in the mid-20th century, of seed banks. These repositories are intended to enable the conservation of the world's crop genetic diversity against the ‘genetic erosion’ of crops, an unintended consequence of the global uptake of new high-yielding Green Revolution agricultural varieties. Plant breeders and scientists advocated a strategy of freezing and long-term storage of seed which enabled the salvage of genetic diversity for future users without requiring the continual cultivation of old varieties: seed banking could preserve valuable genetic material and enable agricultural modernisation to proceed. This account of crop genetic conservation therefore shows how breeders and geneticists sought to create their own seed archives from whence the evolutionary history of crops could be made accessible in ways that are useful for the future. This analysis suggests that conservation practices are informed by ideas about the future use of material, indicating that there is value in exploring concurrently the archival and historiographical issues relating to the biomolecular big biosciences.
Highlights
This special issue invites us to reflect on the links between the archiving of historical sources of the big molecular biosciences and methodological and historiographical issues relevant to the writing their histories
I explore how seed banks were imagined as a response to the problem of genetic erosion and argue that seed banking was seen to both preserve and make available genetic diversity so that it could be used within the modern paradigm of scientific breeding, working with the shift to more globalised agricultural methods
Seed banks can be seen as archives of genetic diversity that made the past accessible as future sources for scientists and breeders by creating ‘records’ of the evolutionary history of crops through the freezing of seeds
Summary
This special issue invites us to reflect on the links between the archiving of historical sources of the big molecular biosciences and methodological and historiographical issues relevant to the writing their histories This account, that explores seed banks as archives of crop genetic diversity, demonstrates a similar interest in the relationship between preserving records and using them in the natural sciences suggesting that there are parallels between seed banking and ongoing efforts to preserve written and material records of genomic science (discussed by Shaw, this volume). Seed banks can be seen as archives of genetic diversity that made the past accessible as future sources for scientists and breeders by creating ‘records’ of the evolutionary history of crops through the freezing of seeds In this way, the potential value of these resources could be accumulated for extraction at a later date through the use of contemporary technology. The section details the ways in which ex situ conservation was seen to facilitate future use; and Section 6 shows how banking created ‘records’ of seeds, enabling the recall of the evolutionary past of crops and its future retrieval
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