Page 66 - The Secret Museum

incubated to make sure that they are alive and will germinate. Freezer B’s collection

contains a replica of the seeds in Freezer A, but these seeds are never touched; they
stay quietly frozen for the future.

A third freezer is being filled at the moment, and this is just the beginning: there is
space for many more as the seed bank increases its collection. ‘You could get 38
double decker buses in this underground vault,’ says Stuppy. Already these freezers
contain the greatest concentration of plant biodiversity on the planet: 10 per cent of
the world’s wild plant species. In years to come, this will diversify even more. The
MSB is hoping to save 25 per cent by 2020. We went back upstairs for a look at the

incubator rooms, where seeds from Freezer A are periodically grown into seedlings
to make sure that the seeds being stored are still healthy. Each brightly lit incubator is
kept at a different temperature: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25°C (41, 50, 59, 68, 77°F),
depending on the type of plant they are set up to incubate. We popped our heads
inside one; it smelt damp and mouldy. Inside were the seeds of a plant called
Cousinia platylepis, and they were germinating well.

I asked Stuppy what happens to the germinating seeds. ‘They belong to the country
of origin, so they are all destroyed. The only reason for growing them is to make sure

the seeds in the freezer are still alive and healthy,’ he answered. He explained that
bio-piracy is a big problem, which countries want to guard against, so acquiring
seeds from other countries involves lots of contracts and teams of lawyers, and part
of the deal is that no germinating plants will be grown without permission having
been given by the country that sent the seed.

Brazil won’t let anyone keep seeds from its country, because it doesn’t want
anyone to own seeds from Brazil which might be valuable later – a wonder drug
perhaps, as yet to be discovered, that grows in the Amazon. ‘What about other

countries?’ I asked. ‘America doesn’t have a large national seed bank for wild
species (they have many large crop seed banks, though). Svalbard, Norway, only has
crops. The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany, in
China, and the MSB are the two biggest seed banks for wild species in the world’,
Stuppy explained.

In an ideal world, the MSB would not need to exist; instead, the plants contained
in the frozen ark of seeds would be growing naturally in the wild. As it is, the MSB
sees its project as a race against time. Who knows how many life-saving plants are

growing on the Earth that are yet to be discovered? Imagine if one dies out before its
unique properties are found? I wonder how many precious medicines are frozen in
the vaults now.

We’re facing a global emergency. By the end of this century, half the world’s
existing plants could be extinct. It is up to us to change. Our lives depend on plants
for food, fuel, medicine, textiles, chemicals and for the oxygen we breathe. Without
plants, we cannot survive, so why are we not doing more to grow what we can and to
protect what we have? At least the seed bank is giving us options for the future while