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ANNALS OF AGRICULTURE
SOWING FOR APOCALYPSE
The quest for a global seed bank.
by John Seabrook
AUGUST 27, 2007

Cary Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of some two million varieties of food
plants.
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Correction appended .
cold drizzle was falling over St. Petersburg last March, and the gray morning light filtered
through the grimy windows of the ceremonial rooms of the Vavilov Research Institute of
Plant Industry, one of the oldest seed banks—and the most storied—in the world, situated on St.
Isaac’s Square. In one of the rooms, a woman in a smock sat at a table with a brown packet, and
its contents, pea seeds, spilled out over the table in front of her. She did not look up from sorting
through the seeds as two visitors passed, and, with her lips moving silently, she appeared to be
lost in thought, or prayer.
Cary Fowler had an appointment to meet the director general of the Vavilov Institute,
Nikolai Dzyubenko, in order to discuss the institute’s seeds. Fowler, an American, is the world’s
seed banker. It’s a nebulously defined position, yet a critical one. As the executive director of
the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funds the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway,
Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of about two million varieties of
food plants—both the familiar domesticated crops and many of their wild relatives—in order to
create the first global seed bank.

We tend to imagine apocalypse coming in the form of a bomb, an asteroid, or a tsunami, but
should a catastrophe strike one of the world’s major crops Fowler and his fellow seed bankers
may be all that stand between us and widespread starvation. Any of the diseases currently active
in the United States—the rust fungus attacking soybeans; the potato late blight (the same one
that caused the Irish potato famine), which turns potatoes into a black mass of rot; the Western
bean cutworm, which feeds on corn plants—has the potential to turn into a devastating
nationwide scourge. Should that happen, the only remedy—genetic resistance—might lie in an
obscure variety, stored in a seed bank.
The Vavilov Institute is a monument to the extraordinary sacrifices people have made in
order to save seeds. During the winter of 1941-42, when Hitler’s troops were blockading
Leningrad, cutting off food and supplies, the scientists who worked there protected the seeds
stored inside the buildings, which amounted to several tons of nutritious food, from the starving
Russians outside. At night, thousands of rats would invade the laboratories; the staff guarded the
seed collections with metal rods. When some collections of potatoes needed resowing during
the winter, institute workers found a plot outside Leningrad, near the front. Eventually, much of