Jonathan Drori: Why we're storing billions of seeds

48,741 views ・ 2009-05-28

TED


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00:12
All human life,
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all life, depends on plants.
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Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds.
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Just think for a moment.
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It doesn't matter whether you live in a small African village,
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or you live in a big city,
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everything comes back to plants in the end:
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whether it's for the food, the medicine,
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the fuel, the construction, the clothing, all the obvious things;
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or whether it's for the spiritual and recreational things
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that matter to us so much;
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or whether it's soil formation,
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or the effect on the atmosphere,
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or primary production.
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Damn it, even the books here are made out of plants.
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All these things, they come back to plants.
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And without them we wouldn't be here.
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Now plants are under threat.
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They're under threat because of changing climate.
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And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet
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with people like us.
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And people like us want to do things that destroy plants,
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and their habitats.
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And whether that's because of food production,
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or because of the introduction of alien plants
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into places that they really oughtn't be,
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or because of habitats being used for other purposes --
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all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt,
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or die, or move.
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And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move
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because there might be cities and other things in the way.
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So if all human life depends on plants,
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doesn't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them?
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I think it does.
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And I want to tell you about a project to save plants.
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And the way that you save plants
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is by storing seeds.
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Because seeds, in all their diverse glory,
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are plants' futures.
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All the genetic information for future generations of plants
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are held in seeds.
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So here is the building;
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it looks rather unassuming, really.
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But it goes down below ground many stories.
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And it's the largest seed bank in the world.
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It exists not only in southern England,
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but distributed around the world. I'll come to that.
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This is a nuclear-proof facility.
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God forbid that it should have to withstand that.
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So if you're going to build a seed bank, you have to decide
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what you're going to store in it. Right?
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And we decided that what we want to store first of all,
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are the species that are most under threat.
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And those are the dry land species.
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So first of all we did deals
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with 50 different countries.
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It means negotiating with heads of state,
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and with secretaries of state in 50 countries
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to sign treaties.
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We have 120 partner institutions all over the world,
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in all those countries colored orange.
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People come from all over the world to learn,
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and then they go away and plan exactly how
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they're going to collect these seeds.
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They have thousands of people all over the world
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tagging places where those plants are said to exist.
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They search for them. They find them in flower.
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And they go back when their seeds have arrived.
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03:02
And they collect the seeds. All over the world.
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The seeds -- some of if is very untechnical.
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You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off.
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You label them. You do some high-tech things here and there,
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some low-tech things here and there.
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And the main thing is that you have to dry them
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very carefully, at low temperature.
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And then you have to store them
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at about minus 20 degrees C --
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that's about minus four Fahrenheit, I think --
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with a very critically low moisture content.
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And these seeds will be able to germinate,
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we believe, with many of the species,
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in thousands of years,
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and certainly in hundreds of years.
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It's no good storing the seeds if you don't know they're still viable.
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So every 10 years we do germination tests
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on every sample of seeds that we have.
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And this is a distributed network.
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So all around the world people are doing the same thing.
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And that enables us to develop germination protocols.
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That means that we know the right combination of heat
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and cold and the cycles that you have to get
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to make the seed germinate.
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And that is very useful information.
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And then we grow these things,
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and we tell people, back in the countries where these seeds have come from,
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"Look, actually we're not just storing this
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to get the seeds later,
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but we can give you this information about
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how to germinate these difficult plants."
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And that's already happening.
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So where have we got to?
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I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed --
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that's three thousand millionth seed --
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is now stored.
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Ten percent of all plant species on the planet,
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24,000 species are safe;
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30,000 species, if we get the funding, by next year.
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Twenty-five percent of all the world's plants, by 2020.
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These are not just crop plants,
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as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway --
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fantastic work there.
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This is at least 100 times bigger.
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05:00
We have thousands of collections that have been sent out
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all over the world:
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drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt;
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especially photosynthetic-efficient plants
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come here to the United States;
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salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia;
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the list goes on and on.
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These seeds are used for restoration.
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So in habitats that have already been damaged,
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like the tall grass prairie here in the USA,
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or in mined land in various countries,
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restoration is already happening because of these species --
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and because of this collection.
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Some of these plants, like the ones on the bottom
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to the left of your screen,
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they are down to the last few remaining members.
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The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck,
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that is down to about 30 last remaining trees.
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Fantastically useful plant,
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both for protein and for medicine.
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We have training going on in China, in the USA,
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and many other countries.
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How much does it cost?
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2,800 dollars per species is the average.
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I think that's cheap, at the price.
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And that gets you all the scientific data
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that goes with it.
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The future research is "How can we find
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the genetic and molecular markers
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for the viability of seeds,
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without having to plant them every 10 years?"
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And we're almost there.
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Thank you very much.
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06:26
(Applause)
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