Scientists "Backing Up" Grain Varieties

The facility would make the villain from a James Bond film envious — a concrete bunker with blast-proof doors carved out of a mountain on an island off the coast of Norway. Inside, the permafrost will provide a cool environment for storage of every known variety of crop seed.

The goal of the seed repository — construction is slated to begin next year — will be to ensure that a global disaster would not wipe out essential crop species. Currently, there are about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but many are located in politically or environmentally unstable areas.

The remarkable part of this project is that it represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world, the environment and the future. In many ways the seed library is similar to backing up a computer hard drive. In other words, it presents plant life as DNA data.

To be sure, the repository is a wise idea. But the idea of storing life as data gives one pause. Maybe the makers of the recent film The Island weren’t so far off in envisioning a remote location where human exemplars are kept as backup copies. Humans are far more complex than plants, but plant and animal life are driven by the same genetic data, which can ultimately be represented as data.