As I suspected, that “genebanks as morgues” slide that was shown yesterday at the Monogram 2015 meeting at Rothamstead, ((“The Monogram Network meeting is the annual get together for the small-grain cereal and grass research community. Academics, commercial scientists and plant breeders meet to hear about the latest advances, exchange ideas and discuss collaboration.”)) and was tweeted at the time, was but a rhetorical gambit, a way of framing an argument to the opposite effect. That argument was that thanks to recent advances in genomics and bioinformatics, genebanks are in fact alive and kicking, and more used — and useful — than ever. As indeed is being shown by the subject of the presentation in question, the Seeds of Discovery project at CIMMYT. I’m glad that’s settled.
But it is interesting to ponder the power — and danger — of rhetorical devices, in an era of 140-character textbites. I mean, it’s a perfectly valid strategy in a fifteen-minute presentation to develop the argument that genebanks are being assiduously mined by breeders for all kinds of useful alleles by opening with the admittedly occasionally-voiced accusation that they are nothing but museums — or worse, morgues. I confess I may well have used such a strategy myself, on occasion. It is a potent way of getting the audience’s attention.
But you do need those subsequent fourteen minutes to make the case, and those in your audience who are so inclined may well remember, and repeat, the accusation more readily and forcefully than the clinching counter-argument. Some, indeed, may start to wonder whether genebanks were basically moribund in the past, and have been brought back from the brink by things like high-throughput genotyping and the associated bioinformatics. Gene-jockeys to the rescue! Whereas in fact breeders have been using genebanks since they began, just in different ways, and must have found them useful, or how would they have survivedY No doubt in twenty years’ time, the way we make use of genebanks now will make them look like intensive care wards. And goodness knows how many characters we’ll have at our disposal to talk about it.
It’s a pity that this tweet gave the wrong message out of context, especially considering how PGR and pre-breeding had such a strong presence in this year’s Monogram. I was delighted to see many researchers talking about efforts to use the diversity of genebanks to solve challenges in breeding, and we had updates on several projects involved in that, such as SeeD and WISP. We also had a very nice talk from Jesse Poland who manages the WGRC genebank in Kansas.