A Facebook post by Dag Endresen of NordGen alerted me to the recent publication of the biography of Bent Skovmand, entitled The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest. Bent Skovmand (1945-2007), a student of Norman Borlaug, was a very influential figure in the world of conservation and use of crop genetic resources in general, and of wheat in particular. The director of the Nordic Gene Bank (now NordGen) when he died, the books he kept in his office are touchingly maintained at NordGen’s Alnarp headquarters as a separate collection. I’ll be trying to get hold of the book.
Thanks for posting on the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog! We miss Bent! His memory still stand proud at NordGen. Even if the change from NGB to NordGen officially was made after we lost Bent – we did start to use the new name for the web site and other preparation while we still had Bent. He was not without doubt about the reorganization, but the preparations was made under his command. He was in particular proud of getting the Svalbard Seed Vault approved. He worked very hard with this project (together with Carry Fowler and many others) and I believe that his contacts in the CGIAR was very important for the success of this second proposal from Norway to host the vault (the first proposal was two decades earlier).
Memorial from the Nordic Council of Ministers
Memorial from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
Bent Skovmand and the funding stone for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault