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Genebanks forgotten, again

Bill Gates highlights his family Foundation’s work on cassava viruses in his latest letter. We have on occasion wondered here why the CGIAR didn’t make more of its work on that subject.

But anyway. I really wanted to rue a different lost opportunity here.

Historically, increasing the productivity of a crop meant finding two seed variants, each with some desirable and undesirable characteristics, and crossing them until you get a combination with mostly the good characteristics of the two parents. This required actually growing tens of thousands of plants to see how they develop in different growing conditions over time—for example, when water is plentiful and when it is not. Now the process is quite different. Imagine the analogy of a large public library with rooms full of books. We used to have to use the card catalogue and browse through the books to find the information we needed. Now we know the precise page that contains the piece of information we need. In the same way, we can find out precisely which plant contains what gene conferring a specific characteristic. This will make plant breeding happen at a much faster clip.

Would it have killed him to slip in some recognition of the genebanks where all those “books” are so painstakingly and expensively kept?

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