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It has been immensely gratifying to see the outpouring of public support against the proposed destruction of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station. The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog first drew attention to the problem in April 2010, some months after the first announcement of trouble from the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry. In a nutshell, the Russian Federation transferred ownership of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station to the Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate Development in order to allow houses to be built there. [1] Building the houses would destroy Pavlovsk’s collection of fruit and berry plants and perennial fodder crops. Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, visited Pavlovsk in June 2010 and raised media interest, followed by online petitions and a Twitter campaign to tweet the Kremlin. Bioversity International and others organized less public letters from scientific bodies, and all the pressure seemed to have had an impact when President Medvedev announced on Twitter that he “gave the instruction for this issue to be scrutinised”. Since then other “reprieves” have occurred. Officials visited the Pavlovsk Experiment Station to see for themselves, and the Housing Foundation postponed the first land auction, which was to have taken place on 15 September, until October. The Foundation also said it would “form an independent, international commission to assess the uniqueness of the plant specimens”. The Foundation’s Board [2] is due to meet to assess the investigation in November. The Housing Foundation’s audit could grant a 5-7 year stay of execution, but only for the land containing the forage plants, not the fruit trees and berry bushes.
NI Vavilov (3rd from left) at Pavlovsk in 1926, with NI Kichunov to his left and SM Bukasov on his right.
Gratifying though the support has been, it has also perpetuated some ideas that are no doubt intended to bolster the case but that could actually do harm, because they are not entirely true. The truth is often more compelling.
Pavlovsk is not the world’s first, nor its most unique, seedbank. In fact, it isn’t even a seedbank.
There is no definitive agreement on which was the first, but Geneva in New York was collecting fruit trees from around the world in the 1880s, long before Pavlovsk’s foundation in 1926.
Geneva and Pavlovsk both conserve the bulk of their agricultural biodiversity as living plants, not as seeds. This makes them field genebanks, rather than seedbanks. There are three kinds of genebank.
- Seedbanks store their material as seeds, often dried and cool to keep them alive longer. The material is multiplied by sowing the seeds and collecting fresh seed.
- Field genebanks store their material as living plants. The material is multiplied by propagating the original plants, a form of cloning, or by collecting and sowing fresh seed.
- In vitro genebanks store living material as test-tube plantlets, tissue cultures or seeds, sometimes (very) deep frozen. The material is thawed, if necessary, and then grown on into full-size plants.
It would be great if Pavlovsk were a seedbank, because moving seeds to a new storage facility is logistically easy. But a large part of Pavlovsk’s scientific importance resides in the fact that the varieties have been studied as varieties, their characteristics linked to the assembly of genes that a specific variety represents. Most of the fruits and berries do not breed true from seed; that is why they are multiplied as clones. A collection of seeds from all of the varieties might contain all the biodiversity at the genetic level, but it would not be nearly as useful, because plant breeders would have to start from scratch to put together a new variety. It isn’t clear whether seeds of all Pavlovsk’s species could be stored in a conventional seed genebank.
Pavlovsk did not witness the death of 12 scientists, who starved to death rather than eat the seeds in their care.
But that’s a story for another time…
The VIR is maintaining a list of stories about Pavlovsk; it would be wonderful to get good translations of the items in Russian. If you can help, please do.
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The 12 scientists didn’t starve to death there? Oh, I knew that part just seemed too symbolic to be true. What’s the real story? Where does the myth come from? I want to know!
It is symbolic, and it is true; they starved alright, but not at Pavlovsk … I hope to post on Sunday.