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from the do-not-store-all-your-seeds-in-one-basket dept.
When civil war broke out in Syria, scientist Ahmed Amri immediately thought to rescue the seed bank that sat in cold storage in Aleppo:
Specifically, 141,000 packets of them sitting in cold storage 19 miles south of Aleppo. They included ancient varieties of wheat and durum dating back nearly to the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and one of the world’s largest collections of lentil, barley, and faba bean varieties—crops that feed millions of people worldwide every day. If these seeds were decimated, humanity could lose precious genetic resources developed over hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years. And suddenly, with the outbreak of violence, their destruction seemed imminent.
It's rare that people consider stores of human knowledge more precious than their own lives. What knowledge would Soylentils sacrifice their own lives to save?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Saturday April 18 2015, @06:01PM
Scientists take risks to get knowledge all the time. For a more mundane case, think about volcano researchers who stay close to erupting volcanoes to get measurements on the lead up to a major eruption. Mount St. Helens killed at least one of them. They try to keep the risks reasonable, but there will always be risks in studying dangerous phenomena.
Similarly, people are willing to take risks to save archives of knowledge (and seed banks). Hopefully it's a calculated risk, but sometimes, like in Aleppo, it's a pretty big one.