The Rural Voice, 1988-09, Page 113NEWS
NEED FOR AGRICULTURAL GENE BANKS
STRESSED AT INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS
Reporter Dee Kramer attended the 16th annual Inter-
national Congress of Genetics in Toronto last month.
There she sat in on a workshop attended by some of the
world's top geneticists and plant breeders:
Drought, floods, forestry, war, and
famine are destroying the world's natu-
ral habitats. When these areas disap-
pear, we lose priceless genetic re-
sources: varieties of plants, trees, fungi,
animals, and insects that we may need in
the future.
At the 16th International Congress
of Genetics in Toronto last month, a
congress held only every five years,
more than 4,000 geneticists, breeders,
and gene bank managers from 70 coun-
tries met to discuss the problem.
BRYAN HARVEY, CHAIRMAN OF THE CANA-
DIAN EXPERT COMMITTEE OF PLANT GE-
NETIC RESOURCES and head of the Crop
Science and Plant Ecology Department
at the University of Saskatoon.
History has shown us that important
genetic selection often happens acci-
dentally, and we cannot predict what
varieties will be significant in the future.
Radhey Pandaya, the new head of the
Ottawa gene bank, tells a story of when
he was a tobacco breeder at the Delhi
Research Centre:
One of his laboratory samples had
died and he told his technician, Dwain
Ankersmit, to get rid of it. Dwain de-
cided to keep it to see what happened
when it grew sprouts. That decision led
to the development of Delgold, a variety
that is grown on 85 per cent of Ontario's
tobacco acreage and is worth $1.5 bil-
lion in farmgate sales.
36 THE RURAL VOICE
To cover all possibilities, we need
samples of the world's genetic re-
sources in the safekeeping of gene
banks. Bryan Harvey, the chairman of
the Expert Committee of Plant Genetic
Resources, the scientific body that over-
sees the work done by Dr. Pandaya at the
gene bank, believes the gene bank
should store as wide a cross section of
genetic samples as possible "because
we cannot even begin to think what we
will need in the future."
Harvey chaired a workshop on the
Genetic Evaluation of Plant Genetic
Resources at the congress. The work-
shop looked into ways of assessing the
genetic diversity that already exists in
the gene banks. At the moment, gene
banks are like libraries that have books
with no covers, hardly any filing system,
and no catalogue. It is important that we
know what has been collected so that
missing genetic material can be found.
"As the wild areas disappear, gene
banks become the ultimate source of
genes for breeding," Dr. Harvey says.
The geneticists and breeders at the
workshop seemed split about whether
the bank's resources should be assessed
by growing out the seeds — the way it's
been done since domestication began —
or whether the new technology of se -
T. T. CHANG FOUNDED AND IS THE HEAD OF
THE INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTI-
TUTE in Manila, Philippines. It was the
first gene bank in the world.
MONKOMBU SWAMINATHAN, PRESIDENT OF
THE INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR CONSER-
VATION OF NATURE AND NATURAL
RESOURCES: he was one of the first men
to "ring the bell" about the crisis of ge-
netic erosion. His proposal led to the
founding of the International Bureau of
Plant Genetic Resources, which over-
sees the world's gene banks. He also
founded India's gene banks for plant,
animal, and fish genetic resources.
quencing and mapping genes in human
cell genetics can be applied to plants.
This second method, molecular
classification, would produce a more
thorough evaluation and would not be
influenced by environmental factors.
But genetic evaluation is no easy task. It
is estimated, for example, that there are
50,000 to 100,000 genes that make up a
human cell, and that it will cost $10,000 -
million for five years to map the se-
quence of the human genome.
The workshop was very friendly,
despite the natural tensions between the
old -guard breeders and the upstart new
molecular biologists. The scientists all
seemed to know one other — they came
from around the world but have been
writing to one another and swapping
papers over the years.
A venerable Chinese man was fa-
miliarly called "T.T." When he insisted
that it was wrong to call a variety of rice
Japanicus, because Japan was the last
country in the world to grow rice, the
room burst into hilarious laughter —
obviously some sort of in-joke.
T. T. Chang ("Even I can't pro-
nounce my name in Mandarin, so they
all call me T. T.," he chuckled) is an
elder statesmen of genetic resources.
He has been compared to N. I. Vavilov,
the Russian botanist who devoted much
of his life to plant collection. (cont'd)