The Shocking True Story of the World's First Seed Bank—And The Scientists Who Sacrificed Their Lives to Save It

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During World War II, the Soviet city of Leningrad was surrounded, cut off from food supplies for nearly two and a half years. People were desperate: they ate boiled leather, machine oil, toothpaste, and wallpaper paste just to stay alive. But, in the center of the city, a group of botanists spent their days surrounded by food that they refused to touch—nuts, seeds, and even a basement full of potatoes—even as several of them starved to death. The seeds for which these scientists were willing to sacrifice their lives formed the collection of the world's very first seed bank: a library of crop varieties that contained the genetic diversity future generations of plant breeders have relied on to feed the world. In this episode, the story of the almost unimaginable bravery that lies behind the food we eat today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	In June, 1941, an early summer sun with warming Leningrad to life after the long winter snow.
0:14.0	Then June 22nd, from the loud speakers along the streets came a voice from the Kremlin, far in Moscow. Today at 4 a.m., without a declaration of war, German troops attacked our borders at many
0:30.2	points and bombed our cities from the air. That's right, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast about the Second World War. Wait, what?
0:40.2	Yes, this is still Gastropod, the podcast about the science and history of food, not military history. I'm Cynthia Graber.
0:46.2	And I'm Nicola Twilly, and this episode we are, in fact, going to be spending some time in the 1940s in Leningrad, which is now known as St. Petersburg in Russia,
0:55.8	but it's because we're telling an incredible story about the world's very first seed bank
1:01.7	and the heroic botanists who saved it even while they starved. Today we know that seed banks are
1:07.3	critical to keeping us from starving. For instance, there are tens of thousands
1:11.4	of varieties of wheat, and maybe only one of them that only historically grew in one country
1:16.6	is, say, resistant to a particular fungus, and that variety might help scientists today breed
1:21.7	a new fungus-resistant modern variety that could help prevent a harvest from being destroyed.
1:26.8	This still happens all the
1:27.9	time. The rice harvest in Southeast Asia is, say, being wiped out by an insect-borne virus,
1:33.9	and plant breeders turn to the collections in seed banks to find the one or two wild rice
1:39.1	relatives that are resistant to the virus that bug is carrying. They breed that resistance into commercial
1:45.2	varieties and basically save one of the world's staple foods.
1:49.5	This is a real example that happened in the 1960s. One rice variety originally from
1:54.3	Central India was resistant to a virus that was wiping out harvests. Pretty much all the rice
1:59.2	grown in Asia today is a descendant of
2:01.1	that variety. So seed banks really matter. And the story we have for you this episode is about
2:06.9	the truly innovative team of scientists who founded the world's first seed bank, scientists who then
2:13.2	had to wrestle with how to deal with an unimaginably difficult situation and an almost impossible
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.