I'll use this article as an excuse to point people to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov who set up one o

I'll use this article as an excuse to point people to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov who set up one of the first seed banks, and whose followers protected it through the siege of leningrad; some even starving to death surrounded by bags of rice. Seeds in a bank in Syria were recently moved out of the country to a nuclear bomb-proof vault in Norway protect them from damage. Preserving biodiversity is serious stuff.