I've been writing about one of the first individuals to recognize the need for centralized repositories of the planet’s genetic biodiversity, an Austrian-born geneticist and plant breeder by the name of Otto Frankel. Born in 1900, Frankel was a young communist who wanted to dedicate himself to the fight against hunger and chose to study agriculture. His early research included counting chromosomes of the Jaffa Orange and understanding the evolution of wheat. In the 1960s, Frankel became what some have called the high-prophet of genetic resources conservation, beginning with his involvement in the International Biological Program and its 1st General Assembly in Paris in 1964. Otto saw firsthand through his research that we were losing genetic diversity among plant species, and he believed that institutions needed to respond with long-term seed storage, computerized data cataloging, and the creation of a global network of genetic resource collections. A few years after the Biological Program assembly, Otto helped to organize a conference on “The Exploration, Utilization and Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources,” now considered a landmark moment in the timeline of conservation biology. He argued that humankind’s impact on genetic diversity of other organisms was on so great a scale that we had “acquired evolutionary responsibility and must develop an ‘evolutionary ethic.’” An evolutionary ethic, said Frankel, is one in which civilized man recognizes the continued existence and evolution of other species as integral to his own existence. In 1974 Otto went to Berkeley, California for the International Congress of Genetics and presented his paper “Genetic Conservation: our evolutionary responsibility,” a moment that according to subsequent leaders in the field of conservation biology, was groundbreaking for its presentation of a conceptual and moral agenda for conservation. Here is a quote from that paper:
“Neither our pre-agricultural ancestor, nor the peasant farmer who succeeded him had cause for concern beyond the next meal or the next crop, the former because he used a pool of great species diversity, the latter a pool of self-renewing intraspecific diversity. This came to an end with the advent of scientific selection. Today’s concern is with preserving and broadening the genetic base. The time perspective for gene pool conservation might be the next 50 or 100 years—which is merely an acknowledgement of the unparalleled technological transcience of our age; we cannot foresee even what kinds of crops will be used at that time. For wildlife conservation the position is altogether different. Concern for its preservation is new, a consequence of our destructive age. Nature conservation is fighting for reserves and for legal recognition. The sights often are set for the short term, although perpetuity is its ultimate objective. Genetic wildlife conservation makes sense only in terms of an evolutionary scale. Its sights must reach into the distant future.”