How Secure Is the Fort Knox of Seeds?
-
The seeds and other samples are kept in massive freezers or large stainless steel capsules filled with liquid nitrogen, and secured with vault like doors, electronic keypads, and security cameras throughout the facility. Photo: Susan Fitzgerald
July 26, 2013
By Luke Runyon
When genetically modified wheat was found growing in Oregon earlier this year, it didn’t take long for accusations to start flying. No one knew how the unapproved wheat ended up in the ground, and a flurry of finger-pointing cast potential blame on a federal seed vault in Colorado, which housed the same strain of wheat.
Inside of a nondescript beige building with a red roof in Fort Collins, Colorado are hundreds of thousands of samples of seeds, livestock semen, and fish eggs. Protected by electronic and physical security that has been compared to Fort Knox, these samples are protected from outsiders on behalf of other seed vaults and private companies like DuPont and Monsanto that have private strains they wish to keep safe.
The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation is in charge of this giant “seed vault,” which is the largest in nation.
The seeds and other samples are kept in massive freezers or large stainless steel capsules filled with liquid nitrogen, and secured with vault like doors, electronic keypads, and security cameras throughout the facility. Access is kept to a minimum to ensure security, and each sample can only be identified with a barcode scanner that accesses a central database.
With so many resources put into protecting these samples and the genetic code they contain, it’s hard to imagine a breach of security occurring, but earlier this summer, the facilities security was called into question when genetically modified wheat seeds that had been produced by Monsanto and stored in the Colorado vaults was found growing in Oregon.
How did that strain of wheat make it all the way to Oregon? No one is quite sure, and even federal investigators from the Department of Agriculture have not been able to pin down the source of the wheat. This and the investigation that followed has brought but the investigation brings up questions of how secure these seed vaults actually are. Luckily for The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation though, they were cleared of wrongdoing and are back to keeping the nation's seeds safe.