Seed Banks

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/09/20/seed-exchange-gardens/

1) Seed banks are cool. Kind of like archives of nature.
2) It makes me think of the Pavlovsk Seed Bank in St. Petersburg, Russia. Did you know that it survived the siege of Leningrad in WWII because scientists moved the specimans and starved to death instead of eating them? It was started by Nikolai Vavilov, who has a very interesting personal history...well until he died in one of Stalin's gulags. But he was kind of the Indiana Jones of the plant world, travelling everywhere to build one of the greatest/largest seed banks in the world.