Killing with Kindness: Adapting to Crisis in Seed Banking Protocols

Seed banking has emerged as a solution to the crisis of diminishing plant variety due to human and mono-culture agricultural encroachment. This paper is a small piece of a larger project that studies the conditions that led to the emergence of seed banking, the diverse practices of seed curation, and the challenges to cryogenic life. Here I consider a simple but real question: What happens when the system that has been idealized as the infallible fail-safe, is discovered to be compromised? How do scientists learn from disaster, adapt their techniques, and innovate around new needs in caring for precious dormant life? This paper follows the story of one such moment of crisis at a small but prominent seed banking facility, the C. M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center (TGRC) at the University of California, Davis. Based on collections made from the mid twentieth century onwards, and from the sites of the origin of Tomato family in Andean Peru and Ecuador, the TGRC contains the biggest collection of tomato variety globally and provides samples of their collection to any bona fide researcher. However, in the fall of 2015, researchers at Cornell University discovered a viroid pathogen on tomato plants that had grown from seed sent from the TGRC. Following the ongoing struggle to understand the spread of the pathogen, treat infected seed, and repair their reputation, this paper explores the intricate relations of care for specimens and responsibility to community that are held in tension in scientific spaces that are experiencing crises.