Summary

The gripping story of how Bent Skovmand and others preserved the world's wheat harvest.

In 1999, a terrifying new form of stem rust--spotted in Uganda and dubbed "UG99"--quickly turned robust golden fields into dark, tangled ruins. For decades plant scientists had bred wheat varieties with rust-resistant genes, but these genes did not work against UG99. Unchecked, UG99 could spread all over the world, including the United States.

Breeders everywhere began searching wheat germplasm collections for sources of resistance. The largest collection was at the Center for Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT ) in Mexico, developed by the brilliant Danish scientist Bent Skovmand. For three decades, Skovmand amassed, multiplied, and documented thousands of wheat varieties. He served as an advisor on wheat genetic resources to dozens of countries, and hunted for seeds that would contain the genes to protect the harvest from plagues like UG99 and the stresses created by global warming. I n an era when corporations and governments often jealously guarded breeding information, Skovmand fought to keep his seed bank a center for free, open scientific exchange. By telling the story of Skovmand's work and that of his colleagues, The Viking in the Wheat Field sheds a welcome light on an agricultural sector--"plant genetic resources"--on which we are all crucially dependent.

Summary

Illuminating biography of Bent Skovmand (1945-2007), a prescient Scandinavian scientist who devoted his career to amassing, categorizing and genetically developing a global seed bank that could save the world from famine. Journalist Dworkin (The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust, 2000, etc.) frames the story of Skovmand's life with the 1999 outbreak of a new strain of stem rust, "Ug99," which decimated fields across the globe. Ug99 demonstrated to farmers and researchers everywhere the importance of "plant genetic resources," Skovmand's life work. Developments in cross-breeding and selective gene modification enable geneticists to create varieties of seeds that have built-in resistance to biological predators. When a strain like Ug99 emerges, researchers turn to germplasm, or seed, collections--like the one at the Center for Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico, where Skovmand worked for close to 30 years--to find the one genetic variation that is capable of resisting it. Then they breed it and provide it to farmers worldwide. Isolating the exact kind of wheat that contains the specific gene required is painstaking work that requires patience, persistence and total dedication. Skovmand possesses these qualities in abundance, and with a fiery passion for feeding the world's hungry, he was an able advocate and technician. He worked tirelessly against the encroaching bureaucracy for fieldwork funding and a free global exchange of ideas and seeds. But years passed without a protected and inventoried global germplasm collection, and local collections in Iraq, Syria, Mexico and elsewhere were compromised by a lack of resources, war or natural disaster. Not until recently did the political community admit the need for a global seed bank, and in February 2008 the Svalbard Doomsday Vault opened in northern Norway, housing millions of carefully protected seeds. In vivid language, Dworkin presents Skovmand's legacy as ample reason for a new generation of genetic researchers to take the cause. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.