Tel Aviv University has recently dedicated its new building housing the world’s only germ plasma bank to store and preserve wild grain resources, collecting the valuable genetic materials of wild oats, barley and wheat.
The collection may one day save the world from a major catastrophe due to worldwide blight and disease to cereals which provide the basic foodstuffs of man and beast.
The germ plasma bank is part of the University’s Institute for Cereal Crops Improvement whose founder and director, Prof. Isaac Wahl, has acquired world fame in his field. Minnesota-trained, Dr. Wahl notes that over 35 percent of the oat acreage in the United States sterns from material grown in Israel and tested by the Institute, providing excellent protection against several devastating crop diseases.
Danger to the world grain supply is due to the fact that today’s food is provided by only 15 species of plants representing a very narrow and limited genetic base. Some of the better varieties could be entirely wiped out if a dangerous new plant disease were to appear. Wahl notes that cereal crops are genetically too uniform and vulnerable to vast damage.
Israel is the natural home of wild oats, barley and wheat which, through the past thousands of years, have developed a natural inbred protection against disease, through a Darwinian system of survival of the fittest seeds. But in cultivated species, some of the toughness has been bred out. What the Tel Aviv Institute does — with extensive funding from abroad, including the U.S. government and university institutes in Europe and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations — is to collect the seeds of wild plants, bombard them with attacking and hostile blights, and then grow and test the most resistant seeds.
After repeated testing and examination, the toughest seeds are stored, under conditions which can preserve them for decades and possibly even hundreds of years. The seeds are taken from this “germ bank” and sent on request to official institutes abroad for local testing and crossing with locally-bred seeds.
The files of the Institute are filled with glowing testimonials, letters or reprints of scholarly articles in scientific journals, testifying to the importance of the Tel Aviv Institute to the world’s food supply.
Wahl, an unassuming man, is fond of quoting from and lavishing praise on colleagues throughout the world for their “great pioneering work.” But his colleagues say that when they travel abroad for meetings with world cereal crop scientists, it is Wahl they say who is most often quoted and praised.
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