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The Viking In The Wheat Field
Susan Dworkin
Walker & Company
December 2009
On Sale: November 24, 2009
256 pages ISBN: 0802717403 EAN: 9780802717405 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 adviser 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. In 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.
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