10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17287
Seeds have traditionally been collected according to their reproductive cycles, i.e. the time when they lose their potential of becoming a real plant. Therefore, the locations of botanic gardens or seed banks imply the vicinity of agricultural land. This article exemplifies the transformation of plant collections into gene and data banks by investigating the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) in Norway and the German Genebank for Fruit Crops (DGO). It shows that international efforts to safeguard biodiversity by intertwining them with bioinformatics infrastructure transform seeds and other plant genetic material into digitalized objects. The almost virtual genetic material, now stored without the neighborhood of acres or gardens, is, at the same time, seen as “options” for new high-tech plants, which might be transplanted to a future territory. Consequently, plant varieties are circulating around the globe in form of genetic material and data. The article shows that the digitalization induces a specific distinction between the material and the digital flows of plants.
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2038-3460
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Suzana Alpsancar
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
svalbard global seed vault
Plants as Digital Things. The Global Circulation of Future Breeding Options and their Storage in Gene Banks
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Essays
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
45-66
TS
Suzana Alpsancar
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17287
45
Technische Universität Braunschweig
2038-3460
1
svalbard global seed vault
en
66
Plants as Digital Things. The Global Circulation of Future Breeding Options and their Storage in Gene Banks
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17287/16149
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                                                                               Essay
                                                                                      45




Plants as Digital Things
The Global Circulation of Future Breeding Options
and their Storage in Gene Banks

Suzana Alpsancar
Technische Universität Braunschweig (DE)



     Abstract: Seeds have traditionally been collected according to their re-
     productive cycles, i.e. the time when they lose their potential of becoming a
     real plant. Therefore, the locations of botanic gardens or seed banks imply
     the vicinity of agricultural land. This article exemplifies the transformation
     of plant collections into gene and data banks by investigating the Svalbard
     Global Seed Vault (SGSV) in Norway and the German Genebank for Fruit
     Crops (DGO). It shows that international efforts to safeguard biodiversity
     by intertwining them with bioinformatics infrastructure transform seeds
     and other plant genetic material into digitalized objects. The almost virtual
     genetic material, now stored without the neighborhood of acres or gar-
     dens, is, at the same time, seen as “options” for new high-tech plants,
     which might be transplanted to a future territory. Consequently, plant vari-
     eties are circulating around the globe in form of genetic material and data.
     The article shows that the digitalization induces a specific distinction be-
     tween the material and the digital flows of plants.

     Keywords: gene bank; digital plant; digitalization; plant collections; sval-
     bard global seed vault.

     Corresponding author: Suzana Alpsancar, Department of Philosophy,
     TU Braunschweig. Bienroder Weg, 80, 38109 Braunschweig, Germany.
     Email: alpsancar.suzana@gmail.com.




1. Plants as Living Organisms and Mobile Biofacts

   When discussing mobility, we are used to the idea of large-scale
movements, and we tend not to look at the microcosm or little motions
surrounding us. Furthermore, we mostly relate mobility to the capacity of
changing places. A key characteristic of modern societies seems to be
constant global flows of material, people, and commodities. Plants are, of
course, part of these flows as they are traded around the world as scien-

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
7 (1) pp. 45-66 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2016
46                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

tific objects, luxury articles, food and fodder. The EU, for example, esti-
mates the import number of 17,8 million tons and the export number of
44,7 million tons of cereals for the marketing year 2014/2015 (European
Commission 2016).
     At first glance, ‘mobile’ plants are those goods flowing through global
channels. People move them like all commodities. Yet, although plants
are not well known to be mobile in the sense of having the capacity of
changing places, they do inherit another type of mobility: As living organ-
isms, they are constantly changing their sizes, colors, and shapes, and they
are in a constant metabolic process. Aristotle (II.1) described these life
processes as types of motions. According to him, things, which exist by
nature, have a principle of motion and of stationary-ness within them-
selves. The plant’s principle of moving is related to growing, withering,
and constant alteration.
     The principle of movement serves Aristotle as a dynamic criterion,
which he accompanies with a genetic criterion to distinguish natural from
artificial entities. For Aristotle, natural entities are those that generated
themselves and artificial entities are those that are produced. In produc-
tion, a projected form is realized by putting together input material fol-
lowing a certain mechanism. That process of synthesizing parts together
can, in general, be undone; a ready-made automobile may be taken apart
again. Plants, in contrast, reproduce themselves by transmitting a parental
form into a newly emerging living being. Here, the ‘outcome’ is a grown
one and cannot be disassembled into its singular components. However,
the crucial difference between a produced object and a plant, even a
modern high-tech plant, is that the plant, no matter what, still needs to
grow.
     In the following, I discuss how the digitalization of modern plant col-
lections challenges our interpretation of the ontological status of plants
and changes the channels through which plants are moved as mobile ob-
jects. Particularly, I want to highlight the dispersion of material and digi-
tal networks of flows due to the impact of bioinformatic infrastructures
on practices of plant collecting. I am going to analyze two examples: the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a meta-collection of iced seeds on
Norway’s archipelago in the Arctic Ocean and the German Genebank for
Fruit Crops (Deutsche Genbank Obst [DGO]), which is a decentralized
gene bank network. Both collections aim to preserve the genetic variety
within certain species for the future, and both collections are highly mod-
ern in terms of their bioinformatic infrastructure. They both explicitly
operate within an international legal framework based on the political will
to safeguard biodiversity. We will see that those frameworks demand and
push a standardization of plant collections, including their digital data
banks. By exemplary examining the rhetoric and practice of two modern
plant collections by a study of literature, I will also reveal the interde-
pendencies of the modes and objects of collecting.
Alpsancar                                                                   47
2. Collecting Plants: Objects, Discourses and Politics

    Currently, about 1750 plant-gene banks exist worldwide (FAO 2010).
Their task is to collect samples, characterize and evaluate plants, docu-
ment this knowledge, conserve the plant material, and finally make the
material and the documentation available to others. Gene banks must use
different conservation techniques depending on the plant’s regenerating
systems, e.g. storages at a very low temperature, in-vitro cultures, or field-
gene banks. Over the last decades, plant collections have been undergo-
ing tremendous changes (Engels and Visser 2003). Since the 1950s and
1960s plants have become subject to international political efforts, and
thus been turned into political and juridical objects. Scientific and tech-
nological boosts, in particular molecular biology and bioinformatics, have
also turned plants into biotechnological and informationalized objects.
These paradigmatic shifts likewise affect the modes and practices of col-
lecting and documenting.

2.1 The Concept of Biofacts

    Since the beginning of agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution, plants
are being cultivated and farmers, breeders, and scientists initiate and me-
diate the process of growing by using quite different tools (low-tech or
high-tech). Hence, cultivated plants have never precisely grown just by
themselves, but were always somehow ‘made’. Because of that, the Aristo-
telian differentiation between the living and the artificial needs specifica-
tion: We may interpret it as an analytical differentiation between two ide-
alized types (Weber 1997, 90) of how things come into existence. It
serves as a scale where objects may be located either closer to the natural
or closer to the artificial vanishing points. This scale is very effective on a
phenomenological level; for example, one could prefer giving real flowers
– in terms of their naturalness – for Fathers day instead of plastic ones,
which appear to be more artificial (Birnbacher 2006). However, on an
ontological level, the contrast between natural and artificial things seems
to be blurred due to the biotechnological control (Thacker 2005), the
capitalization (Oliver 2000; Rajan 2006) or the prospecting of life (Hay-
den 2004; Schiebinger 2004). The dominant character of the ubiquitous
technological-economical production paradigm seems to be pushing
“naturalness” to a residual or even romantic category.
    Against this background Nicole C. Karafyllis (2006) has coined the
concept of biofacts to refer to those objects, that grow but not by them-
selves. The concept, a conjunction of ‘bios’ and ‘artifact’, distinctively re-
lates to the field of living organisms, which are somehow being made.
Here, Aristotle’s dynamic criterion still serves to distinguish the bios from
non-living things while his genetic criterion is challenged in the way that
biofacts de facto come into existence with the help and under the control
48                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

of men. As things which are made they are simultaneously artifacts and
facts, but as living beings they still differ from usual products. By address-
ing the Aristotelian scale in terms of growth, the concept of biofacts is
useful to explore this ontological hybridity. Growing, in the case of
plants, can be examined as a temporal process depending on certain spa-
tial-material conditions. When collected, plants are obviously being de-
contextualized – temporally – from the growing-process and – spatially –
from their (original) habitats. We may point out different degrees of
technization in light of the temporal and spatial de-contextualizations.
The crucial point is that biofacts have to be re-contextualized if they are
meant to stay living beings. “With globalization, neither concepts nor
seeds are fixed in time and space, and every deterritorialization provokes
a reterritorialization” (Nazarea and Rhodes 2013, 11). Thus, against the
idea of a collapse of the living and the artificial, the concept of biofacts
animates us to discuss what we understand as more or less natural and ar-
tificial in regard of living things. In order to do so, we need to examine
the (political, juridical, economical, scientific, technological) conditions
under which biofacts have become what they are.
     The concept of bio-facts not only recalls the technological control of
life but also stresses the process of constructing scientific facts and arti-
facts in the domain of life. In this regard it is useful to distinguish seman-
tic and material levels of determining how objects make sense to us. Ob-
jects – facts, artifacts, biofacts – are what they are according to those at-
tributes, traits and relations we ascribe to them. Of course, these ascrip-
tions are not completely arbitrary but depend on the natural properties of
the objects and the historical contexts in which social practices reproduce
and modify their meaning and existence. In the case of plant collections,
classifying the collected objects, including identifying them as certain des-
ignated entities is especially crucial. As Geoffry Bowker and Susan Leigh
Star (2000) have argued, the way things are classified leads to different
semantic layers and different layers of infrastructure: political and legal
frameworks, scientific knowledge and technological tools and media such
as the bioinformatic information infrastructures in the life science.

2.2 The Political and Legal Framework of Collecting Plants

    The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
has been propagating the threat of “genetic erosion” since the 1960s
(Fowler and Mooney 1990; Flitner 1995). The need to safeguard ‘biodi-
versity’ was legally manifested through the “Convention on Biodiversity”
(CBD), which came into force in 1993, and its following protocols. Terri-
torial rights, intellectual property rights, the concept of ownership, and
farmer’s rights (Juma 1988; Kevles 2000; Schubert et al. 2011; Carolan
2010) have turned plants into juridical objects what may be understood
as part of the broader picture of the politicization of nature (Serres 1995).
Alpsancar                                                                          49
    In terms of the semantics of biofacts, one of the main achievements of
the CBD was to define “biodiversity” in its Article 2:
    Biological diversity means the variability among living organisms from all
    sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosys-
    tems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes di-
    versity within species, between species and of ecosystems (UN 1992, 3).
    Each variety level (ecosystems, species, and varieties) corresponds to a
preserving strategy, affecting the materiality of the biofacts. Ecosystems
may only be conserved in situ, which means preserving plants as viable
populations in their natural surroundings, or, in the case of cultivated
species, “in the surroundings where they have developed their distinctive
properties” (UN 1992, 4). Here, plants are preserved in the form of liv-
ing, embodied organisms subject to a rather low-level of technological
control (e.g. protecting the ecosystems from being transformed into
building land), thus coming close to the “natural” side of our Aristotelian
scale. In so-called ex-situ collections plants are conserved outside their
“natural habitats,” whereby habitat is defined as “the place or type of site
where an organism or population naturally occurs” (UN 1992, Article 2).
In botanical gardens, which maintain the variety of species, plants are de-
contextualized from their natural or cultural habitats and re-territorializ-
ed into the respective gardens. Here, plants are spatially de-coupled from
their origins and their growing process might be subject to a higher de-
gree of technological control in the sense of creating a schedule to prick
them out and nurturing their growth. In so-called gene banks intended
for preserving the diversity of varieties, we observe even deeper interven-
tions: field gene banks still come close to botanic gardens whereas those
plants preserved in vitro (Fig. 1) are in a way spatially decontextualized,
which allows a very high degree of technological control about their re-
production-circles (which are downsized and never paused).. Stored
seeds (in jars, tins or bags), in contrast, are spatially and temporally de-
tached from their living-conditions. However, gene banks normally have
to regenerate all plant material from time to time in order to secure their
germability and thus their value. Therefore, all locations of ex situ collec-
tions imply the vicinity of agricultural land. Because of that context-
dependency, a living plant can never fully become an “immutable mo-
bile” as Latour (1986) described them. Immutable mobiles are easily
transportable without changing their inherent characteristics, as, for ex-
ample, the printed press or emails. As long as collectors want to plant out
their collected plants again one day, they cannot completely detach the
plant from their growing medias, which would ultimately lead to the
plants death. In comparison to archives, the location issue remains crucial
for living collections.
50                                                             Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)




 Fig. 1 – In Vitro Collection from the Laboratory of microclonal propagation of
             plants in Uman city (by Красноштан Василь Ігорович).

    Another important legal document is the “International Treaty on
Plant Genetic Resources” (hereafter the Treaty), which came into force in
2004 (FAO 2009a). The Treaty is officially coherent with the CBD and
aims at guaranteeing “food security” (FAO 2009b) through the conserva-
tion, exchange and sustainable use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food
and Agriculture (PGRFA). The Treaty provides a so-called “Standard
Material Transfer Agreement” (SMTA), which has to be used by all con-
tracting parties to exchange those PGR, listed in its Annex 1. Further-
more, it recommends establishing a “Global Information System on
PGRFA” with standards how to document information and how to build
a digital infrastructure. Hereafter, international descriptors, the Global
Information Management-System (GRIN GLOBAL), and a web-based
catalogue that merges the world’s largest databases into one Gateway to
Genetic Resources (GENESYS) were built (Nawar 2012).
    As the CBD and the Treaty define nearly all related central concepts
such as “genetic resource”, “genetic material”, “ex situ” and “in situ con-
servation”, it is important to see that the CBD and the Treaty do not only
serve as legal framework for safeguarding but also as a semantic frame-
work defining what exactly to collect and why (Flitner 1995). This affects
the material-side of the biofacts: while traditional seed banks have under-
stood their efforts as collecting cultivars and their wild-relatives (Gäde
Alpsancar                                                                        51
1998), such as the Vavilov Institute of Industrial Plants in “St. Peters-
burg”, established in 1926, or the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and
Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben (Germany), established in
1943, gene banks collect genetic material as resources1. A cultivar is un-
derstood as an achievement from a process of cultivation and therefore a
past-oriented concept. A resource, in contrast, is a future-oriented con-
cept, as something can only be understood as a resource in terms of its
usage within a certain process of production. Plant material as a genetic
resource evokes (at least today) the information paradigm of molecular
biology. Information is known to be very flexible in terms of its materiali-
zation. Hence, the metaphor of an information carrier presumes plants to
be as flexible as information goods in terms of their context-dependency.
    Thus, this well-discussed political-legal framework enforces the pro-
duction-paradigm and shifts our biofacts more to the artificial side on our
Aristotelian-scale. Furthermore, it pushes local and regional collectors to
standardize their documentation while engaging in international efforts of
taking an inventory of the worldwide diversity of crops, as we will see fur-
ther on.

2.3 The Bioinformatic Impact on Gene Banks

    The impact of bioinformatics on plant collections is a research issue
on its own. Most of the literature on the conjunction of computer tech-
nology and life science in general (Beaulieu 2004; Thacker 2004; Howe et
al. 2008) or ‘bio-banks’ in particular (Fujurama and Fortun 1996; Gott-
weis and Petersen 2008) have focused on the human and on those gene
banks that hold “digitalized genotypic (genetic) and phenotypic (envi-
ronmental and lifestyle) information” (Ratto and Beaulieu 2007, 176)
which have been turned from “well documented, local tissue-sample col-
lections to large-scale bioinformatics resources with a national or supra-
national scope” (Ratto and Beaulieu 2007, 175) over the last decades. The
largest and most prominent collections of that kind are the “Nucleotide
Sequence Archive”, produced and maintained by the European Bioin-
formatic Institute, established in 1980 in Heidelberg, the “GenBank”
hosted by the US-National Institute of Health, opened in 1982, and the
“DNA Data Bank” of Japan released in 1986. These bio-banks are under-
stood to be repositories that store biological samples, mostly human, for
research purposes, chiefly in the field of genomics or personalized medi-
cine. Along with the establishment of those large bio-banks STS and His-
tory of Science have also gained interest in the practices of collecting and
in the role that collections play within the production of scientific
knowledge (Bowker 2000a; Strasser 2011). By the impact of molecular

1
    Actually, IPK-researchers seem to use both terms today, “cultivar” and “genetic
      resources” (Müntz and Wobus 2012).
52                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

biology and more powerful and widely used computer technology, the
stored data itself, which had been nothing more than a useful annotation
in the beginning, has become increasingly important. As DNA-
sequencing has become faster and cheaper, data-driven research issues
have emerged on the basis of open access data bases and shard hardware
capacities, shifting research from in vivo to in silicio (Marx 2013). By in-
cluding full clinical records of the donors or information about related
research networks today’s data and meta-data go far beyond the corre-
sponding samples and reorganize the process of collecting from a sample-
oriented approach toward a data-driven approach (Quinlan et al. 2015).
Since research becomes less involved with organic tissue, such as blood,
milk, and sperm (Swanson 2014), and is more focused on computer-
based data mining, it becomes unclear if these inquiries are still investi-
gating biofacts in the sense of men made (parts of) living things or simply
artifacts. At any rate, the bios as the object of investigation seems to be
exclusively modeled through the information paradigm.
     It is important to realize that the information paradigm entered the
life science in two different ways. First, the shift from population genetics
(a formal statistical discipline) to molecular genetics (concerned with the
physical-chemical processes and functions of genes) has re-
conceptualized genes – in terms of their materiality – as genetic code, us-
ing the language of information theory (Kay 2000; Keller 2003; Müller-
Wille and Rheinberger 2009). The molecular paradigm interprets grow-
ing plants as living expression of genes and transforms the plant material
into information carriers, readable objects like books. The second entry of
the information paradigm are bioinformatic infrastructures, whose impact
on molecular research may be summed up as enabling the management
and comparison of large amount of data, which could not be handled
otherwise, and, speeding up the task of analyzing DNA structures and
functions at rather low costs nowadays (Strasser 2011). While the first
transformation is primary a scientific one regarding the theoretical op-
tions of modeling biological functions, the second transformation is a
technological one related to practices that permit producing and sharing
scientific knowledge. This shift must actually be understood as a twofold
process of digitization and digitalization.
Digitization is understood as the technical process of converting an ana-
logue stream of information or of signals into digital bits, which are of
discrete and discontinued value. Digitalization, in contrast, is meant to be
the way “in which many domains of social life are restructured around
digital communication and media infrastructures” (Brennen and Kreis
2014); in particular, the change of scientific practices.
     However, plant collections differ from the above mentioned bio-
banks in several ways. Their primary duty has not been storing genetic in-
formation, but maintaining species or varieties by storing and reproduc-
ing plant material and documenting the information necessary for doing
so. Still, just like bio-banks, they provide two kinds of resources for both
                       Fig. 2
Alpsancar              –
                                                                          53
                       Typ-
fundamental and appliedical research: maintained (plant) material and docu-
mented (plant) data. Yet,
                       her-bio-banks do not serve the study of biodiversity
or pre-breeding processes (Bhatti et al. 2015). Also, empirical investiga-
                       bar-
tion must show if there is a comparable shift from ‘wet’ to ‘dry’ research
                       ia: and Cellinese 2012). I would suppose that the
in plant collecting (Beaman
material side of plantsGe-
                         plays a larger role here, because unlike the life of
the human donors therani-whole existence of the plants lays in the hands of
                       um, in the case of endangered species or varieties.
the collector – especially
                       by
Accordingly, plant collections   do not only have to maintain bio-samples
as possible medical substitutions
                       Ser-         or sources of knowledge, but also have
to manage whole life-forms
                       gio and control the status of ‘being’ itself. There-
fore, I suppose that plant
                       Fabricollections ultimately have to stay sample ori-
ented. Another crucials difference lays in the epistemological status of the
samples: in the case of plant collections, the sample refers not to an indi-
vidual being but to a species or a variety which is being instantiated by
the singular sample. We are talking about the digitalization of those ab-
stract entities.




            Fig. 2 – Typical herbaria: Geranium (by Sergio Fabris).
54                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

    Now, the digitization of plant collections concerns the corresponding
information, which has been documented systematically for hundreds of
years and is now converted into digital data. Using a distinction by Vilém
Flusser (2002), the modes in which the information is stored and circulat-
ed can be called their media and the modes in which the symbolic mean-
ing of the information is organized can be called their codes. While media
are the channels and materials through which information is exchanged
and displayed, the codes are the “symbolic systems” putting the content
in order (Bowker 2000a, 647). The digitization of plant collections leads
to a media alteration that affects the code in which the information is
stored: it becomes more abstract and shifts from more qualitative codes
to quantitative ones along the transfer from herbaria (Fig. 2) to books and
then to digital sheets. Compared to dried plants, books do not represent
the information corporally but symbolically through written language.
Through this shift, the information becomes more precise and distinct
but also less detailed and rich. The implementation of standardized de-
scriptors used for digital data banks results in an even higher degree of
abstraction, again replacing richness with precision. A fruit’s color, to
give an example, is one of the main traits used to characterize a variety. In
books, the color can easily be described in a qualitative way giving credit
to graduation and nuances. In his classical directory of apple and pear
varities Willi Votteler describes the fruit husk of “Gravensteiner von Sae-
bygard” as “glatt, fettig, grünlichgelb bis gelb, später lebhaft gelb
[smooth, greasy, greenish yellow to yellow – later vividly yellow, my trans-
lation]” (quoted from Höfer 2015). In contrast to describing a range of
color, UPOV (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of
Plants) descriptors for fruit color list fixed tones, such as “yellow” or
“green”. Even more interestingly, standardized data sheets might not
leave space to describe the change of certain traits over time in regard of
the plants growing-process. Standardized data sheets detach the plant
from its natural existence in terms of freezing its essential time reference
into a given set of pull-down-lists that do not leave space for designating
constant alterations.
    While the digitization of plant collections affects the semantics of the
documentations, the process of digitalization builds a bioinformatic infra-
structure that creates particular networks and practices. This impact
might also be summed up as enabling and speeding up the datification of
the documentations and its circulation through new-built networks, as in
the case of the above mentioned bio-banks. However, digitalization leads
to a specific distinction between the material world and the discursive
world (Abbate 1999), consequently generating two different collecting
practices, two different collections and two different networks of flows:
one of plant material and one of digital plants.
Alpsancar                                                                 55
3. Two Modern Gene Banks

    Traditional plant collections are national institutions. At present, sin-
gle seed banks head for trans-nationalization, which import and combine
existing collections. They recollect and transform what has been collected
before. By doing so, different practices of collecting and different net-
works of exchanging plants – as material or as data – are invented. Here-
by, the material becomes decoupled from the data in terms of their flow-
ing-channels. This happens in quite different ways: while the DGO builds
a network of collections only on the digital level the SGSV recollects
plant as material and as data.

3.1 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV)

    The SGSV has been built with the help of Norway’s government be-
ing juridically responsible for the Vault, the Nordic Genetic Research
Center (NordGen) providing the scientific basis, and the Global Crop
Diversity Trust (Global Trust) paying the running costs. The SGSV con-
sists of nothing more than locked and cooled high shelves accompanied
by a systematic digital documentation and managing system. Whereas
most traditional gene banks have been research institutions, the SGSV is
simply a big storage-room (Fig. 3). When the currently largest plant col-
lection of the world was opened in 2008, it was presented to the public as
a “Noah’s Ark” and as the “final backup” to protect seeds from natural
and human-made catastrophes. The SGSV has been ascribed with reli-
gious, eschatological loaded images and metaphors from IT. As a backup
copy, the Vault stores duplicates of existing collections. The benefit is not
only double safety, but also long-term storage. For example, the gene
bank in Aleppo, run by the International Center for Agricultural Re-
search in Dry Areas (ICARDA), had a collection of 135,000 varieties of
wheat, fava bean, lentil, chickpea, and barley crops and had sent dupli-
cates to Norway when the war broke out in Syria. Today, ICARDA’s sci-
entists, who have left the country as well, plan to regenerate their collec-
tions at ICARDA facilities in Morocco and Lebanon, and so they with-
drew their duplicates from Svalbard (Conlon 2015).
    Let us first take a look at the way Svalbard is recollecting plants. The
SGSV explicitly takes the mandate to safeguard biodiversity and presents
itself as a global player fighting for food security (Global Trust sd). How-
ever, there are different mechanisms at work, selecting which seeds with-
in the general diversity of crops are actually stored there. There is a ca-
pacity limit to store 4.5 million varieties of crops (approximately 2.5 bil-
lion seeds) at total. Furthermore, the Global Trust covers the shipment
costs of those plants listed in the above-mentioned Annex 1 of the Treaty.
Finally, the donating banks, which stay owners of the seeds according to
56                                                              Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

the CBD and the Treaty, ultimately decide what they want to send to
Svalbard.




                 Fig. 3 – Inside the Vault (by Dag Endresen).


    What happens to the collected seeds by being re-collected (Fig. 4)?
First, as Svalbard understands itself as a backup-facility serving other
gene banks the re-collected seeds are duplicates. Remarkably, the relation
between Svalbard and the regular gene banks introduces a differentiation
between those seeds stored in Svalbard and those seeds stored at the reg-
ular seed banks, which does not correspond to their natural properties
but only to Svalbard’s mandate to backup other gene banks: the recol-
lected seeds become copies, the primary collected seeds become originals.
Whenever a gene bank needs to reinstall their original collections, as in
the case of Syria, Svalbard provides the backup-copy. Here, it is crucial to
understand that this differentiation only corresponds to the localization
of the seeds and the way they are interchanged. Talking of origins and
copies would not make sense otherwise because all collected seeds are
equal to one another in terms of being preserved as instantiations of par-
ticular species or varieties. Along with becoming a copy, the re-collected
seeds in Svalbard also change their purpose. While regular seeds are
maintained in order to be planted out one day, Svalbard-seeds are stored
Alpsancar                                                                  57
in order to re-install collections – that is become original collected seeds
again.
    Second, the recollected seeds are even more detached from their
growing-context because: (a) Svalbard has no soils to plant them out; (b)
they are not meant to be planted out but to become original seeds by de-
mand. Accordingly, their reproductive status must be well documented
(month and year), and samples should be stored together in accordance
to their expected life span, in order to substitute them easily with fresh
ones once their time is up. As the process of replacing duplicates to main-
tain the duplication is not very transparent, this is only speculation: regu-
lar gene banks use their own ‘originals’ to regenerate their collections and
to produce new duplicates to send to Svalbard. Thus, the spatial re-
placement first transforms the re-collected seeds into copies and ultimate-
ly into waste – at least in terms of their singular materiality. The Svalbard-
seeds might therefore represent the highest degree of technization com-
pared to biofacts stored at regular gene banks. They are spatially further
away from corresponding soils and temporally constantly postponed to
be planted out – if ever.




    Fig. 4 – Storage box for the Nordic Gene Bank's Svalbard Global Seed Bank,
                     (by NordGen/Dag Terje Filip Endresen).
58                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

    Third, another notable aspect of this initiative is that it does not only
hold a meta-collection of what has already been collected by other gene
banks, but it also centralizes these collections by merging them all into
one single iceberg. That happens on the material level as well as on the
data level. Yet, in contrast to the genetic material, which must be de-
centralized in order to fulfil its purpose (recovering an original collec-
tion), this is not true for the recollected data.
    In the light of today’s international standards, the documentation of
plant collections consists of three data sets. FAO and Bioversity Interna-
tional provide standards for passport data, which serves to exchange ma-
terial between gene banks easily (accession’s origin, holding institute,
storage number). Characterization data serves to identify plants and the
corresponding international standardized variety-specific descriptors re-
garding the distinctiveness, uniformity, and stability of a variety are pro-
vided by UPOV. These characteristics are traits of high heredity, which
means that they are normally passed on from one generation to the next
regardless of their growing-contexts (e.g. the colour of a fruit, the growth-
form of a tree). Evaluation data, in contrast, refers to those traits depend-
ing highly on growing conditions. That information does not serve to
identify a variety but to assess its agricultural performance (yield). In
terms of their economic value as breeding options, seeds therefore intrin-
sically depend on context-performance.
    Accordingly, Svalbard is also semantically re-collecting what has been
collected before. In other words, it hosts two different kinds of collec-
tions: While the material duplicates are stored in the vault, NordGen (sd)
manages the recollected data through a distinct online-catalogue called
the “Seed Portal”. In line with the Treaty’s demands, its data will be
merged into the GENESYS-project. The Seed Portal serves two interests:
to educate the public about the project and to let the depositors know
what is already there and what not. Whenever a gene bank wishes to send
duplicates to Svalbard, they are asked to send the corresponding infor-
mation first. For this, NordGen provides a template on the Seed Portal’s
website, through which the depositors are asked to hand in an inventory
of their donation via email. It hast to comprise the following information
(NordGen 2013):

     ⎯   Institute Code
     ⎯   Deposit box number
     ⎯   Collection name
     ⎯   Accession number
     ⎯   Full scientific name
     ⎯   Country of collection or source
     ⎯   Number of seeds
     ⎯   Regeneration month and year
Alpsancar                                                                    59
    Most entries are standardized by international agreements, such as the
“institute code” which is part of the FAO’s and Bioversity’s (2012) “In-
ternational Multicrop Descriptor” standard. That standard defines the
most common descriptors for basic plant characterization and passport
data. The full scientific names of plants consist of genus, species, subspe-
cies, authority, and year of description, according to the International
Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. The country of origin
is supposed to be described in accordance with the ISO-3166 standard
defining an alpha-3-code for countries.
    This example confirms Bowker and Star’s (2000, 34) observation that
each classification inherits its history and consists of different layers: “Sys-
tems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social
organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration. Each sub-
system inherits, increasingly as it scales up, the inertia of the installed base
of systems that have come before”. It also demonstrates that meta-
collections enforce international standards: if you want to use the back-
up-service you have to adapt your documentation to these standards.
There even might be cases, where adjusting the data means a change of
media as some gene banks, e.g. in the so-called third world, might not use
digital documentations themselves. However, as a consequence, Svalbard
holds a rich digital data bank covering – at best – an inventory of the
world’s gene banks.

3.2 The German Genebank for Fruit Crops (DGO)

    As mentioned above, all contracting countries of the Treaty obliged
themselves to support a Global Information System regarding the charac-
terization, evaluation, conservation and accessibility of PGRFA. In com-
parison to the SGSV as a centralized plant storage facility, many other in-
ternational initiatives are building decentralized networks. One example
is the “European Cooperative Program for Plant Genetic Resources”
(ECPGR) aiming to build a “safety network for our crops” (ECPGR sd).
The ECPGR initiated “The European Genetic Resources Search Cata-
logue“ (EURISCO), a web-based search catalogue providing information
about ex situ plant collections maintained in Europe. EURISCO, in con-
trast to the SGSV’s Seed Portal, is based on a European network of ex
situ collections and retrieves its data from National Inventories (NIs)
from member countries (IPK sd).
    The SGSV is run on donations. In practical terms that means that the
donating institutes have to ship the material and to submit the data man-
ually. The decentralized networks work quite differently. First of all, the
genetic material is not being centralized and re-collected but remains
within the partner gene-banks of the network. Second, the data flow is
technically automatized. And it always flows bottom up.
    In Germany, the Federal Ministry for Food and Agriculture (Bun-
desministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft) is responsible for its
60                                                            Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

implementation. As it hosts Germany’s NI, it serves as a data interface
between EURISCO and Germany’s national, regional and local collec-
tions (BMELV 2012). The NI gathers data from six different gene banks;
the DGO hosted by the Julius-Kühn-Institute (JKI) in Dresden is one of
them. The DGO brings together governmental and non-governmental
partners as well as private persons. Here, it becomes obvious how much
taking an inventory – especially of fruit crops, which cannot be preserved
as seeds due to their reproduction biology (Fig. 5) – relies on the en-
gagement of local and regional collectors, run by farmers, breeders, na-
ture conservation associations or individual aficionados. Those smaller
collections may apply different standards regarding the storage of materi-
al and the characterization and evaluation of the collected objects. Hence,
unifying the documentation often includes research on literature to fill
documentation gasps or verify given information (particularly regarding a
plant’s origin). Each partner is obliged to maintain its collection and to
provide the data. So, in the beginning, only data is exchanged and cen-
tralized – no plant material. While the gene banks stay decentralized, the
documentation becomes centralized and monitored by the coordination
office at the JKI. Once, the network and its primary digital connections
are established, these channels might as well be used to exchange dupli-
cates upon request from breeders, researchers and private persons, which
might then also be coordinated centrally.




        Fig. 5 – Strawberry Field Gene Bank at the JKI Dresden/Pilnity,
                              (by Bärbel Göring).
Alpsancar                                                                  61


    The network providing the data for the Global Information System is
an interlaced and hierarchical structured system. The higher levels are
structured in analogy to political units at international, inter-state (e.g.
European), and national levels, while the nationally gathered information
depends on local actors. Local partners provide their input. Then, the
donated data is collected at the next higher level, in this case, Germany’s
NI. Then EURISCO imports it. While the data originates from growing
contexts and travels ‘bottom up’ into the World Wide Web crossing dif-
ferent systematical units, the international standards are implemented and
concretized top down.
    The main goal of the DGO is to take an inventory of all fruit collec-
tions with German origin, to rationalize this inventory and to secure its
preservation. However, not all fruit varieties are to be preserved. Here,
the coordinators ultimately decide which fruit to include and which not
(Hanke et al. 2012, 127). The argument of world hunger plays the most
important role in most preservation initiatives, but fruit is an exception. It
is interesting to see that other reasons become predominant, such as the
reason to preserve cultivars with a “socio-cultural, local and historical re-
lation to Germany” (BMEL 2012, 27). Here, the term cultivar is echoed
and provided with a second meaning. Cultivars are not only outcomes of
agriculture, but they also pass on cultural history. While the “world hun-
ger argument” is mainly future-driven and focuses on basic needs, this
argument relies on the past and on tradition. The line of this argumenta-
tion, therefore, puts these initiatives somehow close to the cultural work
of museums, which strive to maintain history by making material testimo-
nies accessible for a general public. However, the DGO’s collection is al-
so based on the argument of changing consumption habits, a future- and
profit-oriented reason. While the SGSV serves to back up existing collec-
tions, the DGO primarily serves to rationalize Germany’s fruit collections
and to establish them as a common scientific standard. However, both ul-
timately serve to take an inventory of the world’s PGRFA on the data lev-
el. But, what material is actually documented lies in the hands of local ac-
tors.


4. Plants as Digital Objects

    My article has focused on how the digitalization affects the ontological
status of collected plants. By re-collecting what has been collected before,
meta-collections produce new types of biofacts and install new networks
of flows. Although meta-collections have been technically possible before,
it was the digital infrastructure that made them practicable, especially for
operating on a supra-national level, if not ultimately on a global scale. In
the case of the Svalbard Seed Vault, this process of re-collecting first
transforms the re-collected biofacts into copies and the donating collec-
62                                                            Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

tions into originals. Once the re-collected seeds need to be substituted
with new duplicates they are, second, most likely to be turned into waste;
or – but only in the case of damage – they may be turned into originals
again. Only then, the recollected seeds at Svalbard have a real chance to
live on. As copies and pre-waste biofacts they are shifted closer to the arti-
ficial side of the Aristotelian scale. As long as they stay copies, their mate-
riality is only virtually effective as an insurance policy for the originals.
Their bios, therefore, becomes secondary in comparison to the seeds in
the ‘original’ collection. Yet, to fulfill their function of being backup-
copies they must inherit the capacity to grow and (virtually) stay living
things. The German Genebank for Fruit Crops, in contrast, does not di-
rectly affect the materiality of the biofacts, which themselves stay with the
partners of the ‘decentralized’ network, although it makes them more vis-
ible for potential customers or researchers through its web catalogue.
     By re-collecting information, the SGSV and the DGO produce digit-
ized, centralized and standardized data. Semantically, the information be-
comes more abstract, distinctive and precise but also less rich and vivid.
However, what happens on the material-side of the information is more
substantial: the digital infrastructure, hand in hand with international po-
litical efforts, induces the specific distinction between the world of mate-
rial and the world of digital plants which travel through different chan-
nels and networks. Three questions arise and need further investigation:
(1) how does the digitalization alter the relationship between the material
and the digital plant? (2) how does it transform the study of plants and
biodiversity? (3) do we need a new information policy?
     Information about plants has always had an ambiguous status. Epis-
temologically, it has always been independent of singular material plants
in the sense that the knowledge which it offers is not limited to those sin-
gular material plants it has inductively been gathered from but refers to
varieties or species. As general knowledge, the plant documentation – re-
gardless of its codes and media – has always been an independent object.
Conversely, the information, not as knowledge but as documentation, has
always been ontologically linked to a specific collection and has not exist-
ed, traveled or being stored as an independent object until now: digital
plants are being shared and exchanged without the corresponding mate-
rial transforming the linkage between the documentation and the corre-
sponding material into a virtual one. Furthermore, as in the case of bio-
banks, distinctive data-driven research issues might emerge on the basis
of these newly created global plant data banks using the possibilities of
linking large amounts of data, e.g. for mapping biodiversity (Bowker
2000b). Through this process the information is transformed into a global
documentation discarding its characteristic of being documentations of
specific collections. Maybe, the information stored in the Seed Portal of
the SGSV will once be considered a primary source for research, thereby
turning the historically original documentations into their ‘backup cop-
ies’.
Alpsancar                                                                        63
    Because of the dominance of digital plants, it seems that meta-
collections are not primarily collecting bio-facts anymore but data. Re-
markably, this specific distinction of material and digital flows in the
plant community has not been subject to a lot of debates until now.
Whilst there is a legal framework for the flow of plant material and while
there have been many arguments about authorship and credit as well as
ownership and inventions in case of the data of the bio-banks (Strasser
2011), there has been little debate on the question of the flow of digital
plants. Here, the crucial question would be, what kind of values the new
data banks create and whom they can and will serve. Nonetheless, bioin-
formatic infrastructures already build technological momentum (Hughes
1994): once the documentation is digitized this media shift seems irre-
versible (Bowker and Star 2000). Once large networks keep digital plants
flowing it might be hard to control the flow of information or even im-
plement traffic rules.


Acknowledgements
This article presents first results from the sub-project A “Freezing or Collecting?
Plants in (inter)national seed and gene banks between agrobiodiveristy, evolution,
and plant protection“ within the interdisciplinary research association “The Lan-
guage of Biofacts” (LMU München, TU München, TU Braunschweig), funded by
the German Federal Ministry of Science and Education and supervised by Prof.
Dr. Nicole C. Karafyllis. I would like to deeply thank the whole team for inspiring
discussions on the subject and the possibility of doing research in a vivid context.


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