Thanks everyone who donated to Raymond's GoFundMe yesterday! He's almost there, & only has a week left to raise the last $500 before his school's deadline.

tell you what, once this GoFundMe is complete I will tweet about the Leningrad Seed Bank and why it deserves a movie https://twitter.com/orlandob_9/status/1275990589226582021

well fuck me sideways y'all did it

Ok guys here we go, the Leningrad Seed Bank.

The LSB was started by geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.

Unfortunately Stalin didn't like genetics so he sent Vavilov to a gulag in 1940. Vavilov said "fuck you, I teach genetics in the gulag" & died there.

That's how this story STARTS

In 1941 the Nazis start the Siege of Leningrad.

As Nazi troops were marching towards Leningrad, Russian officials evacuated important assets out of the city to protect them.

This included lots of fancy art from the Hermitage, and NOT Vavilov's seed bank. They just left it.

The Leningrad Seed Bank was already priceless: 250,000 different varieties of crops & their wild relatives, some already endangered. This was a collection Russia's crop scientists & farmers were counting on for more predictable yields, & crops adapted to Russia's many biomes

and the national government just ... left it.

The only people left to protect this seed bank were the crop breeders who worked with the collection. They were also left behind in the evacuation.

So they did what you do in the face of hopeless emergency.

They crunched the numbers to find the minimum samples needed to keep genetic diversity for each variety.

They picked out exactly that many, boxed them up, carried them down to the basement, & left the rest behind.

Then they took shifts standing guard over the collection.

"That's a weird thing to do," one might say. "A couple nerds standing watch don't do much to protect against shelling or incoming troops."

That's not what they were guarding against.

Sieges can last a long time. At some point the city usually runs out of food. That's the point of sieges: starve them out.

The Leningrad Seed Bank was filled with grains, potatoes, beets, & other crops. It was a giant pot of food.

besides human pilfering, there was also just a fuckton of rats

the crop keepers spent a lot of time sealed in the basement hunting rats

The Nazi army calculated Leningrad would run out of food in weeks.

Leningrad stood up to the siege for TWENTY-EIGHT MONTHS.

It's the largest amount of destruction ever undergone by a modern city, & the most lethal siege in world history. 1.5M people were killed by starvation.

The crop scientists quietly kept the secret of the seed bank for nearly two and a half years of siege.

They didn't eat any of it.

A dozen of them died of starvation, surrounded by food.

That's why it is an accepted fact in the crop breeding community that if you fuck up your seed bank, you will be haunted by 12 angry Russian ghosts.

They literally tell this story to students to impress on them the importance of not losing your crop lines.

And that's the story of the Leningrad Seed Bank, folks

I like this story because it reminds me that things can always get worse!

you could be abandoned to die by your own people or, worse, lose your crop varieties

I forgot to talk about why this deserves a movie but also feel like it's self-evident

how is there NOT a very Oscar-bait film about this

to make sure people get the point about saving seeds I propose we cast Matt Damon as the pile of potatoes