title: Biofacts, Bioprospecting, Biobanking: A Reality Check of Seed Banks
Creators: name: Karafyllis, Nicole C.
Publisher: name: Springer International Publishing
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: 19

description: Agriculture depends on, produces and mediates hybrid forms of nature and technology, in short: technonature. The organisms concerned grow neither by themselves nor for themselves. They are grown by means of technology and are thus termed “biofacts” (Karafyllis 2003). Human interfering in the somehow autonomous growth process is the main criterion for demarcating a biofact (see Sect. 8.2), and historically it starts with agriculture. As agriculture is the prototype of culture as such, it may be a fruitful candidate for investigating TechnoScienceSocieties. Rather than dwelling on the valuable insights on industrial agriculture from rural sociology (e.g. Hoban et al. 1992), the following focuses on the material objects of technological change, i.e. high tech plants, and the premodelling of their beginnings (seeds) by seed banks. At the outset, imagine thousands of jars filled with wheat, barley and corn seeds. They line up on shelves in cooling chambers and are long term stored at −18 °C. In addition, we might think of tiny bits of potato tissue, which is cryoconserved in liquid nitrogen tanks. That one cannot conserve potato cultivars type identical by storing their seeds, which generates problems for long term storage in conventional cold chambers, is one of the paradoxes of modern agriculture, which are outlined in the following. A historical sketch, running through the whole article, highlights that large scale seed banks as agricultural institutions profited from the “gene rush” since the 1960s and particularly from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992 (see Sect. 8.3). During those decades, seed banks became both ecologically enframed and high tech, while at the same time, they began to face several kinds of restrictions and resistance, not last by the complex nature of the very different plants, which were meant to be banked. Other technical problems addressed in this chapter are the digitalization of collections and expenses for cooling technologies. Moreover, in order to emphasize the relation between specific politics of time and the different narrations of how an organism becomes a biofact (i.e. by planting and breeding), I will comment on how the concept of biofact relates to the future oriented idea of bioprospecting, i.e. the targeting, collecting and commercializing of new products and their biological predecessors (a process in which seed banks are bottlenecks). Considering politics of time, I critically emphasize seed banks as instances of both making and annihilating presence for the sake of the future (Sect. 8.4). Using seed banks as an example of institutions, which premodel and preselect objects for future growth processes, embedded in a theory of biofacts, my aim is to open a new strain for STS researchers, enabling them to analyse agriculture as a crucial or even existential mode of technology. In this mode, the triangular relation of nature, technology and society continuously rearranges and generates both new materialities and semantics. Based on growth processes while being high tech, modern agriculture allows one to narrate very different stories about TechnoScienceSocieties’ pasts and futures. Certain terms for example, here: “gene bank”, “biodiversity” and “bioprospecting” and technologies (e.g. radiation technology and genetic engineering) are involved, resembling specific politics of time and space, to be unveiled. This will be done from a philosopher’s point of view, thus contributing also to a philosophy of biotechnology. In Sect. 8.5, I will do a reality check of seed banks and demarcate some of their urgent problems (also based on expert interviews). These insights will question the idea of seed banks as biocybernetic models for an industrialized agriculture that newly labels itself as sustainable and concerned with biodiversity issues. Section 8.6 concludes with a short summary and reconsiders the relation of STS and agriculture.