Doctoral Dissertation Research: Moving, Making, and Saving: The Science of Seed Banking

本论文结合档案研究和民族志研究，考察了英国皇家植物园千年种子库的植物移动、制造和保存的复杂过程。该项目询问后殖民时代的种子库做法与科学和治理早期的植物标本流动有何不同。它将通过在英国和美国进行为期十个月的档案和民族志实地考察，研究实验室和可视化技术的变化。它将利用STS、环境人文和视觉文化领域的理论，提出关于农业创新、粮食安全、生物多样性保护的新概念，并挑战基础基因科学的前沿。这项研究的结果将以学术文章的形式发表在同行评议的期刊上，并作为学术出版社图书项目的一部分；此外，还将通过讲习班和研讨会向特定的目标社区传播。这项研究的结果也将被用来制定本科课程，以弥合人文、社会科学和生物科学之间的差距。此外，还将通过网络向学者和公众提供新的初级材料，如植物专利图纸的高分辨率扫描。技术概述该项目的主要地点是英国皇家植物园的千年种子库，这是世界上最大的低温保存植物遗传学资源库。该项目将揭示种子库是如何进行种子科学研究的，目的是增加这一过程的价值，并展示如何才能做得更好。它将通过密切关注种子库与植物机构历史运动的关系，围绕生物多样性、知识产权和农业应用的辩论来做到这一点。它还将审查跨越许多活动范围的各种类型的合作，不同的专业、学科和科学专业之间的合作，使种子成为能够超越正式科学研究主要部门边界的广泛共享的知识对象。该项目的结果将为有关生物多样性、粮食安全和农业综合企业的命运的重要政策决策提供相关的见解，这些都依赖于种子科学。它们还将有助于解决农业和植物史、20世纪美国农业政策、生物材料知识产权、对种子权的倡导和视觉文化等学者提出的关键问题。

General Audience Summary This dissertation project uses a combination of archival and ethnographic research to examine the entangled processes of moving, making and saving plants at the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. The project asks how seed banking practices in a post-colonial era differ from movement of botanical specimens during earlier eras of science and governance. It will study the changes in laboratory and visualization techniques, through ten months of archival and ethnographic fieldwork in England and the United States. It will use theories from the fields of STS, environmental humanities, and visual culture, to contribute new concepts concerning agricultural innovation, food security, biodiversity preservation, and to challenge the frontiers on basic genetic science. The results of this research will be published in scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, and as part of a book project with an academic press; in addition, they will be disseminated to specific target communities via workshops and seminars. The results of this study will also be used to develop undergraduate curriculum that will bridge gaps between the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological sciences. In addition, new primary material such as the high resolution scans of plant patent drawings will be made available to scholars and the public via the web. Technical Summary The primary site of this project is Kew Garden's Millennium Seed Bank, the largest repository of cryogenically preserved plant genetics resources in the world. This project will bring to light how seed science is made at seed banks with the aim of adding value to the process and showing how it can be done better. It will do so by giving acute attention to the Seed Bank's relationship to the historical movement of plant bodies, debates around biodiversity, intellectual property, and agricultural applications. It will also examine various types of collaboration across many scales of activity, among different professions, disciplines, and scientific specialties that make seeds such widely shared objects of knowledge capable of transcending boundaries of major departments of formal scientific inquiry. The results of this project will contribute pertinent insights for important policy decisions about the fates of biodiversity, food security, and agribusiness, which all depend on the science of seeds. They will also serve in addressing pivotal questions being posed by scholars of agricultural and plant history, twentieth century US agricultural policy, intellectual property of biological materials, advocacy over rights to seeds, and visual culture.