A Visit To The Doomsday Vault

Scott Pelley Visits One Of The World's Most Unique Seed Banks

(CBS)  To understand the danger of disappearing crops, 60 Minutes visited a U.S. government storehouse in Idaho, where Mike Bonman watches over America's collection of wheat seeds.

"We have in this room more than 50,000 different what we call accessions or collections of wheat from around the world," Bonman explains.

Most countries collect seeds in banks for safe keeping. And for 110 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has sent scientists, called "plant explorers," to the ends of the earth to collect seeds. If there's an Indiana Jones of plant explorers, his name was Jack Harlan, who made one of his greatest finds in the 1940’s.

"This is PI178383," Bonman says, referring to a wild variety of wheat growing in Turkey. "An old farmer variety that had probably been grown for thousands of years."

In the field, the wheat looked dreadful. Harlan wrote in his journal "it was…hopelessly useless." Useless for food, but, as it turned out, inside these seeds is a superhero for fighting wheat disease. Today, the genes of humble PI178383 are a foundation of agriculture-bred into much of the bread we eat.

"That's why you have to collect everything. Because just by looking at the material in a farmer's field you might say, 'That one's no good. Don't collect it.” But you can't anticipate what value that might have. There may be genes in that material that are gonna be of immense value in the future," Bonman says.

In the past, plant diseases caused mass starvation - think of the Irish potato famine. Today, scientists prevent famines by going through tens of thousand of plants looking for genes to fight disease or drought or any other problem. Turns out some of the rarest and most valuable seeds are stored in some of the most unstable places.

"There was an important seed bank in Afghanistan," Pelley remarks.

"That's right. It's been destroyed. In the chaos following the fighting there, it was looted and destroyed," Fowler says.

The Afghan seeds were thrown away because looters wanted the glass jars they were kept in. Much of Iraq's seed collection was lost in that war and, in the Philippines, a typhoon washed away much of the world's most important rice bank.

"Doomsday doesn't have to come in the form of an asteroid. Doomsday can come in the form of an equipment failure or mismanagement just human mismanagement or a lack of funding or a typhoon, or something like that. And those kinds of things are happening all the time," Fowler says.

Once that crop is lost, Fowler says we'll never see it again. "And any kind of characteristic that it might have had is gone. It’s off the artist’s palate. It’s the color that we can’t use anymore. It may have the disease or pest resistance that we absolutely need to have a viable crop in the future. Gone."