'Goldmine' collection of wheat from 100 years ago may help feed the world | Hacker News Reader

'Goldmine' collection of wheat from 100 years ago may help feed the world

theguardian.com

44 pointsakbarnama8 comments

Hold your horses. I think the title overstates the impact of those old wheat varieties. Yes, genetic diversity is high. But, the reason that today’s wheat is less diverse is only the side effect of one of the most astonishing feasts ever pulled off by a single human: Norman Borlaug. His breeding program in the 1940s was the start of the “Green Revolution“. He’s the guy who saved the billions from starvation.

For further reading about his story, I can highly recommend „The Wizard and the Prophet“ by Charles C. Mann [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327

I certainly feel like we need to use computing for some better things to benefit humanity

1. A long term human readable storage format that will stand the test of a 1000+ years.

2. A database system that works easily and well to catalog things like the DNA of every living plant and animal

A great mandate for the library of congress or the national archives

You might find this interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta

oh of course - more GMO crops is the answer to the urgent crisis of industrial pollution. Write a heart-strings tug article and get it out now! (and call funders since the journalist is likely starving while next to a grocery store today)

Yes, optimization of the technology we use to produce food is exactly the answer.

no, there is not a net shortage of food, system-wide. It is easy to spot a naive answer because the vast productivity of basic foodstuff is not widely known, nor intuitive.

I am well aware that the productivity is not "bad" and that there isn't a net shortage. That doesn't imply we don't need the improvement, or that it won't have a significant impact.

I'd refrain from calling people naive. Farmers would call your approach naive as they know that every promile of productivity counts and can make or break their investment. As you said, this is very unintuitive and it's hard to imagine how much can a tiny increase of productivity at the base level change at the output - but it really is a lot.

> I'd refrain from calling people naive.

agree, that is why I wrote "the answer is naive", not a quality of a person writing the comment.

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