Bent Skovmand, a plant scientist who helped to create the “doomsday vault,” a massively fortified cavern to safeguard three million kinds of unique crop seeds against catastrophe, died Tuesday in Kavlinge, Sweden. He was 61. His wife, Eugenia, announced his death, The Associated Press reported. The cause was complications of a brain tumor, Swedish news reports said.

The vault was only part of Dr. Skovmand’s crusade to save and propagate the best of the best strains of valuable food plants. His mission, he often said, was ending hunger. He searched the world to discover and preserve lost strains of wheat and other crops and helped breed them into stronger, more disease-resistant strains. He helped assemble more than 150,000 varieties of wheat seed and more than 20,000 kinds of corn.

He worked with scientists, farmers and industrial groups in developing countries to make triticale, a hybrid of rye and wheat, a commercial crop. In 1991, Time magazine said that Dr. Skovmand, “while not exactly a household name,” had had “more to do with the welfare of the world’s five billion people than many heads of state.”

In recent years he helped to plan the doomsday vault, a global seed warehouse that is being built on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. About 100 countries have endorsed the project, which is intended to preserve “the raw material of agriculture” in the event of nuclear war, asteroid strikes, climate change or other catastrophes. This “Fort Knox of seeds” was intended not just to preserve genetic material, but to make it available for breeding, perhaps in the very distant future.

The vault, which is scheduled to be finished in late 2008, is to house 100,000 varieties of rice and 1,000 kinds of bananas. Some seeds will be smaller than poppy seeds, some as big as coconuts. The Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is raising an endowment to maintain the seeds and their fortress, noted that crops are often lost forever. It said that of an estimated 7,100 types of apples grown in the United States in the 1800s, more than 6,800 no longer exist. Dr. Skovmand was director of the Nordic Seed Bank, which collected the seeds of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, and is now organizing the international vault. Norway is paying the $3 million to build it in the side of a mountain on Spitsbergen, more than 600 miles north of Norway’s mainland.

It will include fences, motion detectors, steel airlock doors and three-foot-thick concrete walls ensconced in mountain rock. Artificial refrigeration will supplement permafrost in keeping fresh the seeds, which will be wrapped in aluminum foil. Mr. Skovmand was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, and was a Danish citizen. In 1966, he went to work on a Minnesota farm as part of a University of Minnesota international agricultural exchange program. He graduated from the university with a major in biological and physical sciences in agriculture. He stayed to earn master’s and doctorate degrees.

At the invitation of Norman E. Borlaug, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize for what came to be called “the green revolution,” he joined the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in El Batán, Mexico. He studied using older, rarer seed strains to rejuvenate crops. He particularly strove to preserve wheat varieties that Roman Catholic monks brought from Spain in the 16th century to make wafers for communion. Some of this “sacramental wheat” was grown in such remote, inhospitable places that its intact genetic heritage might greatly bolster future wheat varieties. Another project was collecting 129 different samples of a popular hybrid variety of wheat called Bobwhite from around the world and finding that they differ immensely by region, with each contending that its own was the original. He worked with molecular geneticists to pinpoint variations.

Dr. Skovmand, who was knighted by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2003, spoke six languages and traveled to remote places hunting seeds. He wandered from Turkey to Tibet to the Guatemalan highlands. “You could set him down in the middle of Kazakhstan with some farmers, and he would charm them,” Richard Zeyen, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Minnesota said in an interview with The St. Paul Pioneer Press. “He had an ability to communicate with anybody.” Beside his wife, Dr. Skovmand is survived by his daughters, Kirsten, Annelise and Astrid; and his son, Francisco.

He fought what seems to be a losing battle against patenting individual genes, contending that such information should be freely shared among researchers. He said in an interview with The New York Times in 2000 that copyrighting genes is “like copyrighting each and every word in ‘Hamlet,’ and saying no one can use any word used in ‘Hamlet’ without paying the author.” Dr. Skovmand put all his own data on CDs, and gave them away. He considered labeling each one: “Duplication of this CD is enthusiastically encouraged.”
(Por Douglas Martin, The N.Y.Times, 14/02/2007)