In Search of the Holy Grain?

Wednesday night, while flipping the channels after watching CSI (Grissom was following his heart this time - he left the CSI Team to join his beloved Sarah, but I'm sure gonna miss them both after all these while), I "stumbled" upon a documentary entitled "Seed Hunter". Since I didn't catch it from the beginning, any of you who do, please correct me if I'm wrong with my narration, OK? Thanks (:-D)

Seed Hunter is about a remarkable journey of an Australian Scientist, Dr Ken Street in search of seeds that can stand the extreme weather changes to improve crops resilience as part of the solution to the global food crisis (the effect of global warming).

His journey (Dr. Ken was dubbed as the Indiana Jones of Agriculture) took him from farm to farm in Syria to one of the toughest landscapes in the wild mountains of Tajikistan. With limited time & money, he was accompanied by a group of so-called "gene detectives". What they were looking for is the seeds from the wild chickpea reputed to survive temperatures above 40 degrees and well below zero degree. Amazing?

The wild chickpea itself cannot be eaten but what they were looking for is the genes/DNA of resiliency that comes with the specie, to be re-engineered and re-developed to have tougher crops which can brave through climate changes.

At the end of the documentary, it shows Dr Ken depositing his seeds in the seed bank dubbed as "doomsday vault" located somewhere in the Arctic.

Well, there are a few things I like about the documentary :

(i) how it captures the determination of one Scientist with little budget on a wild chase for a seed which he believes that can help solving the world's problem; it is a wild chase because none of them in his team really know how the wild chick pea looks like but they persevere

(ii) the warmth of the people that he met along the way - their willingness to assist, giving him information - though sometimes their eagerness ended in confusions and wrong destinations) but still

(iii) the simplicity of the way Dr Ken and his team work. Simply taking samples of seeds and putting them in envelopes - writing their journals in notebooks (yes, the old fashion way) - with no modern/hi-tech gadget (guess it is because they cannot afford to "travel heavy" as they are going to tough terrains).

(iv) 6 months after his journey, Dr Ken came back to visit his farmer friend in Syria handing him the re-engineered seeds for him to grow in his farm. Isn't that a nice thing to do?

How I wish there are sequel to this.

(Sources of images : Dr Ken Street from www.aciar.gov.au; Syrian farm from www.farm1.static.flickr.com; Tajikistan mountains from www.monocle.com and wild chickpea seeds from www.seedhunter.com)