Ukraine’s agricultural research is threatened by the war

moment of horror. In a video posted on the internet on May 14th Sergey Avramenko, a researcher at the National Gene Bank of Plants of Ukraine, the world’s tenth-largest such facility, ran his fingers through bags of charred seeds. “Everything turned to ashes,” he grieved. It later emerged that only an outpost of the bank had suffered the shelling which caused this destruction. The main trove of seeds remains safe in an underground vault. But it may have been a close-run thing. The bank in question is in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, and that city’s defenders have only now repelled the Russian forces which were besieging it.