One of the world's oldest science experiments comes up from the dirt

On Thursday morning, several hours before sunrise, Marjorie Weber arrived at a rendezvous spot on the campus of Michigan State University. Three of the school’s other plant scientists were already there, waiting in dribbling snow. As they stood around blowing on their hands, the fifth member of their crew, Frank Telewski, “emerged from the darkness with a shovel slung over his shoulder,” Weber said.
 
With everyone else crowded around, Telewski, the group’s leader, pulled out a copy of a map from 1931, drawn like an architectural blueprint. It would guide them to a botanist’s version of buried treasure: A bottle filled with sand and a bunch of really old seeds.

 
Weber and her colleagues are the latest custodians of the Beal seed viability experiment: A multicentury attempt to figure out how long seeds can lie dormant in the soil without losing their ability to germinate. Every 20 years, the experiment’s caretakers creep out to a secret location under cover of night, dig up a bottle, scatter its seeds over a tray of sterile soil and see which ones grow.
 

It’s one of the world’s longest-running experiments, having already gone on for 142 years.
 
And the botanists in East Lansing hope that it will last for at least another 80.

 
What started out as a straightforward attempt to measure seed persistence has grown into a more interesting experiment as the decades pass. With technology improving and knowledge increasing, the keepers of the cache can do more than just count each bottle’s successful sprouts. They can look inside seeds to see how they tick, begin to determine what accounts for longevity — and even, in some cases, get species that seemed done for to spring up again. Lessons from their work could help with everything from restoring damaged ecosystems to storing crop seeds for the long-term.
 
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