These Rare Seeds Escaped Syria's War—to Help Feed the World

In 2014, the remaining staff of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) fled their gene bank in Tel Hadia, 20 miles south of Aleppo. Syria’s civil war, which had broken out three years earlier, had finally made the staffing of the facility untenable. But the scientists had already shipped off a resource of incalculable value: the seeds of the most important crops on Earth.