One March day in 1959 , in the sleepy British seaside township of Eastbourne , a nuclear enthusiast decide to run her dinner guests irradiated peanuts and potatoes that had been preserve with radioactive sodium .
While Muriel Howorth ’s client were unsure about their repast , the unusual dinner party was the start of an unforeseen Sir Ernst Boris Chain reaction that led to the birth of one of the quirkiest horticultural collectives there has ever been : the Atomic Gardening Society .
The society encourage members to raise plant under radioactive conditions so that beneficial sport would rise . The estimate might go foreign , even dangerous , now – but back in the 1950s it was part of a broader trend . The movement was part of a concerted feat in the US and Europe to find good uses for atomic energy after the devastation cause by the nuclear bomb drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
In his 1953“Atoms for Peace ” speech to the United Nations world-wide fabrication , US President Dwight Eisenhower highlighted a turn distributor point in attitudes to atomic power when he tell that it should be “ constructive , not destructive ” . He also propose the International Atomic Agency be jell up , where “ experts would be mobilise to apply nuclear energy to the needs of agriculture , medical specialty and other passive activities ” .
In “ gamma gardens ” run by internal laboratories in the US , plants growing in homocentric rotary were bombard with radiation from a central source – such as cobalt-60 – elevated on a pole . The pole could be get down below priming when masses were lean the plant . plant nearest the center of attention tended to give way , a little further out they developed tumours and developmental problem , but the plants furthest out sometimes developed potentially beneficial mutations . It was hoped the discussion could , for instance , produce colour changes in blossom , disease resistance in wheat and increased gelt contentedness in maples .
“ If you retrieve of genetic modification today as slice up the genome with a scalpel , in the 1960s they were hitting it with a hammer ” says nanotechnologistPaige Johnsonof the University of Tulsa , Oklahoma , who explore garden history in her bare meter .
Johnson discovered the Atomic Gardening society while meditate atomic motifs in garden . She was quite unprepared to ascertain this actual construction of the great power of the corpuscle in the garden . “ When I first try about atomic gardening I call back it was a joke , ” she says . “ It sounded like something out of the B movies of the 1950s – giant ants and that sort of matter . ”
Giant ant maybe not , but the peanuts to which Howorth subjected her atomic dinner party guests had been bombarded with 18,500 R of X - rays – that ’s 37 times the battery-acid that would kill a soul in 5 hours . The peanuts originated in the lab of Walter Gregory of North Carolina State University , who would select beneficial mutants from the flora he zapped – those which produce larger or more numerous peanuts than common . His thick - hulled “ North Carolina fourth - generation X - rayed ” ( NC4x ) strain was the size of it of an sweet almond ( Crops and Soils , vol 12 , p 12 ) , and it was one of these that he sent to Howorth .
Gregory scream the NC4x as “ a milestone in crop gentility ” . When a NC4x Howorth implant shoot in a quick four days , it was hailed by garden author Beverley Nichols as : “ the most sensational plant in Britain … It is the first ‘ atomic ’ peanut ” .
The media attention make for newfangled fellow member to the society and allowed Howorth to direct an former crowdsourcing experiment . She imported irradiate Atomic Energised seed from entrepreneur C. J. Speas of Tennessee and parcel out them to phallus of the society , who looked for modification in their source and account them on progression cards . These were then psychoanalyze by retired geneticists and works life scientist .
It would be light to dismiss atomic horticulture as a naive and fanatic attempt to somehow make up for the ills of nuclear artillery . atomic energy seemed to anticipate not only free electrical energy but the eradication of dearth – and the atomic gardener had no qualms about releasing irradiate seeds into the environment . “ They think they were changing the world , and they were n’t very self - reflective about that , ” says Johnson .
The legacy of the atomic gardens can still be seen today . Working Vasco da Gamma gardens subsist in Japan , and varieties descended from irradiated industrial plant – such as the Rio scarlet grapefruit – stack our supermarket shelf . 70 per cent of the peppermint sold in the US is descended from a mutant in a neutron - irradiated source . Even if atomic horticulture was a misguided experiment , it has thrown up some unexpectedly tasty answer .
In 1963 Muriel passed the Atomic Gardening Society on to Thomas E. Grey . If anyone has any further data about him , or was a member of the club , please get in touch withPaige Johnson , who give a talk on the Atomic Gardening Society at theGarden Museumin London recently .
( Image : Frank Scherschel / Time & Life / Getty )
This postal service originally appeared onNew Scientist .
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