The Botany of Desire Page #3

Alcohol consumption

Started to rise

in about the 1830s.

And there's some public outrage

over that,

That people seemed to be too

interested in drinking,

Or are drunk,

So all forms of

alcoholic beverage

Begin to be criticized,

and cider is among them.

People went after

apple trees.

Suddenly the apple,

Which had been celebrated for

much of american history,

Is vilified as

the evil fruit.

It's back in the garden of eden,

in a sense.

The hatchet wielded by

the famous prohibitionist

Carrie nation,

was not just about

Breaking down saloon doors,

It was also about

chopping down this evil tree

That was getting

americans drunk.

But the apple would

be rescued from infamy

By the sweeter side

of its nature.

Even though cider was

what happened to most apples,

Apples were also eaten

as a food.

And whenever you were lucky

enough to find a sweet one,

That's what you did with it.

So with cider

in disrepute,

The race to find sweet new

varieties intensified.

Everyone who had

a cider orchard had his eye out

For that one good edible apple.

It was really well understood

That one of the tickets

To great success

and great wealth in america

Was to find a good

edible apple.

And all the famous apples

that we know --

The delicious, the macintosh,

The baldwin, the northern spy --

These had all begun

in cider orchards.

They were the stars.

Before 1900, the fate of, like,

99% of apples was to be drunk.

After 1900, it becomes the fruit

that we now know.

For 20th-century americans,

Apples became

a symbol of wholesomeness.

The apple growers

came up with this campaign --

"an apple a day

keeps the doctor away" --

And essentially rebranded

the apple as a health food.

That's all well and good,

But what it meant is that,

As soon as you're

eating apples,

You focus on those few varieties

That are really tasty

and popular,

And the industry shrank down

the number of apples

Over the course of

the 20th century.

So that, by the time I was a boy

in the early '60s,

There were very few apples

in commerce.

There was the red delicious,

the golden delicious,

And the macintosh.

That was, you know,

Easy for marketers

to get their head around,

It was all the public

seemed to want.

But for the apple,

it wasn't very good news --

Because as soon as you kind of

freeze its evolution,

The apple is kind of

a sitting duck for its pests.

Apples were

increasingly being grown

In what scientists

call "monocultures,"

Which churned out

just a single variety.

Once you rely on

the genetic uniformity

That comes with cloning

Rather than planting

from seed,

You restrict the species'

natural ability to evolve.

So you have your plants,

with their genetic combination,

Staying still,

while the pests --

I'm talking about

insects or diseases,

Viruses or bacteria --

Are always trying to

pick the lock.

And sooner or later,

They will be able to get not

just one of your plants,

But all of your plants,

'cause they're the same.

To defend them

from insects and diseases,

Most apples are routinely

sprayed with chemicals.

The bugs are clearly

Well ahead of

the human controls.

If you're talking about

a large grower,

With a couple of hundred acres,

They're probably spending

A half-million to three-quarters

of a million dollars a year

In chemical costs.

One of the biggest

consumers of pesticide now

Is the apple crop.

It's the fate of monocultures.

We'll have to

check the records

To see what the resistances are

in these,

Because these could be

real useful

In breeding right now,

I think.

In geneva, new york,

scientist herb aldwinckle

And phil forsline

are looking for

Another way to help

the apple --

By harnessing the defenses

that lie hidden in its genes.

So think what it

would be like

If it was grafted on

a dwarfing rootstock.

Probably double the size

and even more color.

Aldwinckle and forsline

Collaborate at this

apple research center,

Which is run by the u.S.

Department of agriculture.

It's a botanical version

of noah's ark.

To walk into

this orchard is to --

At first, it looks like kind of

a normal orchard...

And then you realize

as you look down the rows

That, my god, every one of

these trees is different.

There are yellow ones

and there are red ones,

And there are green ones,

and there are purplish ones,

And there are small and large

And every shape

of tree and fruit.

It is just

this vast library.

Here, there are more

than 5,000 different kinds

Of apple trees -- each with its

own distinct set of genes.

A mechanic has a wide

variety of tools

Which he hopes

he'll be able to use

To fix problems with machines

he's working on --

It's a similar situation

with apples.

We need to have a tool chest,

And the genes are what provide

the tool chest.

In 1989,

aldwinckle and forsline

Got an unexpected opportunity

to add to their tool chest

Some of the most valuable

apple genes in the world --

The genes from kazakhstan.

We regard

the kazakh apple forests

As the gene bank

of the domestic apple.

Wild forests

were being chopped down,

The trees were being destroyed,

They just wouldn't

be there anymore

Unless someone went there

and collected them

And grew them somewhere else.

We had some jeeps

we traveled around in,

And so we were able to visit

true apple forests.

It was a bit of

a culture shock

To be in central asia

for the first time.

My first impressions were,

this was in

The middle of nowhere --

what am I doing here?

But, uh...

To just see

The diversity in those apples

Is just amazing.

Once an apple tree

is chopped down,

It's gone forever.

But if we can take the seed

from that tree

And store the seed,

We can preserve the genes that

were present in that tree,

And essentially we can preserve

that tree forever.

Aldwinckle and forsline

Made several trips

to the kazakh forests.

They brought seeds back

and planted them.

We're standing in

the middle of what I call

"kazakhstan re-created

in geneva, new york."

But we're not only just

saving it,

We're developing

a library of information

On every one of these trees.

The notion of

conservation of seed

Is to conserve it --

because you don't know

What you might need it for

at some future time --

Maybe nothing.

Why do we have museums?

Well, because it's a good idea

to conserve things --

That's the primary value.

Then there's a secondary value,

And that is to u t

as genetic breeding stock

To solve problems --

To solve problems that might

enable growers

To use fewer pesticides.

In his lab,

Aldwinckle is trying to do

just that,

By moving genes that provide

disease resistance

From a wild kazakh apple

into a commercial variety.

These are pieces of

leaves of fuji apple.

And what we've got here is

an experiment

To try and transfer some genes

For resistance

to apple scab

Into fuji, and therefore make

fuji resistant to apple scab.

In the 19th century,

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