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ANATOMY OF A ROSE -- EXPLORING THE SECRET LIFE OF FLOWERS |
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FIFTEEN: Alchemy of a Blue Rose PLANT GENETICISTS, WORKING for commercial flower companies, dream of creating a blue rose. Why not a yellow smiley face on each petal? Why not red dots on a blue background with a yellow smiley face? ... Or would that be too busy? *** THE TRUTH IS THAT we already have blue roses. I own a couch covered with them. I can walk into any department store and find some version of a blue rose, as well as many other things that human beings have shaped and colored. I enjoy buying these things. But I have so many things. To be honest, I don't even like double roses, flowers with an excess of petals crowding the carpel. Like most highly cultivated flowers, double roses are a mistake. Some gene sent the wrong message to that part of the rose meant to develop into a stamen. Instead, the potential stamen acquired pigment and turned into a petal. Along its side, you can still find the flap that would have been the anther meant to hold pollen. Obviously, such a mutation is inefficient in producing offspring and should normally die out. But for hundreds of years, gardeners have encouraged this kind of change and have cross-bred roses to produce a stunning array of extra petals, new colors, and prize-winning shapes. Stamens can rather easily become petals. Evolution used the same idea for the original rose, in which the petals probably developed out of the stamens that grew next to the sepals. In that case, the mutation was beneficial. A few colorful petals seemed to draw more pollinators. (In other flowers, petals more clearly derived from the sepals themselves.) In roses, we happily exchanged reproduction for decoration. What we lost was scent. Most roses don't smell sweet anymore. As it turns out, it is hard to put scent back into a flower through cross-breeding. Apparently, in the world of flowers, pollinators, pheromones, and odor plumes, smelling good is a more complex process than looking good. Most flowers in private gardens and public landscapes have been cross-bred to look good, to get bigger, grow taller, bloom longer, stand up straight, think positive, and smile, smile, smile! Many colors in a petunia or an impatiens would never be found in a forest or meadow. Some colors have been developed specifically, in the words of one plant breeder, to "go well with brick or nonwhite siding." They are the product of human thought and human labor. We hand-pollinate a promising plant with the pollen of another promising plant, perhaps from another closely related species, hoping for a hybrid with the right qualities, a more marketable penstemon or a yellow impatiens. Impatiens are an extremely successful bedding plant. But they don't come, yet, in the color yellow. A single seed of such a flower, a commercial yellow impatiens, would be worth a lot of money. Americans alone spend billions of dollars each year on flowering plants and shrubs. The majority of these are hybrids. Annually, about one thousand new hybrid plants are introduced into the commercial flower market. Many flowers in private gardens and public landscapes are aliens. If I visit a city in a hot, dry climate, I will see plants from hot, dry climates around the world. Flowers from Brazil live in Los Angeles. Flowers from China live in Ann Arbor. These flowers, too, have usually been cross-bred and domesticated for use. Aliens can become too successful. There are dangers. Still, it's really rather wonderful. Bougainvillea and bird-of-paradise fill my patio, where, for a nanosecond, I am a Hawaiian queen. I buy a sacred lotus for the miniature pond. When its petals unfurl, the Supreme God is revealed. I plant tiger lilies and a flamboyant hibiscus tree. It's a designer Eden. Geography trembles. Ecosystems mix. Imagination is as real as a plant. This patio is rich and trembling, with imagination, with unnatural connections, with a certain bravado. *** BLUE ROSE, OF COURSE, is not a simple matter of cross-breeding. A gene in a petunia contains the code for the enzyme that creates the pigment delphinidin, responsible for the color blue in flowers like petunias, iris, violets, and morning glory. In 1991, a flower company cloned the gene and inserted it into a rose. Not much happened. Possibly the delphinidin was being masked by other pigments in the rose. Also, delphinidin molecules may only be blue at a high pH (a low acidity), and most rose petals are too acidic. The company now hopes to find the genes that control pH in a petal or to crossbreed its variety with roses that are naturally less acidic. Already, the company has used its cloned and patented blue gene to create a violet-colored carnation. A black carnation developed by the firm is also poised to enter the flower market. And the company has another carnation that can last a month in a vase on your dining room table. As with any new hybrid, regulators in the United States and in Europe had to approve the violet carnation for sale. This was not a problem. Apparently the regulators did not believe that genetic material from a violet carnation could easily escape and get passed on to other plants in the environment. Genetically engineered carnations don't produce much pollen, which is buried deep in the flower. A cut carnation stops producing pollen. Furthermore, if (unlikely enough) a nearby weedy relative of the carnation were pollinated with a genetically violet cousin and if it produced fertile seeds -- new, violet weeds -- there was a sense of "So what?" People don't worry much about violet carnations or blue roses. They feel differently about genetically engineered crops. Let's say that a crop is given a gene resistant to herbicides. Now we can spray that crop and kill only weeds. The fear is that the crop will hybridize with nearby plants to create a superweed, resistant to herbicides, or to pests, or to whatever has been engineered into the crop. Or to something we didn't predict. A gene from a common soil bacterium has been spliced into corn to create a crop resistant to the corn borer. Millions of acres in the United States have been planted with this corn, and the same gene is regularly spliced into potatoes and cotton. Only in the late 1990s did we realize that pollen from these crops is poisonous to monarch butterflies. We are interfering with relationships we do not understand. This is not a news flash. We began interfering as soon as we picked up a rock and chipped it into a spear point. We were hell-bent on transforming the world. We haven't looked back. This is who we are. I don't want a blue rose in my garden. But I like the color blue. A small perennial herb called the dayflower grows in the mountains near my home. Its triangle of three petals is about an inch long, somewhat deeper than cerulean, lighter than indigo, more like ultramarine. Opening at dawn and wilting by noon, the flower rises delicately out of a tapered, folded leaf. Some people call the dayflower widow's tears, perhaps because of this tear-shaped leaf, or perhaps for some other reason. The dayflower does not grow in abundance. It seems rare. It appears suddenly, twinkling in the grass. What did I feel the first time, and every time since, that I saw a dayflower, so singular and elegant, outside all that I know and am? The dayflower is mystery in a pretty shade of blue. The dayflower is the shape of the Other, the Beloved. If you are inclined, you could see God in this flower. You could feel transparent, clear as glass. You might even feel, dimly, what it will be like not to exist in your present form. A blue rose is not the Other. A blue rose is an interesting artifact in a pretty shade of blue, perhaps the right color for that spot in the garden, yes, against the white wall, but not so good, unfortunately, with the patio brick -- and clashing, really dreadfully, beside the bougainvillea. *** WRITER AND CULTURAL CRITIC Jeremy Rifkin promotes the word algeny, which means "a change in the essence of a living thing." Algeny is analogous to the medieval idea of alchemy. Alchemists in the Middle Ages believed that all chemical elements were transformable into other elements. Nature was a continuum that we could ride, like an escalator. Furthermore, and of greater interest, all metals were on their way to becoming gold. This last transformation became a powerful symbol. Humans, too, could transform into spirit. Jeremy Rifkin writes: The algenic arts are dedicated to the improvement of existing organisms and the design of wholly new ones with the intent of perfecting their performance. But algeny is much more. It is humanity's attempt to give metaphysical meaning to its emerging relationship with nature. Algeny is a way of thinking about nature and it is this new way of thinking that sets the course for the next great epoch in history. The blue rose is part of the next great epoch. With biotechnology, roses can be made to smell again. A commercial flower company has inserted into a rose the gene that encodes the enzyme used by citrus plants. The resulting rose will smell lemony. Eventually, we will program other fragrances into flowers. The blue rose can smell like cinnamon, like baking bread, like the talcdusted skin of your first child. Our ability to isolate genes, clone them, and put them into other plants has greatly sped up all kinds of research. Having sequenced the genome of the whiteflowered Arabidopsis thaliana, scientists everywhere are popping genes in and out of this little mustard to see what happens. In a generation of seedlings, we can see the effect of a gene's absence, its presence, and its addition (or overexpression). A particular gene, for example, with the nickname of ANT, controls the size of leaves and flowers. When ANT is inserted into the genome of a plant, the plant grows to produce bigger flowers and seeds. When ANT is removed from a genome, the resulting flowers and seeds are smaller. The development of a flower is one of the things we understand least about plants. As we keep tinkering, however, we learn more and more, every day. We discover that one gene starts the response to a growth hormone. The mutation of another gene causes changes in the ovary. How about, now, that gene there? Flowers are quickly giving up their secrets. In the future, the crops we plant may flower at the times we choose, under the conditions we choose, in ways we choose. In our gardens, we will control the color of a flower, the shape of its petals, and the memories in its smell. The blue rose, certainly, will do what we tell it to do. *** I AM NOT ALWAYS SURE what I feel. In Los Angeles, there is a garden center that I sometimes visit. Here, next to the freeway, flowers are crammed together row after row, one bright bloom after another: tulip trees, gardenias, fuchsias, hydrangeas, jasmine, wisteria, lilies, impatiens, vincas, zinnias, dahlias, verbena, daisies, hibiscus, and roses, roses, roses. The vast majority of these are hybrids. Many have signs attached, reminding me, "Asexual production of plants protected by the Plant Patent Act is prohibited." Soon some of these plants will be genetically engineered. I have stood in this place, surrounded by flowers, and I have been moved to tears. I have felt the excitement. So much beauty. So much bounty. It just went on and on, the beauty and the bounty, the alchemy and the algeny, all the magical arts. My heart beat faster. My chest felt hollow. Flowers are on a fast-track continuum.
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