If you are really into micro-propagation you can get to the stage where the cuttings you are taking are just a scraping of cells of the surface of, say, a tobacco leaf. So you can have a situation where the propagator starts off with a very large cutting, or can also end up with a single living cell. It will contain all the genetic information that the largest cutting has and will to my certain knowledge produce an identical plant as will the cutting of bougainvillea you might put in this afternoon.
So far so good. Now the fun (and when the trouble starts). An Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel discovered the rules that govern and determine inheritance. He experimented with garden peas – tall ones and small ones and the intermediate ones resulting from crossing them. Eventually that led to the discovery of dominant and recessive genes, and helped to explain something about plants that seemed subject to all sorts of diseases. It also provided the key that allowed scientists to unlock the mystery of inherited characteristics and allowed them to devise breeding programmes that gave us rust resistant wheat, and increased the yield of many economically important plants, and so on and so forth. But no rigorous selection by the breeder will result in some terrible plants, and in my opinion has already produced some terrible looking varieties in the rose and tulip world, for the laws of inheritance dictate that a certain number of individuals bearing a full set of recessive genes also occur.
It has also unlocked Pandora’s box, because with the discovery of how to manipulate DNA in living organisms it gave us the ability to get into the single cell, and begin to manipulate the very essence of the plants with which we are so familiar. In a laboratory in the middle of England in the middle of the 1970s I saw plants growing which resulted from the single cell mingling of the petunia and the tobacco. They had ‘forgotten’ how to behave as petunias or tobacco, and were something in between – plants which did not fit into any known system of classification. I am sure that it is but a short step now to cloning single cells taken from the lining of the mouth of any human being and producing an identical individual in every way to its parent, just like I and many others can produce plants from single cells. It is only a very short step to getting inside these same single cells and tinkering about with the inherited characteristics
on the chromosomes and altering them. In some case for good I am sure, but there’s no guarantee that errors won’t occur. We may get glorious new plants (and babies). We may also get monstrosities as well. There’s a thought…
Until next week may your God go with you wherever you may be.
