This was the biggest apple launch of all time.
The new iPhone 11 is simply amazing.
Hold on. No, not that kind of apple.
This kind of apple.
This is a new variety of apple.
The Cosmic Crisp.
It's the largest launch of a single variety ever.
It's the child of the blockbuster Honeycrisp apple and the Enterprise
apple. In the U.S.,
apples are a five billion dollar a year industry.
There are more than 7,500 varieties of apples grown across the world
in 2,500 of those are grown in the U.S.
like the Pink Lady, the Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, the
Honeycrisp and America's favorite, the Gala, which just beat out the
Red Delicious variety for the first time ever.
Red Delicious had reigned more than half a century before the Gala
apple dethroned it.
And yet, scientists are still developing new varieties.
Actually, it's not just apples.
There are plant breeders, horticulturalists and scientists around the
world working to perfect and reinvent the food everyone knows.
Whether it be apples or berries, mushrooms or crops like rice and
wheat. And this innovation isn't just the controversial GMO kind.
That's short for genetically modified organism.
In fact, crops have been cross-bred to produce new varieties for
hundreds of years.
Plants naturally cross-pollinate, which produces new varieties.
Here in the U.S. are breeding programs like the one at Washington
State University that is responsible for the more than 20 years of
work it took to create and grow the Cosmic Crisp apple through
natural means. Here's how we invent new foods like the Cosmic Crisp.
The first masters of biotechnology date back to more than 12,000
years ago to the Neolithic period of the Stone Age, where the
adoption of farming and agriculture first began to develop.
It was then that humans isolated elite selections of crops and mass
planted them to domesticate certain crops, and this happened
independently in different regions all over the world with all sorts
of plants. But the modern apple we know today can be traced back to
Kazakhstan during the Bronze Age and to bear droppings.
For millions of years, bears chose to eat the larger, sweet variety
over the smaller, bitter apples.
Then through bear droppings that contain those apple seeds, a process
called germination, more fruit trees grew to grow that larger sweet
apple we know today.
By the first millennium BCE, apples had become part of Western
agriculture. The ancient way of doing it was simply planting seeds
and you'd get variation.
Fast forward a few thousand years to colonial America in the late
1700s, nearly 100 years after the apple was imported by immigrants,
pioneers were encouraged to plant apples.
In 1806, Jonathon Chapman, well, you might know him as Johnny
Appleseed, distributed apple seeds from western Pennsylvania to West
Virginia. And this helped America's apple crop flourish in new parts
of the country. When an apple seed is planted, it doesn't just grow
into the same variety of apple of the seed it was grown from.
It entirely depends on pollination.
Each plant inherits half of its DNA from the tree the apple came from
and half from the tree the pollen came from.
So when new apple seeds were planted throughout the country, being
pollinated by who knows what, thousands of new varieties hit the
market. If you planted a seed from a Cosmic Crisp apple, you wouldn't
get a Cosmic Crisp tree.
You would get a tree that was, had inherited 50 percent of its genes
from Cosmic Crisp, but fifty percent from whatever pollen parent had
actually pollenize the flower that then made that fruit.
In 1905, f ruit growers evaluated 100,000 clones from literally
hundreds of thousands of apple selections.
In this screening of the open pollinated chance seedlings resulted in
varieties we still see today, like the Red Delicious, Golden
Delicious and the McIntosh.
This starts with understanding that the tree you see in an orchard is
a composite tree made up from two parts, the rootstock and the scion.
That means it's made up of two different varieties.
It has the top part that has the fruit.
That's the scion variety.
And then the bottom part is the rootstock.
You can have, for example, a rootstock that makes a huge big tree and
whatever scion variety you would bud or graft on top of that, it will
grow into a really big tree.
Grafting is a process where plant material from one variety is fused
to another and then together the plant grows.
And this technique dates back thousands of years too.
It's even mentioned in the bible.
Grafting, you'll take a bit of scion stick.
Okay, technical term, but it's got several buds on it.
You'll cut the bottom perhaps into a V and you'll cut a similar kind
of shape on top of the rootstock chute.
You literally can just push the two together, bind them, so that they
hold. And then the vascular tissues will fuse, and that means that
you get this new tree growing up out of the grafted wood.
This technique is also known as clonal propagation.
That's when scientists make identical genetic copies of a plant.
The Cosmic Crisp was made by classical breeding, which is also known
as hybridization. Evans is part of the breeding program at Washington
State University that developed the Cosmic Crisp.
Fundamentally, you're taking pollen from one of the apple trees in
our case and then using that pollen to pollenize flowers of the other
parent. Simple process.
It's just controlled pollination, so it's using a process that's
happening out there all the time with bees or other visiting insects.
But the pollen that's used on to the flowers is random.
With ours, we're using this pollen from a specific male parent that
we've chosen to give us that greater potential of having offspring
with the characteristics that we're looking for.
From their plant breeders germinate and evaluate thousands of seeds
that came out of the hybridization process.
One of the Cosmic Crisp's parents is the Honeycrisp apple.
Honeycrisp has got this ultra-crisp texture that really hadn't been
seen very much until Honeycrisp hit the market.
And for some reason, Honeycrisp caught the fancy of America and it
changed the whole apple industry because they found out that people
liked it so much they'd pay two times a Honeycrisp than for regular
apples. The other parent apple is an Enterprise, and if you haven't
heard of that one, it's because it's mainly grown and sold in
Indiana. This is Jules Janick.
He's a horticulturalist and professor at Purdue University in
Indiana. You can probably call him the grandfather of the Enterprise
apple. We developed the Enterprise apple.
Kate Evans made many crosses and one of the crosses she made was
crossing Enterprise, which is a big, red apple, attractive,
scab-resistant to Honeycrisp. As breeders make crosses, each genetic
mashup between two parents generates a unique offspring every time.
It's kind of like how siblings share DNA from the same two parents,
but have different characteristics.
And that's because you've inherited that maternal and paternal DNA.
But it segregates, it all mixes up.
So what we're using is breeders were using that technique to get that
mixing up off of genes to then enable us to be able to choose the
best individual.
The process of identifying a great variety of apple takes years.
It takes two or three years to really grow a tree.
So they keep replanting it and testing it to make sure it's as good
as they think it is.
The Washington State University breeders were looking for an apple
that would appeal to both consumers and to growers.
So, for example, when it came to ultimately choosing the variety that
became the Cosmic Crisp, its tastiness and storability were at the
forefront. It's slow to brown, so you throw your lemon trick out the
window. It's just so natural slow to brown.
To test this, we left out two apples overnight and here's what they
looked like after 16 hours.
A lot of people ask us all must be a Frankenstein apple or is it GMO,
and no, it's not.
A GMO is a genetically modified organism.
It's a plant or animal that has been altered by genetic engineering,
which is a manipulation of an organism's genes by either introducing,
eliminating or rearranging specific genes using methods of modern
molecular biology, or at least that's how it's thought of in
countries like the United States.
Technically, something that has been genetically modified can be done
through traditional methods too, like selective breeding.
However, the GMO technology that's often referred to today originated
in 1973.
Scientist Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen engineered the first
successful organism by cutting out a gene from one organism and
pasting it into another.
This technique is known as gene transfer.
However, the first food genetic modification tests were in 1987, and
from years of testing later, Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato hit shelves
as the first food crop to be approved for commercial production by
the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The tomato stays riper longer than the non-engineered variety, and
they say it's tastier.
These tomatoes were modified to be firmer, thus extending the shelf
life. And now that the FDA has pronounced them safe, they'll be
shipped.. But getting consumers on board with a crop that had new
genes proved difficult.
Still, just the thought of juggling tomato genes in a lab scares some
people. When the Flavr Savr first hit the market in 1994, d emand was
high, but by 1998, sales sharply dropped off as public perception
changed and the Flavr Savr tomato was never profitable because of
high production and distribution costs.
According to The Non-GMO Project, there's no scientific consensus on
the safety of GMO.
Even Chipotle has indicated on their menus that their food is
non-GMO, as part of their "food with integrity" mission.
And they were the first restaurant chain to do so in 2013.
But those in favor of the technology say it allows scientists to make
food more aesthetically pleasing, easier to cultivate, and even can
make food more nutritious.
Unfortunately, people are afraid of GMO.
People are afraid. It's just a fear that some crazy gene and they
don't want any in their mouth that has been controlled by genetics.
It's an irrational fear and I might say grafting at the same thing in
the 19th century, people were afraid of grafting, they though it
wasn't natural. So the question is, what's natural and what's
unnatural. New innovations now allow scientists to edit genomes, a
living organism's entire genetic code.
Then there's CRISPR-Cas9, which is short for clustered regularly
interspersed short palindromic repeats.
The way it works is kind of like having a document on a computer and
using the find tool to locate a specific word and then adjust that
word. CRISPR enables you to change some of those sequences to mimic
many other natural variations.
So in a fruit or vegetable with conventional breeding, you know, you
have a mother and a father and the children are always a combination,
but what happens if you could actually just change one of the traits
and not have to go through all the changing of everything?
CRISPR has seen its ethical challenges, particularly when it's used
in human science.
In November 2018, a Chinese scientist said that he used the gene
editing technology on twin girls to protect them from getting
infected with the AIDS virus.
CRISPR was used on embryos, disabling a particular gene that allows
HIV to enter a cell.
But the approach restricted in the U.S.
and much of Europe drew an international outcry.
China sentenced him to three years in prison.
Scientists are using CRISPR on the food we eat, like to keep
mushrooms from browning or to make oranges resistant to the greening
disease that is killing citrus plants around the world.
One startup, Pairwise, is currently using CRISPR to grow cherries
without a pit and to extend their growing season.
These natural breeding process take a long, long time.
The one example I can give is think about seedless grapes.
That's a natural genetic variation.
Well, we're working on using that same information to derived from
those grapes and create a cherry without a pit.
What pairwise is doing is essentially speeding up what they say would
happen naturally anyway.
It would just take years to happen in the wild.
And it's generally mimicking something that's already been naturally
done. We're only working on things that could be done through
breeding, but could be much faster.
Apples are 2.5
billion dollar a year business in Washington, which grows about 60
percent of the nation's supply or nearly 140 million boxes.
But these growers can't just grow any ol' apple.
Turns out, many apples have patents.
New varieties are trademarked, patented and marketed like any other
brand. Some of these apples are club apples.
Growers are paying somewhere around sixty three thousand dollars an
acre to plant a branded variety.
Any branded of variety, any apple.
Owning the intellectual property rights to a certain kind of apple
started in the mid 20th century when the first varieties were
patented as a way to compensate growers who spent time and money to
develop them. Most breeders would patent their apple varieties in the
U.S. The Cosmic Crisp is a new club apple, and it's managed by
Proprietary Variety Management, where Grandy is the director of
marketing. We are trademarked in probably over a hundred countries
and we have a few partners internationally so that they can protect
the trademarks. And so the patent for this particular apple is under
its name, W-A 38.
Washington State University owns that patent.
Washington State has a 10-year exclusive deal to grow the Cosmic
Crisp, and that's because the University of Washington collaborated
with growers in the state.
Growers then have a license to produce the WA-38 trees, and then that
license enables them to sell their fruit under the Cosmic Crisp
brand. The license actually comes through when they purchase the
trees through the nursery.
Most growers will still purchase trees, so the nursery will produce
finished trees. For growers, it can be a huge investment to take on
growing a new variety.
For a grower to make that investment, t hey've got to be fairly
confident that it's the direction they want to go in.
Why the growers do it?
Growers do it because fundamentally they're in business.
Some argue that the future of plant breeding lies in CRISPR
technology.
CRISPR technology, gene-editing, is something that we use to change
an individual gene and that is the plant breeding of the future.
Baker says growers have a reason to stay excited.
Growers are generally excited about any technology that helps make
farming easier. Just like consumers are generally excited about
anything that makes healthy food easier.
We're working on making fruits and vegetables more convenient, more
available and more affordable.
Regardless of whether the fruit was modified in a lab or hybridized
in a breeding program, many say there is space in the produce section
for new products.
And new produce means higher price tags and higher price tags can
mean a better profit for growers.
Growers obviously are interested in growing a new product where they
hope to be able to get a better return on their investment.