Plus other fun facts from The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.
. They understood that radioactive fallout was going to fundamentally alter the ecosystem of any place where bombs were tested or dropped., where scientists would essentially plunk a tube of radioactive material into the center of a field. They’d plant various crops in a kind of pizza pie configuration of concentric circles. Eventually the isotope rod would get dropped into a bunker that shielded the surface from its gamma rays, and scientists could safely go check on their spoils.
Gamma rays have an even smaller wavelength than x-rays—they’re something you can only get after you split into an atom—and they can shoot through basically anything like a bullet. So, surprise surprise, the plants right next to the radiation center would die. Some of the closest ones to survive would grow tumors. But somewhere farther out in the circle, you’d start to see plants that were just….
That became very interesting to the US government during the cold war; politicians wanted to prove to the world that there was a bright side to the whole nuclear weapon thing. There were a bunch of initiatives designed to get nuclear physics into our everyday lives in a helpful and morally palatable fashion, and one of them was using those gamma gardens to create exciting and useful new plant varietals.
Researchers would start by trying to spot any potentially useful adaptations that cropped up thanks to irradiation. Then they’d take the mutant plant and try to improve on it; they might cross-breed with something else, or irradiate a second or third or fourth generation of it, for example. At each stage they would store some seeds, so that when they found something really neat—either for aesthetic or agricultural purposes—they could get those nuclear plants out to the public.
Even folks without any interest in nuclear science interacted with some of these plants, and we still do today., which is now very common, is just one example, which was bred in an atomic garden to have very dark flesh and sweet juice. Most of the world’s mint oil comes from a peppermint cultivar called “Todd’s Mitcham,” which is resistant to certain fungi, and was bred at Brookhaven National Lab’s gamma garden.
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