Parthenocarpy

For the sake of knowledge, experimental biologists tweak the nose of Nature by causing plants and animals to produce offspring without proper parentage. Tadpoles have been coaxed out of unfertilized frogs' eggs; live, healthy rabbits have been born after a conception which took place m a_ glass vessel; cell fragments of sea urchin eggs--fragments not even containing the female nucleus--have been fertilized with hypertonic sea water. Reported last week was a new fraud on Nature: the fertilization of holly and other plants with a chemical instead of natural pollen.

The method is called parthenocarpy (Greek parthenos, virgin; carpos, fruit). The chemical is indoleacetic acid, or heteroauxin, a famed plant hormone which has been used to stimulate root-sprouting and growth (TIME, Oct.11). Heteroauxin can be made synthetically at a cost of about $3 per ounce. One ounce in very dilute solution is enough to treat hundreds of plants. At the Department of Agriculture's experiment station in Beltsville, Md., Frank Easter Gardner and Ezra Jacob Kraus of the University of Chicago sprayed holly blooms with heteroauxin, obtained berries. These parthenocarpic fruits contained no trace of embryo, but the plant ovaries swelled up just as though the blooms had been pollinated, the seed coats developed, and the berries, green at first, turned red at the proper time in the autumn. To the eye, they were no different from berries from pollinated blooms.

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