New Flowers by X-Rays

For the first time two new flowers, created by the genetic effect of X-rays on seeds, were offered by a nurseryman to U.S. gardeners this week. Both flowers are calendulas, one a large, golden, double-petaled variety, the other an orange semidouble.

Both had their origin in seeds exposed to X-rays in 1933 by Genetecist Ernest Brown Babcock of the University of California. The X-rays ionized--or "electrified"--the seeds' nuclei, kneading their chromosomes into unusual patterns which produced the two desirably abnormal plants* (as well as a number of other undesirably abnormal freaks, grotesques and runts).

Such X-ray mutations have formerly been of interest chiefly to geneticists (TIME, April 14), but the two unusual calendulas caught the eye of David Burpee, astute Philadelphia seedsman, who two years ago introduced a tetra-marigold produced with colchicine, a chromosome-multiplying chemical. Seven years of reselection (with no further irradiation) assured the permanency of the new strains, readied them this year for Burpee's market.

*Since cosmic rays and the earth's slight natural radioactivity have identical ionizing effects, some biologists believe them to cause the small number of mutations which normally occur in all plants and animals and whose occasional increased fitness-for-survival is one of the mainsprings of evolution.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.