China's mutant veggies from outer space
Sep 20
Charles Hutzler | Wall St Journal
Even before China's ambitious space program rockets the first Chinese astronaut into earth's orbit, the effort is bearing fruit - and vegetables.
At a dusty farm on Beijing's northern outskirts, volleyball-size eggplants burst from the crop rows and gourds the size of baseball bats hang from vines. Tomatoes as big as softballs and 67cm cucumbers were harvested last month and packed off - not to market, but to scientists and government officials.
As the outsize dimensions and the elite customer base attest, these are no ordinary vegetables. Rather they are special varieties bred from seeds and seedlings shot into space on rockets, retrieved and then cultivated back on earth. The goal, scientists involved in the project say, is to develop crops that are hardier and higher yielding than their earthly counterparts. The results, says farm manager Wang Zhiping as he wades through belly-high plants on a well-watered field, are already evident.
"One eggplant can feed a family for two days," he says.
Mutant vegetables from outer space provide a telling, if quirky, glimpse into China's highly secretive, military-run manned space program. While the effort to conquer the stars captures the headlines, the program is also focused on eking out concrete returns, propelling China to the cutting edge of research, and potentially creating commercially viable products and breakthroughs in weaponry.
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"For very little investment, we're getting great advances in technology for our economy and in other fields," says Ma Xingrui, vice-president of the China Aerospace Science & Technology Corp, which produces the manned program's spacecraft.
For now, the space program seems on course to pass its most significant milestone by year's end: placing its first astronaut into orbit. The feat would make China only the third nation, after the US and Russia, with a manned space program.
Unlike the US and Russia, China hasn't developed its space program from scratch; instead, it has built on key Russian technologies. The Shenzhou spacecraft is an improved version of the Soyuz capsule, the workhorse of the Soviet program. Government agencies, military offices and research institutes, most operating on separate budgets, also feed into the program.
This intersection - between state-directed space funding and obscure research institutes - is where China wants to reap practical benefits from space. At one such complex, a dingy office building in Beijing's suburbs, researcher Liu Min of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Genetics began examining radiation's effects on plants in 1985. Two years later, the first seeds, from green peppers, went aloft on a retrievable satellite.
"Originally, we just put the seeds into space and brought them back to see what happens," Liu says.
Later, in the 1990s, budding co-operation with Russia allowed her to place seeds on the Russian space station Mir. At the same time, a government-backed company increased funding for the space seeds in hopes of finding super-crops for farmers being displaced to marginal land to make way for the massive Three Gorges Dam. Soon Liu's seeds and seedlings were riding on Shenzhou test flights, in test tubes strapped to astronaut-mannequins.
In space, the seeds and seedlings are exposed to zero-gravity and cosmic rays which, Liu says, can have a great impact on the DNA of immature organisms with rapidly growing cells.
The US and Russia conduct similar tests, but focus on assessing space's effect on living organisms and developing foods to grow aboard spaceships.
The Chinese program has determined that not all seeds respond positively to the effects of space, Liu says. But those that do can then be bred several times, resulting in stable seeds that grow faster and produce a bigger yield.
Liu says that in breeding, China is ahead of the Americans and the Russians.
Critics, however, say the Chinese experiments lack the funding, equipment and stringent controls to isolate space's numerous variables and thus pinpoint the mutation process.
Moreover, the same results can be obtained at a fraction of the cost by radiating seeds in labs on earth, says Bruce Bugbee, a Utah State University biologist funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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