For the first time in the history of science or agriculture, man may be about to make a fundamental improvement in the unique power of plants to manufacture food out of carbon dioxide and water in the presence of light. Selective breeding, long practised to increase the yield of plants, may eventually be looked back on as little better than superficial when compared with a new method described last week by Cornell's Botanist Lewis Knudson. Using X-rays, Knudson has permanently increased the size of plants' cnloroplasts—the cell's tiny granular bodies where chlorophyll makes sugar and starch out of inorganic matter by...
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