Nuclear Radiation Improves Peanuts

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28792, 13 January 1959, Page 9

Nuclear Radiation Improves Peanuts

(Rec. 10 p.m.) RALEIGH (North Carolina), January 12.

An American geneticist has improved the strain of a living organism—a peanut—by nuclear radiation, it was announced yesterday.

The scientist. Dr. Walton Gregory, of the North Carolina State College agricultural experiment station, was said to have produced changes in peanuts in a few minutes with X-rays that nature would have taken thousands of years to achieve. Dr. Gregory’s achievement was hailed by Dr. Roy Lowom, director of the station, as a milestone in fundamental genetics and as one of the classic examples of how atomic energy can be used for beneficial rather than destructive purposes. Dr. Gregory was said to be the first American to have improved the strain of a living organism by tadiation.

According to the experiment station’s announcement, work on the new variety of peanut, called N.C. 4X, began in 1949 when Dr. Gregory took 501 b of peanut seed

to the nuclear laboratory at Oak Ridge (Tennessee) and exposed it to massive doses of X-rays.

The irradiated seed was then planted at a research station in North Carolina, and, by the third or fourth generation, almost every conceivable type of peanut was growing from the seed. The rays had upset the genes of the seed and a total of 11,000 mutations developed from' the seed. What was more important, the announcement said, Dr. Gregory had all of these mutations in one field at one time. Many breeding lines were started, one of which culminated in the N.C; 4X variety. Dr. Gregory and other scientists were still working on other breeding lines which may produce more new varieties.

The announcement said Dr. Gregory felt that the new variety would enable growers who were having difficulty with an earlier hybrid he helped develop to maintain their present high yields while overcoming some of the hybrid’s weaknesses. N.C. 4X had thicker hulls, fewer damaged kernels and fewer growth cracks than the earlier N.C. 2 variety and also Sad more resistance to leaf spot disease.