Word: knudson
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...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 the process of photosynthesis-most important chemical reaction in the world...
...Botanist Knudson suspects that the bigger its chloroplasts, the bigger is a plant's power to synthesize food for its own growth-and for the nourishment of man and beast. So Knudson's colleagues are eagerly planning to adapt his method to develop more productive strains of corn, wheat, clover, other crops...
...Though Knudson uses X-rays to modify plants, his results have no relation to those of other scientists who for 15 years have also been creating mutations of plants (and animals) with X-rays (TIME, April 14). Such previous mutations were caused by the ionizing-or "electrifying" -effect of X-rays on the cell's chromosomes, kneading these heredity-determining units into unusual patterns and thus producing freakish plants which would seldom occur in nature...
...Knudson's X-rays produce their changes not by affecting the chromosomes, but rather the chloroplasts themselves. Reason: chloroplasts are passed on directly from parent plant to its offspring through the seed or spore instead of arising anew in each generation under the genetic influence of the chromosomes. Knudson worked with fern spores, because they are simple and sexlessly reproductive...
...Union has demanded that General Motors recognize it as the exclusive bargaining agency for all General Motors employees. This stand is just as ridiculous as the one which Mr. Knudson adopted. No one knows how many employees of General Motors wish to be represented through the Union. The Union itself does not know. In some plants of General Motors the Union membership is negligible, and it does not seem likely that the Union at present has enrolled half of the General Motors employees. In the course of time an exclusive bargaining agency may grow up in General Motors...