Humankind Engineers Mutant Red-Eyed Wasps!

Researchers have used gene manipulation to create an amazing new mutant wasp with horrifying blood red eyes! A team of scientists at University of California Riverside used CRISPR gene-slicing technology (which sounds more like a salad technology than something used for wasps) in order to permanently alter the eyes of the tiny parasitic jewel wasps (Nasonia vitripennis). Researchers injected DNA and RNA into the nearly microscopic wasp eggs with infinitesimal needles. The resulting red eyes are hereditary and can be passed through successive generations.

The scientists hope to understand how male jewel wasps can somehow ensure that all of their offspring are male—a very unusual ability which geneticists and entomologists would like to understand. However, beyond novelty eye color and sex selection in tiny obscure parasitoid wasps, the researchers are also after bigger game—understanding how to manipulate the genes of all sorts of insects including agricultural pests and dangerous disease-carrying bugs like mosquitos and tsetse flies.

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The Tree of Forty Fruits

The Tree of Forty Fruit by Sam Van Aken

If you have been keeping your eyes on the internet lately you have probably seen the shimmering tapestry of pink, purple, red, and white blossoms which is the “tree of forty fruits”. This is a stone-fruit tree which has been agonizingly grafted together out of numerous branches from heritage peach, apricot, plum, apple, quince, cherry and other rose-family fruit trees into a frilly pink Frankenstein of a fruit tree. The root stock is a hardy plum tree to which the other stocks are added one by one. The effect is simultaneously garish and beautiful—particularly in blossom season (though it must be impressive to see the tree in early fall when it is laden with heterogenous fruits).

The tree of forty fruits seems like it might have been designed by a mad scientist, a huge biotech corporation, or a high-minded super-villain (like Poison Ivy or someone), but it was actually the creation of an art professor, Sam Van Aken. Van Aken gre up in rural Pennsylvania and he wanted to save the vanishing heirloom fruits of his youth. In an article about his project in Epicurious, Van Aken explained why he is working to safeguard these classic fruits, “In trying to find different varieties of stone fruit to create the Tree of 40 Fruit, I realized that for various reasons, including industrialization and the creation of enormous monocultures, we are losing diversity in food production and that heirloom, antique, and native varieties that were less commercially viable were disappearing,” To him the number forty has a talismanic quality which represents superabundance. He has already created 16 of the intricately grafted trees and he dreams of spreading them around the country and perhaps the globe.

The tree of forty fruits is a living sculpture—a bizarre amalgam of trees, agriculture, and diligent manual artistry. It isn’t just a splicing together of different tree species, it is a hybridization of ancient fundamental human pursuits. If you told the nurserymen and sculptors of Babylon that we would live in a world with such a tree, they would applaud. So should we!