List of Headings
- i Reasons why scientists created the very first gamma gardens
- ii Altering the characteristics of crops has been a practice since ancient times
- iii Encouragement to take up gamma gardening offered to the public by the media
- iv An individual who worked to increase the popularity and effectiveness of gamma gardens
- v The structure and functioning of a gamma garden
- vi Gamma gardening and specific illnesses
- vii A wide range of produce that was exhibited from early gamma gardens
- viii Cooperation and competition between different countries about gamma gardening
- ix Reasons why scientists and the public started to question the value of gamma gardening
- x How gamma gardening eliminated famine
Questions 1-7
Drag a heading into each box.
1. Visitors to garden shows across the US and in the UK in the 1960s could see science at work. Never before had such giant peanuts been on display or so many huge tomatoes which kept on growing from a single plant. In addition, there were multi-coloured flowers on a single bush, and seeds that promised to grow a rare blue rose.
2. In 1959 in the UK, a woman named Muriel Howorth founded a society to promote gamma gardening and published a book a year later about how to grow a gamma garden in a back yard.
3. Promotions and contests in US newspapers offered cash prizes of $1,000 for the 'most unusual' plants reported to them.
4. The largest, usually lab-based, gamma gardens of the 1950s could cover as much as five acres, with plants arranged in sections which were laid out in the shape of a circle. The way a gamma garden worked was simple: radiation came from a radioactive metal pole which was stuck in the garden's centre and exposed the plants around it to its silent rays.
5. Gamma gardening could speed up evolution, and it seemed like a solid answer to the problem of food shortages and plant disease.
6. Humans have been selectively altering plants for millennia. Long ago, staple foods such as potatoes and tomatoes were poisonous, but farmers bred them so they became edible. Farmers and scientists throughout the ages continued to modify plants using selective breeding to enhance a characteristic over a few plant generations, or through chemically induced mutations.
7. During the 1970s scientists grew frustrated with the randomness of the genetic mutations the radiation produced. The public had also become uneasy about the relationship between radiation and disease and began worrying about the radioactive tools they used to produce their plants and the impact these had on the safety of fruit and vegetables in particular.