What Is Atomic Gardening? ☢️ | QI

This clip is from QI Series 15, Episode 7, 'Next' with Sandi Toksvig, Alan Davies, Frankie Boyle, Ross Noble and Lucy Porter.

[decodolly]

So, someone was trying to improve sweetcorn. They involved the Jolly Green Giant, introduced gamma radiation and we ended up with the Incredible Hulk.

[merlapittman]

And once again, I am reminded of just how funny Ross Noble and Frankie Boyle are! I'm a big fan of Frankie Boyle, especially, and I'd love to see more of him on QI

[MitchCyan]

I’d love to see Frankie Boyle on
QI again.

[samsonsoturian]

This era of nuclear research is also what lead to all the mutation based superheroes in comic books but most of that was changed to gene editing in the early 2000s when everyone realized mutations are garbage

[LB-geih]

“The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” was initially a play by Paul Zindel, won the Pulitzer Prize. The more you know…

[roblowrie]

That shot they put up on the screen looks like Dungeness. That's a strange place. 👍🏻

[LeornianCyng]

Need more appearances by Frankie on QI. He’s really intelligent and interesting.

[WilliamSmith-mxze]

Atomic gardening: when a gardener says 'I've got green fingers', he's literally got green fingers. Indeed, they're glowing bright green.

[bebejewels]

OMG. I live near Oak Ridge. How strange to see the can with that label.😂

[puirYorick]

Bob Newhart was (in) a Buck Henry film with Gilda Radner and Madeline Kahn playing the American FIRST FAMILY. The crux of the ridiculous plot involved some sort of atomic substance spewing out from a volcano in a fictional African country that permits the growing of giant vegetables.

[angemaidment]

It was interesting to hear that Sandi lost a film roll to Paul Newman’s daughter. Reminds me of the time Graham Norton said he missed out on “The Devil Wears Prada” and Stanley Tucci got the part.

[Aloddff]

I love this story, when they did it on no such thing too

[canoli]

My father’s doctoral dissertation in the early 1950’s concerned the effects of radiation on rose bushes. 😮

[mohamedal-ganzoury]

Did she just end with...super-seeded? 🤭🤭🤭

[nbartlett]

And now the same people who recoil in fear of "GMO" foods will happily eat a red grapefruit.

[wanderlustwarrior]

Genetic engineering has super SEEDED the gamma garden indeed.

[cakeman]

It would be nice if they could provide closed captioning for Americans.

[randomnadir]

They still use radiation to accelerate variegation. Valuable tool for genetic engineering.

[JimC]

A reminder (not a complaint) that the show is "Quite Interesting", not "Quite Accurate Information".

Re the "atomic corn", there appears to be some dispute. Supersweet corn originated from a sweet but badly stunted variety. One story says it was natural, another says it was irradiated.

"Breeding The Nutrition Out of Our Food" [Op-Ed]
by Jo Robinson, New York Times, 26 May 2013

"This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An opinion essay last Sunday about the reduced nutritional content in many modern fruits and vegetables referred incorrectly to the origins of supersweet corn. The corn was a result of a natural, spontaneous mutation, and was not created through radiation."

Also see the wiki article "sweet corn".

[boogieknee]

I naively assumed that this would have been a study on phytoremediation* rather than deliberately damaging the dna of plants which would then enter the food chain.
*The containment/extraction of toxins from the environment using plants.
>..example certain plants will accumulate certain chemicals in their seeds ....if the fruit itself is harvested and the seeds removed....
You now have removed that element from the ground as a biproduct of harvesting the fruit.