The New Explorers. Series III; No. 308; Super Seeds

<v Speaker>It's aerial warfare. A squadron on the attack. <v Speaker>But the enemy is not a missile base. <v Speaker>The enemy is as old as time itself. <v Speaker>As if from the pages of the Bible, it's a plague of locusts. <v Speaker>The year is 1993. <v Speaker>Sometimes we win with pesticides that will gas and poison the insects, <v Speaker>but chemicals are expensive and they also poison good bacteria that helps <v Speaker>the soil. It's a short term defense. <v Speaker>This scientist is looking for a better way, a way to use nature's own defenses, <v Speaker>to make crops better. <v Speaker>And this scientist is using one enemy against another to eliminate pests. <v Speaker>It's also cheaper and better for the soil. <v Speaker>In the eternal war against plague and pestilence, these new explorers <v Speaker>are winning.

<v Speaker>[Theme song plays] <v Speaker>Major funding for The New Explorers is provided by Amoco, celebrating <v Speaker>the adventure of scientific discovery for the year 2000 and beyond. <v Speaker>Additional funding is made possible by Waste Management Inc. <v Speaker>providing recycling and other waste services around the world.

<v Speaker>And by Duracell, embracing the power of science education. <v Speaker>The source of future technology and innovative growth. <v Speaker>Duracell, the Copper Top Battery. <v Speaker>Hello, I'm Bill Kurtis. It's early morning in South America. <v Speaker>And this is a street market in the high mountains of Columbia. <v Speaker>There are fruits and vegetables here the rest of the world has never seen, though some <v Speaker>are familiar. But our new explorers come here looking for the secrets of the original <v Speaker>food, not only to make them bigger. <v Speaker>Looking for the secrets that can fight disease and drought. <v Speaker>Hoping to save the staples that we eat and ultimately <v Speaker>maybe save us as well. [music plays] [rooster crows] <v Speaker>The farmers of Pescador Colombia have been farming these fields all their lives,

<v Speaker>sowing beans and planting cassava. <v Speaker>Year after year, they lost 20 percent to an insect called the horn worm. <v Speaker>And just as much of the bean crop to the bean weevil. <v Speaker>It was a hard loss, but they learned to live with it, <v Speaker>to harvest what they could, to sell it the market, and keep the rest to feed their <v Speaker>families. <v Speaker>We've been working on this house since since Christmas Day. <v Speaker>And then the scientists came. <v Speaker>Dr. Julia Kornegay moved here 8 years ago with her family to help. <v Speaker>She's a plant ?reader? and like the earliest farmers, she came with dreams of <v Speaker>a magic seed that would resist disease and withstand the pests that <v Speaker>destroy the crops. <v Speaker>But instead of just dreaming about it, she would use science, <v Speaker>a patient systematic approach, to find a special seed <v Speaker>that would hold the answers to the farmers' problems.

<v Speaker>Problems like this one. These are some of the most destructive insects in the world. <v Speaker>Tiny bean weevils, attacking the seeds of a bean plant. <v Speaker>300 million people depend on beans for food. <v Speaker>This insect can single handedly destroy a farmer's crop. <v Speaker>It happens regularly to the farmers of Pescador. <v Speaker>Here we have the adults. The adult male and female and the female adults <v Speaker>are over positing or laying their eggs on the seed. <v Speaker>They actually glue them onto the seed and you'll see them, they're little white specks. <v Speaker>After a day, the eggs will hatch and the larvae will bore down into <v Speaker>the seed. So although the the actual ova position <v Speaker>or the egg laying causes no damage to the seed, <v Speaker>uh the emerging of adults is where the major economic losses come from this <v Speaker>insect. <v Speaker>Once the adult female lays her eggs on the beam, it takes just 30 days for the offspring <v Speaker>to emerge, eating much of the bean in the process.

<v Speaker>Any beans the farmer has stored are ruined. <v Speaker>Working in the South American laboratories of C.I.A.T., Columbia's International Center <v Speaker>for Tropical Agriculture, Dr. Kornegay and her team began a search for <v Speaker>the special bean that could somehow resist the weevil and fight it off. <v Speaker>They knew it wouldn't be an easy journey. <v Speaker>There are over 26,000 different beans preserved in C.I.A.T.'s Gene Bank <v Speaker>of all stripe and color. <v Speaker>Wild beans, domestic beans, beans from Central America used by the ancient <v Speaker>Aztecs and Mayans and South America by the Incas. <v Speaker>If only one of them resisted the insect, it could hold the key to defeating <v Speaker>the bean weevil. <v Speaker>Research would take years. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Speaker>While the bean exploration moved forward, the C.I.A.T. <v Speaker>Laboratories were launching a mission against another devastating enemy.

<v Speaker>This is a healthy field of cassava, the hardy plant that will grow in the harshest <v Speaker>conditions, poor soil, and foul weather. <v Speaker>That's why 800 million people worldwide depend on it. <v Speaker>The route is the key. The plant is dug up so the tubers can be chopped and mashed <v Speaker>by those preparing the meal. <v Speaker>But this is not a healthy plant. <v Speaker>Its leaves have been stripped by a creature that flies hundreds of miles to descend <v Speaker>on a field out of nowhere and give birth to worms that devour <v Speaker>up to 75 percent of the planet. <v Speaker>Dr Tony Bellotti, an entomologist, has been studying the cassava horn worm <v Speaker>for almost 20 years. <v Speaker>Now, down below the plants, they have already defoliated these plants. <v Speaker>They've fed on these. <v Speaker>We see leaves moving, a lot of movement down there. <v Speaker>[Belotti] A lot of movement, hm.

<v Speaker>They'll stay like that un-under this debris uh for about 2 weeks <v Speaker>to they eventually uh, the adult emerges and then is ready to fly. <v Speaker>If it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, it is the nightmare of cassava farmers <v Speaker>and a dreaded enemy of the plant scientist who battles it. <v Speaker>If you have a good attack of these, like we normally find in cassava fields, it would <v Speaker>leave this field without any leaves at all on it. <v Speaker>It would just completely defoliate the field. <v Speaker>You've got a handful there, don't cha? <v Speaker>Yep. <v Speaker>Now, what do we have? <v Speaker>Well, here you got several different stages of the uh form. <v Speaker>This is the smallest, you can hardly see it. <v Speaker>This has just come out of the egg stage now, it's just beginning to feed on the leaf, as <v Speaker>you can see there. <v Speaker>Mhm, and then over here is the next size. <v Speaker>?inaudible? As it feeds after a few days, it'll get to a larger size, as you see here. <v Speaker>?inaudible? <v Speaker>And it just takes a few days to get that?

<v Speaker>Yeah, it'll take about 5 days, let's say, to get to that size. <v Speaker>And then it gets bigger and bigger, feeding on more leaves. <v Speaker>Yeah huh. <v Speaker>And we get into this stage. <v Speaker>Right, no, yeah. This is when it really can do the damage to us. <v Speaker>It gets to this stage, it becomes a feeding machine at this stage and it will just <v Speaker>continually consume foliage. <v Speaker>Until it uh reaches its maturity and then goes into the <v Speaker>pre pupil stage, which is the head end? The feeding end? <v Speaker>This is the feeding end. <v Speaker>Right there. <v Speaker>And it just kind of devours the greenery. <v Speaker>Then it goes into the pre pupa stage, right there? <v Speaker>Exactly. <v Speaker>They- very fast uh movements. <v Speaker>Why? <v Speaker>They don't like to be disturbed in that stage. <v Speaker>It's uh they're trying to uh go into a quiescent stage where <v Speaker>uh they want to change into the ?pupa?. So they don't like to be disturbed at this stage. <v Speaker>And if every little, just touch him, and they'll react to it. <v Speaker>Mhm. <v Speaker>It's very sensitive in that stage. <v Speaker>And then this is the pupa? <v Speaker>That's the pupa stage, right. <v Speaker>Big.

<v Speaker>Uh huh, and they're sort of protected. That's a fairly hard coating on them. <v Speaker>And they're fairly protected in this stage. <v Speaker>Very difficult to control them in this stage. <v Speaker>We do have a few or a few insects that you will find in the soil that will actually feed <v Speaker>on these, but not very many. <v Speaker>They are sealed in there, but you can see the wings beginning to form. <v Speaker>You can start seeing some formation uh exactly in that. <v Speaker>And as this pupil stage uh ages a little bit, you can start seeing <v Speaker>a little bit more definition. <v Speaker>Mhm. And then the final stage, they will emerge <v Speaker>as a moth. <v Speaker>As a moth, right. This is their really mobile stage. <v Speaker>And I say, this stage they can fly hundreds of kilometers and they can <v Speaker>migrate to other cassava fields. <v Speaker>We usually find that they will do this in mass. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Speaker>So there it is, the enemy. <v Speaker>One of many that have been here longer than we have. <v Speaker>Sometimes they have one. [music plays] <v Speaker>From the pharaoh's locusts swarming across Egypt to the Irish potato famine

<v Speaker>of the 1840s, plagues have been a major part of our religious and historical <v Speaker>record. For over a century, the boll weevil has ravaged cotton fields <v Speaker>in the south. In 1958, the locust wiped out 160,000 <v Speaker>tons of grain in Ethiopia, enough to feed 1 million people for a year. <v Speaker>There are pests that attack every one of the staples of the world, leaving many farmers <v Speaker>in third world countries on a fragile thread of survival. <v Speaker>We can battle them with chemicals, but more and more pests are developing resistance to <v Speaker>our chemical poisons. <v Speaker>So Dr. Bellotti searches for ways to help farmers who can't afford expensive <v Speaker>chemical pesticides. He studies how nature does it. <v Speaker>An old Arab motto says, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. <v Speaker>And these wasps are perfect examples.

<v Speaker>The cassava is of no interest to the wasp, but the horn worm is <v Speaker>a hearty meal. <v Speaker>Preying on horn worm larva, the wasp will sting its victim, <v Speaker>then carry it back to its nest. <v Speaker>He's gonna come up ahead. He's gon, he's gonna kill it. <v Speaker>He's gonna kill it right there. Even the big worms are no match. <v Speaker>If it's a larger one like this, uh it will there again against sting it again, <v Speaker>sort of paralyze it and then it will start cutting it up or slicing it up into strips <v Speaker>almost like pieces of filet mignon. <v Speaker>And it will take these strips, roll it into a ball, and take those strips <v Speaker>back to the nest and feed it to the young larva that are developing in their nest. <v Speaker>Tony's research has shown that a family of wasps can kill up to 100 <v Speaker>horn worms in a day. An effective ratio for smaller horned worm outbreaks. <v Speaker>It's a prime example of biological control, developing natural, non-chemical

<v Speaker>methods of saving crops. <v Speaker>[speaking Spanish]. <v Speaker>For Dr. Bellotti, the payoff comes from making a difference in farmers' lives. <v Speaker>[speaking Spanish]. <v Speaker>He's also fascinated by the insects. <v Speaker>His calculation's that there might be as many now as 30 million different species of <v Speaker>insects. So if you consider the human race as one species and you look at the diversity <v Speaker>that we have in the human race, you can imagine the diversity that's out there, genetic <v Speaker>diversity in insects, and that's where the most successful forms of life on <v Speaker>Earth. And uh it is absolutely fascinating to work with them. <v Speaker>?inaudible? I could think of working with uh with anything else except entomology. <v Speaker>I enjoy it that much. <v Speaker>It's an alien world. Strange beings of all shapes and forms <v Speaker>like this cicada shedding its shell. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Speaker>They spark the kind of curiosity that intrigue scientists into lifetimes of study

<v Speaker>and will continue to lead Dr. Bellotti to yet another means of natural control. <v Speaker>While Tony advanced on one front, Julia Kornegay and her colleagues were bogged down <v Speaker>in beans. <v Speaker>After testing 10,000 types of beans by placing the adult bean weevils <v Speaker>on the seeds to see if they would lay eggs, Not one bean survived <v Speaker>a weevil attack. And then 5 years after the study began, <v Speaker>they decided to test some wild beans. <v Speaker>Over 20 years earlier near Arcelia, Mexico, an American scientist, Dr. H.S. <v Speaker>Gentry collected a primitive bean that he found growing in the hills. <v Speaker>They were inedible, odd shaped, even birds wouldn't eat them, but they were <v Speaker>rare. So he saved them. <v Speaker>Eventually, the beans from Arcelia ended up at C.I.A.T.'s Gene Bank. <v Speaker>And when scientists set the weevils on them, the insects starved to

<v Speaker>death. The seed was resistant. <v Speaker>The secret was in its gene. <v Speaker>The challenge for Julia and her colleagues was to transfer the gene from the Arcelia bean <v Speaker>to be in those the Pescador farmers were planting. <v Speaker>They named it the arcelin gene, after the area in Mexico where it was found. <v Speaker>...Is indeed, the arcelin. <v Speaker>Then Julia Kornegay and her team went into action. <v Speaker>Crossbreeding the wild bean with other varieties. <v Speaker>This is hybrid seed now. This has 50 percent of its genes come from <v Speaker>the mother and 50 percent cut from the father. <v Speaker>And what we want to do then is to evaluate and uh select <v Speaker>among the progeny, those that have best expressed the traits of interest, in this <v Speaker>particular cross. <v Speaker>Under normal conditions, the bean plant will breed alone or self-pollinate. <v Speaker>The pollen from its stamen will fertilize the female stigma. <v Speaker>But Dr. Kornegay had to transfer the resistant gene from the Arcelin plant

<v Speaker>to an edible bean plant. <v Speaker>She took the pollen from the Arcelin plant and gently placed it on the stigma <v Speaker>of the new plant. <v Speaker>And it worked, producing the hybrid variety of bean plant that was resistant <v Speaker>to the bean weevil. <v Speaker>Every day we're evaluating the action of genes and how can we best combine <v Speaker>them, manipulate them, uh take them out, or put them in <v Speaker>um to to improve a crop? <v Speaker>And then the final product, of course, is a better bean. <v Speaker>But it also has to to filter down to a practical application <v Speaker>which farmers will uh adopt. <v Speaker>It was a remarkable achievement to create a new variety which can resist pests and <v Speaker>disease, but it's also useless if no one wants to eat them. <v Speaker>So Dr. Kornegay and other scientists at C.I.A.T, let the farmers themselves test <v Speaker>the new varieties.

<v Speaker>[speaking Spanish] <v Speaker>In the hills of Pescador, Indians help the farmers harvest a crop of beans. <v Speaker>Today, a small threshing machine is broken, so the farmers will have to thresh the bean <v Speaker>from the pods in the traditional way. <v Speaker>Then they must be dried, spread on a clean surface until the moisture leaves, <v Speaker>and the seeds can be packed and stored. <v Speaker>Some seeds will be sold and some will be stored for next year's crop. <v Speaker>Before C.I.A.T. began working here, that was impossible. <v Speaker>Farmers were forced to sell all their seeds right away. <v Speaker>If they stored them, the bean weevil got to them. <v Speaker>That meant each year, they would plant different varieties of beans, untested and <v Speaker>often unsuitable to resist the bean weevil. <v Speaker>Now, with the stronger Arcelin variety, bean yields have increased by 50

<v Speaker>to 100 percent. <v Speaker>Dr. Kornegay's team is now testing their advanced beans at C.I.A.T. <v Speaker>sister research centers in Central America and Africa, and the new beans <v Speaker>are growing strong. <v Speaker>There are 18 centers like C.I.A.T. <v Speaker>operating in 17 countries around the world under the acronym C.G.I.A.R., <v Speaker>Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. <v Speaker>Scientists joined in a global effort to help third world farmers. <v Speaker>It's an idea that many say originated in the 60s with Dr. Norman Borlaug, a breeder <v Speaker>who developed a variety of wheat that resisted black stemmed rust. <v Speaker>It was distributed worldwide and saved millions of lives. <v Speaker>And won Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize. <v Speaker>Today, as science continues to look at new technology, it's finding answers in the most <v Speaker>unexpected places. <v Speaker>One example is the salicornia plant.

<v Speaker>It's a halophyte, a salt lover that grows in salt water instead of freshwater. <v Speaker>It can grow just about anywhere, but its ideal climate is the desert coastline. <v Speaker>The seeds of the salicornia produce an oil that can be used in cooking. <v Speaker>Many Middle Eastern countries, dependent on imported cooking oil could become <v Speaker>self-sufficient, producing their own halophyte and become coastal desert <v Speaker>farmers within a few years. <v Speaker>Perhaps science will come up with a variety of cassava that will resist the horn worm. <v Speaker>C.I.A.T scientists don't rule out that possibility. <v Speaker>Biotechnologists here are engaged in a long term project to record the entire <v Speaker>genetic makeup of cassava. <v Speaker>It's the first step toward identifying the genes that could produce resistance not <v Speaker>only to insects, but to drought as well, or the ability to yield higher nutritional <v Speaker>content. This type of investigation is cutting edge research, still in the early <v Speaker>stages of development.

<v Speaker>The work that C.I.A.T. is doing in Colombia will be shared with other countries all over <v Speaker>the world that depend on beans and cassava for their food. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Speaker>It's all part of how scientists are discovering ways to maximize a farmer's <v Speaker>natural resources, enabling him to bring his products here. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Speaker>Strolling through this market, the C.I.A.T. Lab seemed part of a distant world. <v Speaker>Here, an Indian medicine man foretells the future by letting a parakeet pick

<v Speaker>a card. <v Speaker>The parakeet will pick out at random, a card <v Speaker>telling my fortune. <v Speaker>It's in Spanish, so I'll have to have you. <v Speaker>I see. Let's hear what it says. <v Speaker>It says uh the person that left you has left a tremendous <v Speaker>anguish. But this is going to reduce its health. <v Speaker>There is a tendency in you to believe in magical thought. <v Speaker>And in the intervention-. <v Speaker>I came to him, didn't I? <v Speaker>And then the intervention of supernatural <v Speaker>forces. Decide yourself to recognize the <v Speaker>your will to give more power to your will. <v Speaker>Yes. <v Speaker>There will be little problems during these days. <v Speaker>But soon happiness will surround you. <v Speaker>I like this man. <v Speaker>Trust yourself and trust those that are around you. <v Speaker>You know, sir, you have a very smart parakeet. Very smart.

<v Speaker>I'm gonna get one. <v Speaker>[speaking Spanish] <v Speaker>And what's a medicine man without magic potion? <v Speaker>[speaking Spanish] <v Speaker>He says this is water that he brought from the Amazon and if you take a bath with it, <v Speaker>you will be- You will pretty soon fall in love. <v Speaker>[laughing] I'll take it. <v Speaker>Strangely, our scientists may not be as far apart as you might think. <v Speaker>Dr. Bellotti has his own magic potion. <v Speaker>This liquid that you see right here is the liquid that comes out of that horn worm. <v Speaker>And you could actually just the decanter that off. If you want to get the best, <v Speaker>though, is to just put it right in the blender itself. <v Speaker>He's developed a natural pesticide, made of horn worm infected with the virus. <v Speaker>The farmer sprays the liquid virus on his fields. <v Speaker>The invading horn worms contract the disease and die before doing too much damage. <v Speaker>It's C.I.A.T.'s version of natural germ warfare.

<v Speaker>Back in the early 70s, uh we found at C.I.A.T., in the cassava fields, <v Speaker>we found some diseased larva. <v Speaker>We took these into the laboratory and looked at them, realized we had some type of <v Speaker>disease that these larva had. <v Speaker>And we sent these off to be identified. <v Speaker>Eventually it was Boyce Thompson, an institute that helped us with the identification of <v Speaker>the virus disease. So we realized what we needed, if we were going to use biological <v Speaker>control, we needed some type of natural enemy that we could apply <v Speaker>or put out in the field whenever the attack occurred. <v Speaker>Of all the natural enemies that we had, we realized that the virus disease probably fit <v Speaker>this criteria best in the sense that it was a natural occurring <v Speaker>disease of the insect. It gave us very good control. <v Speaker>You get 99 to 100 percent control when we use this out in the field <v Speaker>and the chance of something going wrong in the sense that it's going to harm humans <v Speaker>or other animals isn't very great. The chance of something going wrong with pesticides. <v Speaker>Yes, there's a lot of problems with pesticide contamination in human beings in many

<v Speaker>parts of the world. I think that biological control is a much safer <v Speaker>means of uh of controlling these insects. <v Speaker>And that's the point. Using the natural ways, science has achieved <v Speaker>breakthroughs. <v Speaker>Is there a moment of discovery, a thrill in this business that <v Speaker>causes you to say, "that's why I got into it"? <v Speaker>Yes, there are actually. There are several times when when you solve <v Speaker>a problem or you begin, you understand. <v Speaker>For example, inheritance of a trait or or you finally <v Speaker>make obtain combinations of genes and a genotype that you've been <v Speaker>struggling to get for many years and you finally obtain it. <v Speaker>So, yes, indeed, that's that's the nice part. <v Speaker>But then between all that, there's a lot of diligent uh exploratory <v Speaker>work that has to be done to get to those those points. <v Speaker>[music plays]

<v Speaker>Like the scientists, the farmers of Pescador believe in sharing their successes. <v Speaker>Today, we celebrate over a meal of cassava and beans from their fields. <v Speaker>Science has helped these farmers improve their lives in a major way. <v Speaker>It just seemed like magic. <v Speaker>Major funding for The New Explorers is provided by Amoco celebrating

<v Speaker>the adventure of scientific discovery for the year 2000 and beyond. <v Speaker>Additional funding is made possible by Waste Management Inc. <v Speaker>Providing recycling and other waste services around the world and by <v Speaker>Duracell. Embracing the power of science education. <v Speaker>The source of future technology and innovative growth. <v Speaker>Duracell, the copper top battery. <v Speaker>A videocassette and accompanying teacher's guide are available for each episode of The <v Speaker>New Explorers. To order, call 1 800 6 2 1 0 6 6 0 or write <v Speaker>The New Explorers 1 5 1 8 1 Route 58 South Oberlin, Ohio <v Speaker>4 4 0 7 4. <v Speaker>[music plays] This is PBS.