Still, that discovery may in fact have threatened one cherished aspect of the American way of life by triggering the slow demise of late summer state fair watermelon seed spitting contests. The San Francisco Examiner reported on November 21st of that year that the discovery of an “elixir of growth,” meant that “…science may at last have a grip on the steering wheel of evolution, and be able to produce at will almost any kind of species…” including “…a plague of man-eating ones.” In 1937 Americans had much more important things to worry about, just as we do now. If you were reading a Hearst Corporation newspaper in late 1937, you might have thought humanity would eventually be swallowed up by giant carnivorous plants, unwittingly unleashed by uncontrolled biotechnology. Just a knife or a hard thunk on the sidewalk are enough to get a watermelon to spill its genetic guts. Will seedless watermelons make us superhuman or turn our children into giants? Hardly, but they do give home cooks the power to count chromosomes without a microscope.
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