A PUBLICITY stunt or serious science? With China’s space programme, it is hard to tell. The nation is set to launch a satellite that will carry plant seeds into space and bring them back to Earth for sowing, China’s official news agency Xinhua revealed last week. The idea is that radiation in space will cause genetic mutations that might have a beneficial effect.
Which would be fine, except that similar experiments by NASA drew a blank. For example, the seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred International flew soybean seeds to the International Space Station in 2002. When scientists later analysed seeds from…
