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Short Wave

An Apple Is An Ovary: The Science of Apple Breeding

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.76K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What's your favorite apple? Maybe it's the crowd-pleasing Honeycrisp, the tart Granny Smith or the infamous Red Delicious. Either way, before that apple made it to your local grocery store or orchard it had to be invented — by a scientist. So today, we're going straight to the source: Talking to an apple breeder. Producer Hannah Chinn reports how apples are selected, bred, grown ... and the discoveries that could change that process. Plus, what's a "spitter"?

Read more of Hannah's apple reporting.

Want to know how science impacts other food you eat? Email us at [email protected] and we might cover your food of choice on a future episode!

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Thriving in the face of adversity. That's something the incredible species of our world do every day.

0:06.4

I'm Chris Morgan. Join me on the Wild as we explore stories of hope and resilience in nature and what they can teach us about ourselves and each other.

0:15.2

Listen to The Wild from KU.OW in Seattle, part of the NPR Network.

0:20.6

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

0:26.0

Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with producer Hannah-Chin.

0:29.3

Hey, Emily.

0:30.3

And a fridgeful to the brim of apples that I picked with my family at Rock Hill Orchard in Maryland.

0:35.4

I forgot, Hannah, there's so many varieties out there.

0:38.1

There's Sun Crisp, but also Rome, and this new apple I hadn't heard of called a Rosalie.

0:43.5

I think that's my new favorite.

0:44.8

Ooh.

0:45.8

You know, Emily, what's really cool is that those rosalie apples that you saw, they're the same rosaliees that I might see apple picking in New York.

0:54.0

They're clones. They're clones.

0:55.0

They're clones?

0:57.5

Yeah. Basically, if I buy a rosalie in a grocery store in New York and you buy a rosalie

1:02.6

in an orchard in Maryland, our rosalie apples are going to be genetically the exact same

1:07.7

because they're all from the same original plant.

1:10.5

So you're telling me all apples are copies of each other.

1:14.2

Exactly. Well, in botanist terms, they're propagated.

1:19.5

Every leaf has the genetic potential to make a tree.

1:24.4

So this is Susan Brown, and she's supervised a lot of propagation in her time

1:28.7

because she's the head of the apple breeding program at Cornell Agritech in Geneva, New York,

...

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