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The Truth about the Worlds First Tissue Cultured Cashew Plant
[Anacardium Occidentale] Preface:- I am tempted to write this based on a report in Deccan Herald. Thursday July 8th 2004, a prominent English daily of India – Titled Pioneering Laboratory. It also came on the Internet. It is claimed that the lab is the first in the world to obtain tissue-cultured plants of cashew and the plants in the field are doing extremely good. I write this article not out of any grudge but in honesty to to the spirit of truth. We make our world out of our action and inactions. I am simply acting against an untruth here. I was the first student of the lab and the work on cashew was initiated by me around 1983. Based on the work the lab got an enormous funding from department of science and technology of India around 1985. The first claim of an international success was done around 1987 /88, with a cabinet minister of Indian Government planting the plant in the field with wide publicity, I then did challenge these claims. This came shortly after I left the lab in protest of over exaggerating the work and attempt to exploit me and my hard work, misleading, the public, the government bodies, for name, fame and with an eye for funds without little respect to human values - a thing which made me to revolt and walk out throwing my doctorate degree and prompted me for greater research from a point of freedom. My research basically concludes that the highest goal of human endeavor should be to uphold Truth and Justice. Human beings are born with weakness; their “self” hides the real Truth and tries to make the best out of the situation for advancing once own self. It is unfortunate as I began to write the applied aspect of Unified Theory, I had to take this aspect. The Truth about
first Tissue Cultured Plant
Way back in 1982 the above said
lab was an unrecognized lab for [PhD work]. It belonged to a Christian Priest.
It had small project for around 2 lakhs for Tissue Culture of coconut. Coconut
was considered the toughest plant to clone. No student was willing to join the
lab. That was a period when I was seeking a research career with intent to
contribute something to the society and make my life worthwhile. The priest gave
a sermon, about Mayor, Mendel, Einstein and other great scientist who without a
doctorate degree by the value of their research paper made names in science. I
decided to take the challenge. When under his guidance, even
after nearly year of day night work, I failed to make even a slight progress. I
began to waver, I found the priest wanting in intellectual arena. I contemplated on
leaving the lab. I took a break spent a week with my friends in a
reputed institute, and then suddenly I developed a strange communication with
nature. This communication helped drastically deviate from the style of my
questioning and approach to experimentation. My research work began to stir; in
addition to coconut I started work on woody trees of commercial and aesthetic
value, taking the explants directly from mature tress. [Normally most people
work with seedlings, because they are more amenable]. I began to make quick
progress in everything I touched. Back in my village
I once happened to observe a germinating seed of Cashew. The tremendous
growth of the seed in the early period of germination astonished me. A seed is a
system that develops from a single diploid cell that in turn is the product of
two dedifferentiated information, which has differentiated to enclose a shoot
meristem, root meristem and a pair of cotyledons that carries stored food and hormones
for the germinating seed. I realized that as a researcher trying to clone plants through tissue culture, my aim was to find that optimum nutrition and hormones that the cotyledons give to the growing point. As a law Cyotkinins [hormone] are known to induce shoot growth and Auxins [Hormone] are known to induce root growth. It was apparent that a species-specific hormone and nutrients are getting directed to shoot and root meristems from the cotyledon to cause such astonishing growth. In a childish curiosity I decapitated apical shoot and root meristem in freshly geminated cashew seed placed it in steel glass [one used for drinking water] filled with wet sand and covered it with a plastic to maintain the moisture. Within few days to my surprise the cotyledonary axis produced large number of shoots and ring of roots appeared from the cut end of the hopocotyl. It is apparent that the instinct of the system to survive reacted to produce the results striking targets amenable to dedifferentiation and differentiation see series of photographs below.
Its known that leafs are the primary source of production of hormones cytokinins and Auxins. The auxins produced in the leaf move towards the earth to the root tip and cytokinins move against it to the shoot tip. So naturally my second childish question was, can the shoots produce its own root, I tilted the glass so the axis of the shoot stand apart from the axis of the mother seed. I was expecting the plants in the corner of the axis to produce roots at its base. My thinking turned correct and I could isolate many plants from the seed and transfer them to soil. Later it was found that these shoots could be easily rooted in the tissue culture in the lab or can be made to directly root in sand in a controlled glass house conditions. Any one can do this experiment
right in his garden. [Later I shifted the experiments into lab in glass bottles.
See fig]. This work was claimed by the priest and the so-called director
of my old laboratory as worlds first Cashew Tissue Cultured Plant.
It along with, my work with another woody species Lagerstroemia Indica
where in I succeeded in clonal multiplication through axillary bud directly from
mature trees led for asking for huge research fund from the government. Since
cashew was a cash crop funding body readily granted huge funds? There were many potential
ideas of great importance that developed in around this simple tool that I
accidentally discovered, in fact it formed the basis of physics of biology that
led me to the Unification Theory. This will be discussed as I write the applied
aspect. See Seed a Potential Tool I Initially used this model to quickly develop an appropriate media for tissue culture of leaf axillary buds obtained from young cashew seedlings and hoped to extend it to axillary bud multiplication from mature tree to complete tissue culture technology for cashew. I made some progress in this direction with explants derived from seedlings, but failed with the one obtained from a mature tree.
Why I say the work has no worth as far as cloning is considered The concept of cloning came with human attempt to conquer the genetic information. Nature mixes its information and plants obtained form seed may not show the potential of mother plants which we choose with a goal of high productivity and return. It is degrading to claim a natural phenomenon as a technology and discovery with such publicity. Eco-Culture - a New technique to Clonal multiplicationn But my ingenious mind developed an alternate simple less expensive technique called Eco-Culture for development of clonal plants for cashew and coffee. This is based on the system manipulation. It again based some simple observation of nature. It was noted that Plants have a close relationship with environment cycles. These cycles and their intensity determine the production of food and hormones. Which means the internal production of hormones in a plant system can be controlled though the manipulation of environment cycles and can make the axillary buds to form shoots and then root it to obtain complete cloned plant. If His will permits, this and many more possible ideas of technological possibilities that occurred during my journey to the Unified Theory will be shortly come on the net. Why
I did not publish my work or resorted to exploit it. Answer is simple nature snatched the right from me. The very communication I was having with nature opened the immense ignorance on which I exist as I try to clone biological system. I had no answers to why nature mixes its information, I had no answers why genes are paired, why chromosomes are paired and so on. From the basis of my communication with nature, at the conscious level I new that no plants obtained from somatic embryogenesis in tissue culture can be expected to be uniform. As an agriculturist I could not hide the truth and keep going. For a plant like cashew a feasible grafting technology is already in place and the idea of clonal propagation through tissue culture was more a fancy than a applied reality – simply a way for few researchers to survive by dancing with the wave and projecting fancy visions to the ignorant funding bodies and the public. Home - Back to Authors work in Biotechnology
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