The new iPhone 11 is simply amazing.

Hold on. No, not that kind of apple.

This kind of apple.

This is a new variety of apple.

The Cosmic Crisp.

It's the largest launch of a single variety ever.

It's the child of the blockbuster Honeycrisp apple and the Enterprise

apple. In the U.S.,

apples are a five billion dollar a year industry.

There are more than 7,500 varieties of apples grown across the world

in 2,500 of those are grown in the U.S.

like the Pink Lady, the Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, the

Honeycrisp and America's favorite, the Gala, which just beat out the

Red Delicious variety for the first time ever.

Red Delicious had reigned more than half a century before the Gala

apple dethroned it.

And yet, scientists are still developing new varieties.

Actually, it's not just apples.

There are plant breeders, horticulturalists and scientists around the

world working to perfect and reinvent the food everyone knows.

Whether it be apples or berries, mushrooms or crops like rice and

wheat. And this innovation isn't just the controversial GMO kind.

That's short for genetically modified organism.

In fact, crops have been cross-bred to produce new varieties for

hundreds of years.

Plants naturally cross-pollinate, which produces new varieties.

Here in the U.S. are breeding programs like the one at Washington

State University that is responsible for the more than 20 years of

work it took to create and grow the Cosmic Crisp apple through

natural means. Here's how we invent new foods like the Cosmic Crisp.

The first masters of biotechnology date back to more than 12,000

years ago to the Neolithic period of the Stone Age, where the

adoption of farming and agriculture first began to develop.

It was then that humans isolated elite selections of crops and mass

planted them to domesticate certain crops, and this happened

independently in different regions all over the world with all sorts

of plants. But the modern apple we know today can be traced back to

Kazakhstan during the Bronze Age and to bear droppings.

For millions of years, bears chose to eat the larger, sweet variety

over the smaller, bitter apples.

Then through bear droppings that contain those apple seeds, a process

called germination, more fruit trees grew to grow that larger sweet

apple we know today.

By the first millennium BCE, apples had become part of Western

agriculture. The ancient way of doing it was simply planting seeds

and you'd get variation.

Fast forward a few thousand years to colonial America in the late

1700s, nearly 100 years after the apple was imported by immigrants,

pioneers were encouraged to plant apples.

In 1806, Jonathon Chapman, well, you might know him as Johnny

Appleseed, distributed apple seeds from western Pennsylvania to West

Virginia. And this helped America's apple crop flourish in new parts

of the country. When an apple seed is planted, it doesn't just grow

into the same variety of apple of the seed it was grown from.

It entirely depends on pollination.

Each plant inherits half of its DNA from the tree the apple came from

and half from the tree the pollen came from.

So when new apple seeds were planted throughout the country, being

pollinated by who knows what, thousands of new varieties hit the

market. If you planted a seed from a Cosmic Crisp apple, you wouldn't

get a Cosmic Crisp tree.

You would get a tree that was, had inherited 50 percent of its genes

from Cosmic Crisp, but fifty percent from whatever pollen parent had

actually pollenize the flower that then made that fruit.

In 1905, f ruit growers evaluated 100,000 clones from literally

hundreds of thousands of apple selections.

In this screening of the open pollinated chance seedlings resulted in

varieties we still see today, like the Red Delicious, Golden

Delicious and the McIntosh.

This starts with understanding that the tree you see in an orchard is

a composite tree made up from two parts, the rootstock and the scion.

That means it's made up of two different varieties.

It has the top part that has the fruit.

That's the scion variety.

And then the bottom part is the rootstock.

You can have, for example, a rootstock that makes a huge big tree and

whatever scion variety you would bud or graft on top of that, it will

grow into a really big tree.

Grafting is a process where plant material from one variety is fused

to another and then together the plant grows.

And this technique dates back thousands of years too.

It's even mentioned in the bible.

Grafting, you'll take a bit of scion stick.

Okay, technical term, but it's got several buds on it.

You'll cut the bottom perhaps into a V and you'll cut a similar kind

of shape on top of the rootstock chute.

You literally can just push the two together, bind them, so that they

hold. And then the vascular tissues will fuse, and that means that

you get this new tree growing up out of the grafted wood.

This technique is also known as clonal propagation.

That's when scientists make identical genetic copies of a plant.

The Cosmic Crisp was made by classical breeding, which is also known

as hybridization. Evans is part of the breeding program at Washington

State University that developed the Cosmic Crisp.

Fundamentally, you're taking pollen from one of the apple trees in

our case and then using that pollen to pollenize flowers of the other

parent. Simple process.

It's just controlled pollination, so it's using a process that's

happening out there all the time with bees or other visiting insects.

But the pollen that's used on to the flowers is random.

With ours, we're using this pollen from a specific male parent that

we've chosen to give us that greater potential of having offspring

with the characteristics that we're looking for.

From their plant breeders germinate and evaluate thousands of seeds

that came out of the hybridization process.

One of the Cosmic Crisp's parents is the Honeycrisp apple.

Honeycrisp has got this ultra-crisp texture that really hadn't been

seen very much until Honeycrisp hit the market.

And for some reason, Honeycrisp caught the fancy of America and it

changed the whole apple industry because they found out that people

liked it so much they'd pay two times a Honeycrisp than for regular

apples. The other parent apple is an Enterprise, and if you haven't

heard of that one, it's because it's mainly grown and sold in

Indiana. This is Jules Janick.

He's a horticulturalist and professor at Purdue University in

Indiana. You can probably call him the grandfather of the Enterprise

apple. We developed the Enterprise apple.

Kate Evans made many crosses and one of the crosses she made was

crossing Enterprise, which is a big, red apple, attractive,

scab-resistant to Honeycrisp. As breeders make crosses, each genetic

mashup between two parents generates a unique offspring every time.

It's kind of like how siblings share DNA from the same two parents,

but have different characteristics.

And that's because you've inherited that maternal and paternal DNA.

But it segregates, it all mixes up.

So what we're using is breeders were using that technique to get that

mixing up off of genes to then enable us to be able to choose the

best individual.

The process of identifying a great variety of apple takes years.

It takes two or three years to really grow a tree.

So they keep replanting it and testing it to make sure it's as good

as they think it is.

The Washington State University breeders were looking for an apple

that would appeal to both consumers and to growers.

So, for example, when it came to ultimately choosing the variety that

became the Cosmic Crisp, its tastiness and storability were at the

forefront. It's slow to brown, so you throw your lemon trick out the

window. It's just so natural slow to brown.

To test this, we left out two apples overnight and here's what they

looked like after 16 hours.

A lot of people ask us all must be a Frankenstein apple or is it GMO,

and no, it's not.

A GMO is a genetically modified organism.

It's a plant or animal that has been altered by genetic engineering,

which is a manipulation of an organism's genes by either introducing,

eliminating or rearranging specific genes using methods of modern

molecular biology, or at least that's how it's thought of in

countries like the United States.

Technically, something that has been genetically modified can be done

through traditional methods too, like selective breeding.

However, the GMO technology that's often referred to today originated

in 1973.

Scientist Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen engineered the first

successful organism by cutting out a gene from one organism and

pasting it into another.

This technique is known as gene transfer.

However, the first food genetic modification tests were in 1987, and

from years of testing later, Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato hit shelves

as the first food crop to be approved for commercial production by

the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The tomato stays riper longer than the non-engineered variety, and

they say it's tastier.

These tomatoes were modified to be firmer, thus extending the shelf

life. And now that the FDA has pronounced them safe, they'll be

shipped.. But getting consumers on board with a crop that had new

genes proved difficult.

Still, just the thought of juggling tomato genes in a lab scares some

people. When the Flavr Savr first hit the market in 1994, d emand was

high, but by 1998, sales sharply dropped off as public perception

changed and the Flavr Savr tomato was never profitable because of

high production and distribution costs.

According to The Non-GMO Project, there's no scientific consensus on

the safety of GMO.

Even Chipotle has indicated on their menus that their food is

non-GMO, as part of their "food with integrity" mission.

And they were the first restaurant chain to do so in 2013.

But those in favor of the technology say it allows scientists to make

food more aesthetically pleasing, easier to cultivate, and even can

make food more nutritious.

Unfortunately, people are afraid of GMO.

People are afraid. It's just a fear that some crazy gene and they

don't want any in their mouth that has been controlled by genetics.

It's an irrational fear and I might say grafting at the same thing in

the 19th century, people were afraid of grafting, they though it

wasn't natural. So the question is, what's natural and what's

unnatural. New innovations now allow scientists to edit genomes, a

living organism's entire genetic code.

Then there's CRISPR-Cas9, which is short for clustered regularly

interspersed short palindromic repeats.

The way it works is kind of like having a document on a computer and

using the find tool to locate a specific word and then adjust that

word. CRISPR enables you to change some of those sequences to mimic

many other natural variations.

So in a fruit or vegetable with conventional breeding, you know, you

have a mother and a father and the children are always a combination,

but what happens if you could actually just change one of the traits

and not have to go through all the changing of everything?

CRISPR has seen its ethical challenges, particularly when it's used

in human science.

In November 2018, a Chinese scientist said that he used the gene

editing technology on twin girls to protect them from getting

infected with the AIDS virus.

CRISPR was used on embryos, disabling a particular gene that allows

HIV to enter a cell.

But the approach restricted in the U.S.

and much of Europe drew an international outcry.

China sentenced him to three years in prison.

Scientists are using CRISPR on the food we eat, like to keep

mushrooms from browning or to make oranges resistant to the greening

disease that is killing citrus plants around the world.

One startup, Pairwise, is currently using CRISPR to grow cherries

without a pit and to extend their growing season.

These natural breeding process take a long, long time.

The one example I can give is think about seedless grapes.

That's a natural genetic variation.

Well, we're working on using that same information to derived from

those grapes and create a cherry without a pit.

What pairwise is doing is essentially speeding up what they say would

happen naturally anyway.

It would just take years to happen in the wild.