Christmas tree cloning
Oddstuff has a story on German research involving cloning good-looking Christmas trees.
The story shouldn’t really seem odd to Kiwis: we’ve got whole industries based on cloned trees, including vast plantations of cloned pine trees. And even in the northern hemisphere, parts of the Christmas tree industry already use cloned trees because some popular plants are sterile hybrids that can only be propagated as clones.
I’ve occasionally thought it would be entertaining to stage a protest about cloned apples outside a supermarket, just to see how people react…
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »