Fantastic Four Vegetables?

On 7/31/06, Douglas May wrote:
(...)
> OK, seeing how plants and seeds actually GROW and develop in space,
> that's useful, but seeing how they mutate? come on! Can't you just
> expose them to radiation here on Earth? is there something special
> about Cosmic Background Radiation that causes different kinds of
> mutations? Would the microgravity cause any mutations at all? Maybe
> pollinating for several generations in microgravity would, but taking
> a single generation of seeds for two weeks? And they say the seeds
> have a higher vitamin content? Could that be something less spacey
> like, say, the SOIL MAYBE???
(...)

Well, we can't reproduce all types cosmic rays out there, I think -
for one, some of them have energies too high for our particle
accelerators and the like. Also, I wouldn't rule out the hypothesis
that microgravity can cause mutations. We know that microgravity
affects many biological systems and that ultimately has either effects
or causes in the cell molecular machinery - and parts of that
machinery deals with organization, replication and checking of the DNA
itself. In short, I think that the only way to test if something in
space causes different mutations is to do experiments targeting that
possibility.

So, under a purely scientific point of view, the Chinese research is
interesting - although certainly one can question its practical
utility and its legitimacy.