![]() ![]() Midway to his degree, he took a year off to work for a British food company, Tate & Lyle, which owned sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean and did a lot of sugar refining. Inspired, Long decided to study agricultural botany at the University of Reading. ![]() (It’s since been closed.) One of the teachers at the school stood out-a plant enthusiast who took her students on frequent field trips. He grew up in London in a working-class family and attended what he describes as “not the best” high school. The premise of RIPE is that, as remarkable as photosynthesis may be, it needs to do better.Īt seventy-one, Long is thin and fit, with a craggy face and a voice so soft it borders on a murmur. Stephen Long is a professor of plant biology and crop sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the director of a project called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, or RIPE. It always worked well enough to power the planet-that is, until now. It didn’t change when humans began to domesticate plants, ten thousand years ago, or, later, when they figured out how to irrigate, fertilize, and, finally, hybridize them. Photosynthesis remained remarkably stable over thousands of millennia of natural selection. Through it all, plants continued to make a living more or less the same way they had since that ancient cyanobacterium took up with the alga. (Charles Darwin was deeply troubled by the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record, describing it as an “abominable mystery.”) Later still, grasses and cacti evolved. They were so fabulously successful that they soon took over. Some two hundred million years later, in the early Cretaceous, plants with flowers appeared on the scene. During the Carboniferous period, towering tree ferns and giant club mosses covered the earth, and insects with wingspans of more than two feet flitted through them. The rise of plants made possible the rise of plant-eating animals. There was so much empty space-and hence available light-that plants, as one botanist has put it, found terrestrial life “irresistible.” They spread out their fronds and began to grow taller. ![]() (These were probably related to liverworts.) Eventually, they were joined by the ancestors of today’s ferns and mosses. The first explorers stayed small and low to the ground. Another branch set out to colonize dry land. One side of the family stuck to the water. ![]() The continents crashed together to form a supercontinent, Rodinia, then drifted apart again. The secret to photosynthesis passed to the alga and all its heirs.Ī billion years went by. This accommodation, unlikely as it was, sent life in a new direction. Instead of being destroyed, as you might expect, the bacterium took up residence, like Jonah in the whale. One day, another organism-a sort of proto-alga-devoured a cyanobacterium. ![]()
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