Can we clone our way out of trouble?

The imminent death of a fruiting icon throws Russ Swan into a moral quandary…

Sometimes you just have to let it go, let it go. I haven’t morphed into a pre-adolescent Disney fan, but have been thinking about the philosophical implications of our desire to preserve the things we hold precious.

If you’ve ever enjoyed apple pie, which of course you have, the chances are that the fruit used was the Bramley

It being autumn, I’ve also been thinking about apples. Apples are a big thing round these parts, and never more so than at this time of year. A nearby village holds an annual Apple Day festival in which growers fight it out to win prizes for the biggest, tastiest, shiniest, or most oddly-named varieties. There are hundreds of similar events in the UK, where the Sheepnose nuzzles up to the Dog’s Snout and the Red Royal Limbertwig happily associates with the Nonnetit Bastard.

Apple Days started as recently as 1990 in a reaction to the increasing blandness and uniformity of supermarket fruit. Save our rare and delicious varieties, they cried. It is the fruit lover’s equivalent of the real ale movement (recently rebranded as the ‘craft ale revolution’), determined to celebrate the deliciousness of traditional fare.  There is a particular bitterness to this year’s Apple Days in my locale, because we are on the brink of losing one of our great apple trees. If you’ve ever enjoyed apple pie, which of course you have, the chances are that the fruit used was the Bramley.

This celebrated variety is one of the best cooking apples in the world, and it was born just down the road from Chateau Babble. A couple of hundred years ago, a young girl in the village of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, planted a few pips. One of these grew into a tree which produced exceptionally good fruit. The apples kept well and retained their flavour when cooked, and the variety became known as the Bramley (after the landowner, not the girl).  Remarkably, that original tree still stands in the same spot, and still produces fruit. Annual UK production has reached over 80,000 tonnes from around 300 growers, and apparently the fruit is also revered in Japan – although the rest of the world scarcely knows it. Poor ignorant souls.

Now, here’s the thing. The original Bramley tree is dying

All of those thousands of tonnes come from grafted plants, where a fruiting branch (a scion) is spliced to the rootstock of a different tree. If you did this with animals you’d be branded a Frankenstein, but it’s normal in fruit farming. And that, in turn, is because apple trees do not come ‘true’ from seed – every single pip is a new variety, and rarely of any interest.  Now, here’s the thing. The original Bramley tree is dying. The owner of the modest terraced house, in the garden of which it stands, herself grew old and died. The untended garden became overgrown, and the tree infected with honey fungus. It is, by all accounts, only a matter of time.

A nursery of grafted trees.

This is a shame, as I think most will agree, but it is not a catastrophe. Prompted by a friend to join a campaign to save the tree, I felt I had no choice but to decline. For a start, this looks like a battle that cannot be won – horticultural experts agree that honey fungus is usually a death sentence, and in an ancient apple tree most definitely is. The Bramley has of course already been cloned, many many times. Every fruit bearing graft on every tree in every Bramley orchard is a living recreation of the original. Full roots-and-all clones have also been created by the University of Nottingham, and distributed to key growers around the country and elsewhere.

There are more problems in the world than the demise of a novel fruit tree in a Midlands garden.

This means that the battle is not only unwinnable, but paradoxically is already won. The genetic code is preserved in living tissue in thousands of places, precisely as in the original tree. What exactly would we be trying to save? Then there is the moral point. There are more problems in the world than the demise of a novel fruit tree in a Midlands garden. Things live, things die, and new things take their place. This is evolution, and I for one don’t want any part in arresting it. Maybe one day a child in another garden will plant a different pip, and discover something even better than a Bramley.

Cloning presents tricky morals, though. If we have no misgivings about cloning a tree, what about a pet? This is now a real thing, for people who have too much money and too much insecurity, and who hope to reanimate a favourite dog or cat. A British couple who had their dog cloned earlier this year paid tens of thousands of pounds for the privilege. Ironically, it was a boxer – a type that has been inbred so much for aesthetic purposes that it is itself a genetic dead-end. Breed a boxer with any other dog, and the puppies’ nose reverts to a normal non-squashed shape. But clone it, and the flat face can live forever.

It’s a shame about the Bramley, and it’s a bigger shame about the boxer, but preserving either of them is like putting two fingers up to evolution. Let them go.

Russ Swan