The Soviet Garden

My country is like a dream Loveliest in the world

Written on flower buds And in the songs we sing

Greetings are holly here In this land of ours

The land where brotherhood Blossoms eternally

I love your river Dniester And your misty woods

We all sing your name We all praise you!

You, my all, Moldova!

To you my deepest yearnings Wherever I would go,

You'll be in my heart I will cherish you always!

Everything I do to you I will devote!

You, the luckiest of all Soviet Daughters!

I love your river Dniester And your misty woods

We all sing your name We all praise you, Moldova!

We all praise you!

You, my all, Moldova!

The 1950s, beginning of the Cold War.

After Stalin's death Nikita Khrushchev becomes the leader

of the Soviet Communist Party

He aims for the Soviet Union to become

first worldwide in scientific and technical development.

The cosmos is declared Soviet property.

A Soviet Spaceship defies gravity

and becomes the sun's first artificial satellite,

the first man-made planet.

These kids were the first to utter

the hitherto unknown word: RAKETA.

Who knows, maybe they will also be the first starship pilots?

After conquering the cosmos, Khrushchev wants

to overcome the United States here on Earth.

Following the party orders, scientists take over agriculture.

Mathematics and physics take over nature.

The future belonges to research and scientific experiments.

- In the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences,

we asked professor Adlov to explain how scholars

will meet this year's Congress.

- Soviet scientists were tasked by the party

to take the lead in all fields of science.

The small Moldovan republic

was part of the Great Soviet Empire,

being 14th largest among the 15 Soviet Republics.

Under the new economic policy

Moldova is ordered to exponentially grow production in all branches of agriculture.

- Milk farm chief Maria Cazac, has shown a burning ambition

to fight for even higher productivity and do her best in outracing

the United States in dairy and meat production per capita.

- So we can outrun the United States as soon as possible.

Moldova and its lands passed through an overnight industrial shock.

To meet party plans, even rivers were forced to flow uphill.

When I was born, Moldova was still part of the Soviet Union.

My family was big and united.

At the holidays all of us used to gather at my grandparents'

I spent a good part of my childhood at my grandma, Olimpiada's,

She was a biology teacher.

I remember her bringing a microscope from school, during summer vacations

so I could study natural processes.

Next to the house, I had a small garden. It was all my own.

There, I used to seed and nurture crops till they were fully grown.

A few years ago, my grandmother died of pancreatic cancer.

I've noticed that this terrible illness spread significantly in recent decades.

I remember Grandma telling us about strange secret experiments

in Moldova's collective farms during Soviet times...

I wonder: is there a connection between those experiments

and the exponential growth of cancer illnesses in the past half century?

- Man is what he eats, breathes and even thinks.

I love cats, I just adore them.

My cat will never eat a store bought sausage,

which I might find tasty.

You know, a wurster!

She smells it but ignores it, even though she is hungry.

That's some instinct!

Once I brought sprats and shared some with my cat.

She didn't even smell them. Some hedgehog came and ate them.

Doubtlessly, technical progress had an amazing effect on the quality of life,

as well as diseases, causing a lot of new illnesses to appear.

The main cause of progress is the increase of population.

More population means more food.

For more food, we need to genetically modify corn cobs to grow in size,

to a half meter, for instance.

Unfortunately, the human species ages, just like any other.

Every genetic reproduction cycle works like a software program.

If this "software" is attacked by "viruses", just like with a computer,

be it food, radiation or magnetic fields, then this program could malfunction.

Basically, that's how cancer acts.

A cell with a function, be it of the liver, muscles, lungs

must, following reproduction, specialise in the same function.

But if its program malfunctions, then it switches back to its initial programming,

becomes a big cell, grows and destroys surrounding cells thus generating Cancer.

- Good afternoon, some tomatoes, please?

Which ones?

Pink, please.

A kilo or two?

- Two, please. - All right.

Where are they from?

Orhei.

I wondered if you know anyone...

...who's growing them traditionally, you know, seed to seed.

No, currently hybrids rule the day.

Seed to seed ones are scarce.

- Maybe there are still folks who grow them traditionally.

- Maybe some country granny with a passion, you know...

Hi, 2 kilos of onions, please!

- I wonder if you know anyone growing tomatoes naturally.

- I do, myself, from Dubasarii Vechi.

Seed to seed, not hybrid.

- This is not done anymore, no harvest.

No harvest?

- None! My mother in law, lost 20 years on that.

No harvest.

How did they grow them before?

Before is past, you know.

Pardon?

- Before, seeds were seeds, tomatoes were tomatoes,

now everything is made from soy... Hybrids, everywhere.

- We're looking for someone who still practices traditional breeding.

- Nowadays seeds have codes, not names.

No more variety names.

- Such is the specificity of man, that he needs to control everything,

to have the feeling that nature would be lost without him,

although nature evolves very well without him.

- Could you tell us more on biodiversity and its role?

It is the diversity of everything alive.

If we look specifically at agriculture and focus on the last hundred years,

we'll notice we lost three quarters of our agricultural biodiversity.

That would equal 75%.

This means that if you used to buy tomatoes from the farmers at the marketplace,

and you had 10 tomatoes, now you only have 2, one red and maybe one pink.

Many disappeared or were somehow erased...

...by the Soviet block breed identity.

- Storms aren't solely to blame for the death of this wheat crop.

Man created a variety,

man cultivated a heavy spike,

but failed to give the straw strength.

The breeder's mission begins again.

Again he must examine millions of varieties

until he finds one or two with the necessary properties.

Here's what "Lenin" award laureate,

Nikolay Dubinin, has to say.

- Indeed, crops with useful features for agriculture

are seldom met in nature.

Thus, in creating new varieties, breeders face hereditary conservatism.

May this dependency be decreased?

Modifying chromosomes leads to Mutation,

thus creating new qualities in plants.

Mutations may be the result of chromosomal changes,

both chemical and structural.

If breeders could willingly cause gene mutations,

and change chromosome structures,

then they will control the plants' hereditary change in nature.

So, how to enter the cell's molecular structures?

Radioactivity can do that.

It is a wonderful molecular surgical instrument.

It produces the finest operations inside chromosomes,

modifies gene chemistry, rebuilds their structure.

The cell gains new properties

that become stable features of a radioactive mutant.

- Tell us about the beginnings of radiobiology in Moldova.

- I remember radiobiology experiments at my institute, back in 64-65.

In the beginning, when I was still a student.

For obtaining various mutations, we first used liquid mutagens

like radioactive phosphorus and sulphur

mutants were further used to get hybrids

which would be planted on thousands of land hectares,

and that's how it began.

Then, in 67-68, they brought in more powerful machinery.

- Currently everyone is concerned with creating hi-tech robots.

We are creating "plant robots" the very same way.

- Could you please tell us about the history of radiobiology?

How did man come to the ability to modify crops, specifically?

- After 1900, Genetics started developing in a major way as a science.

Researches were also made by Russian Scientists.

A massive contribution, was that of Iosif Rapoport

and also an enormous contribution of Dubinin.

Based on research on drosophila melanogaster and other insects,

he noticed that under Gamma ray influence eye colour and wing form may change

to a great extent, just like all other features.

Thus they concluded that Gamma rays produce mutations.

- After the war, a big group of scientists

from across the Soviet Union,

were sent to Moldova.

I must mention that Moldova

was among the Soviet Union's best equipped

radiobiology research centers.

- The beans that used to grow in Moldova

were not suitable for mechanised picking,

The beans layed on the ground and it had big grains.

We needed to create a variety that would grow straight up,

with smaller grains,

which could be cultivated by tractor and harvested by combine.

We picked a Mexican black bean variety,

and exposed them to Gamma rays.

The mutants obtained

stood up better.

We also changed the colour of the seeds from black to white.

We then exposed the seeds again to Caesium rays

and obtained a variety with straight up branches.

And you could see fences of peas on the fields where it was sown.

All in one size and shape!

That's what we did...

We went to Moscow in '68

and brought the Kolos radioactive unit to irradiating seeds before planting.