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It's that time of the year, here in the UK, when farmland suddenly turns a bright shade of yellow and everyone starts complaining about allergies. We call the plant that's growing so abundantly rape, which once shocked an American visitor I spoke with. (In this context, rape derives from the Latin word rapum, which means turnip.) She calmed down when I used the alternative name she was familiar with - Canola.
Although rapeseed oil is one of the oldest known vegetable oils, in its natural form it contains harmful levels of erucic acid. In the early 1970s, two scientists at the University of Manitoba in Canada - Keith Downey and Baldur Stefansson - bred new varieties of low erucic acid rapeseed (LEAR), trademarked as Canola. Canola is now a generic term for the edible varieties of rapeseed extensively cultivated in Europe and North America.
When I was researching the first Tomatosphere mission last week, I came across a mention of an earlier Canadian space seed experiment involving canola, and it's that story that I'm exploring today.
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