Emily Kwong

There's Suncrisp, but also Rome, and this new apple I hadn't heard of called a Rosalie.

I think that's my new favorite.

Ooh.

You know, Emily, what's really cool is that those Rosalie apples that you saw, they're the same Rosalies that I might see apple picking in New York.

They're clones.

They're clones?

Yes.

Yeah, basically, if I buy a rosalie in a grocery store in New York and you buy a rosalie in an orchard in Maryland, our rosalie apples are going to be genetically the exact same because they're all from the same original plant.

So you're telling me all apples are copies of each other.

Exactly.

Well, in botanist terms, they're propagated.

So this is Susan Brown, and she's supervised a lot of propagation in her time because she's the head of the apple breeding program at Cornell Agritech in Geneva, New York, which is where I met her for this reporting trip.

Oh, this is what people do with house plant cuttings when they propagate them.

They like snip off a bit, put it in water.

You're telling me that the new plant is genetically the exact same as the old plant?

Yeah, when people do that, they're basically cloning their houseplants.

So when Susan propagates apple trees, she's basically just copy and pasting them.

And that means all of the apples on that Honeycrisp tree are going to be genetically identical.

So then if that's the case, Hannah, how do you create a new kind of apple?

Like that Rosalie apple.