Human Flower Project
We All Scream for Blue Roses
A day late for Halloween, the Sunstory company introduced a blue rose at the International Flower Expo Tokyo. (It actually looks lavender-colored to us, though certainly bluer than any rose we’ve encountered outside a Woolworths.) Sunstory has been tinkering along toward a blue rose for thirteen years, we understand.
Their horticulturists “worked with the Australian company Florigene, who took the delphinidin gene (which creates the blue color) from a petunia. They took that gene and inserted it into a mauve rose known as the Cardinal de Richelieu,” winding up with a burgundy bloom, which would not do. (We don’t want pigs that hang glide; we want pigs that fly.)
“They then used RNAi technology to reduce the cyandin pigment, which eventually resulted in the final blue roses…,unveiled” November 1.
The peculiar roses will go on the market next fall. We’ll be interested to see if the public likes them. Here in the U.S. and in much of Europe, biological novelties (non-human ones, anyway) seem to have negative-cachet. Rather than seeming progressive or precious, they strike many folks as freakish, even dangerous to one’s health. Better a vase full of shaggy goldenrod than a perfect tulip grown in a laboratory.
Readers, what do you think? Sunstory, a Japanese brewing company, estimates that its creation will bring in $300 million. Do you find the blue rose marvelous as a moonwalk, creepy as Frankenstein, ho-hum, or other?
Sunstory introduced its blue (ish) roses, at Tokyo’s Flower Expo Nov. 1
Photo: via the Cleveland Leader
Very pretty. I really want it to be blue, but is it really.