Life from 2,000-year-old seed in Israel
By Steven Erlanger The New York Times
MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2005
JERUSALEM Israeli doctors and scientists have succeeded in
germinating a date seed that is nearly 2,000 years old.
The seed, nicknamed Methuselah, was taken from an excavation at
Masada, the cliff fortress where, in A.D. 73, 960 Jewish zealots died by their
own hand rather than surrender to a Roman assault.
The point of growing the seed is to find out what was so
exceptional about the original date palm of Judea, much praised in the Bible
and the Koran for its shade, food, beauty and medicinal qualities, but long ago
destroyed by the crusaders.
"The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree," says Psalm 92.
"They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. They shall be fat and
flourishing."
Dr. Sarah Sallon, who runs a project on Middle Eastern medicinal
plants, said the date-palm tree in ancient times symbolized the tree of life.
But Dr. Elaine Solowey, who germinated the seed and is growing it in
quarantine, says plants grown from ancient seeds "usually keel over and die
soon," having used most of their nutrients in remaining alive.
The plant is now 11.8 inches, or 30 centimeters, tall and has
produced seven leaves, one of which was removed for DNA testing. Radiocarbon
dating in Switzerland on a snip of the seed showed it to be 1,990 years old,
plus or minus 50 years. So the date seed dates from 35 B.C. to A.D. 65, just
before the famed Roman siege.
Three date seeds were taken from Level 34 of the Masada dig. They
were found in a storeroom and are presumably from dates eaten by the defenders,
Sallon says.
Mordechai Kislef, director of botanical archeology at Bar-Ilan
University, had some date seeds from Ehud Netzer, who excavated Masada in the
1970s.
Sallon recalled that "They were sitting in a drawer, and when I
asked for one, he said, 'You're mad,' but finally gave me three." She then gave
the seeds to Solowey, an expert on arid agriculture and dates.
Solowey took them even though "I didn't have much hope that any
would come up."
Sallon is the director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine
Research Center at Hadassah Medical Organization, which she set up 10 years ago
to study natural products and therapies, from Chinese medicine to the
indigenous medicinal plants of the Middle East. The idea is to preserve these
plants and their oral histories in a modernizing region, and also to
domesticate them, evaluate them scientifically and then try to integrate them
into conventional medicine.
Solowey, who teaches agriculture and sustainable farming at the
Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based at Kibbutz Ketura in the
southern Negev, works on finding new crops for arid and saline areas like
Jordan, Gaza and Morocco. She also works with Sallon to domesticate indigenous
plants that appear to have medicinal uses.
Solowey, who grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in California, said:
"We've bred for yield and taste, but not hardiness, so we have a lot of plants
as hardy as French poodles, so we have to spray to protect them, and then we
pay the price. There isn't a cubic centimeter of water in the San Joaquin
Valley that isn't polluted with something."
Solowey planted the date seeds at the end of January after trying
to draw them out of their deep dormancy. She first soaked the seeds in hot
water to soften the coat, then in an acid rich in hormones, then in an
enzymatic fertilizer made of seaweed and other nutrients.
"I've done other recalcitrant seeds," she said. "It wasn't a
project with a high priority. I had no idea if the food in the seed was still
good, but I put them in new pots in new potting soil and plugged them into drip
irrigation and kind of forgot about them."
About six weeks later, she said, "I saw the earth cracked in a pot
and, much to my astonishment, one of these came up."
The first two leaves looked odd, she said, very flat and pale. "But
the third looked like a date leaf with lines, and every one since has looked
more and more normal - like it had a hard time getting out of the seed."
Lotus seeds about 1,200 years old have been sprouted in China, and
after the Nazis bombed London's Natural History Museum in World War II and a
lot of water was used to put out the fire, seeds about 500 years old also
germinated.
"But no one had done it from 2,000 years old," Sallon said.
In the time of the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, forests of
date palms covered the area from Lake Galilee to the Dead Sea and made Jericho
famous; a date palm is featured on ancient coinage, as it is on the current
Israeli 10-shekel coin.
The date palm symbolized ancient Israel; the honey of "the land of
milk and honey" came from the date. It is praised as a tonic to increase
longevity, as a laxative, as a cure for infections and as an aphrodisiac,
Sallon said. But the dates of Judea were destroyed before the Middle Ages, and
what dates Israel grows now were imported in the 1950s and '60s from California
and originated elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Prophet Muhammad considered the date of great importance for
medicine, food, construction and income, and it is described in the Koran as a
"symbol of goodness" associated with heaven.
Dates need to grow 30 years to reach maturity and can live as long
as 200 years.
But it is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears
fruit. "Men are rather superfluous in the date industry," Sallon said.
"O.K., I have a date plant," Solowey said. "If it lives, it will be
years before we eat any dates. And that's if it's female. There's a 50-50
chance. And if it's a male, it will just be a curiosity."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg
Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. www.ppi-india.org
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