Chapter 54: Breeding Feasibility Report
The tribespeople's current way of thinking was simple and direct: bigger and more was better.
If a single stalk of wheat could truly bear twenty grains, then the same basket of wheat ears would yield much more food to be steamed. The logic was simple.
Since Chen Jian said it was possible, the tribespeople naturally believed him.
However, some held different ideas.
Even though the stories and myths Chen Jian told had been subtly instilling the idea that humanity's ingenuity was a powerful force, some still felt that an unknown power controlled everything.
It was like the natural order of things: people have two legs, pigs have four; flowers bloom in the heat and wither in the cold. These things were taken for granted, preordained by the gods.
But now Chen Jian was saying that the original ten grains of wheat could one day become twenty. This idea felt a little frightening to some. They didn't understand what they were afraid of and couldn't express it in words.
Perhaps it could be described in a more fanciful way, one the tribespeople could not yet articulate: mortals were setting foot in the realm of the gods and disrupting the divine order.
Although Chen Jian spoke with confidence, he knew that breeding was an extremely long process, and he had no idea how long it would take to succeed.
Take wheat, for example. The original wild wheat is an ordinary diploid plant; like humans, its chromosomes come in pairs.
To use a simple and slightly inaccurate analogy, it is like the genes for single and double eyelids. If 'A' and 'a' form a pair, then during reproduction, meiosis separates the 'Aa' pair in the sperm and egg cells, which then combine with cells from the opposite sex.
The wheat Chen Jian ate in his previous life, however, was actually hexaploid. In simple terms, its gene pairs were like A1, A2, A3 matched with a1, a2, a3.
The original diploid (Aa) wheat had fewer seeds, long stalks, poor tillering ability (producing fewer stems from a single seed), and a low seed-setting rate.
One day, perhaps due to a spring frost, the cold induced a doubling of its chromosomes. It became A1A2 paired with a1a2, which is tetraploid wheat.
This tetraploid wheat was sturdier and produced more seeds.
Then, by chance, it might have crossed with a distant relative like wild goat-grass or rye. These relatives are diploid, but the wheat was tetraploid, so the base pairing was not perfect, resulting in a triploid seed.
For an organism to produce offspring, it must have an even number of chromosome sets, because an odd number cannot divide perfectly into sperm and egg cells.
This triploid plant could germinate, grow, flower, and produce ears of grain, but it was sterile, with no seeds in its ears. It was somewhat like a mule, born from a horse and a donkey, though not exactly the same.
Normally, this sterile plant could never have offspring, but then a miracle of nature occurred.
This sterile seed might have experienced another spring frost, or been scorched by fire, or exposed to some kind of natural toxic gas. In short, its chromosomes doubled again, transforming it from a triploid to a hexaploid.
Nature had cured its infertility and also gifted it with a more diverse set of genes, allowing it to grow stronger and bear more fruit.
Because wheat is a self-pollinating plant most of the time, this process of natural hybridization and chromosome doubling, aided by spring frosts and autumn chills, was an accidental process that took countless generations.
During the planting process, people discovered that some wheat stalks had larger ears and stronger tillering ability. They did not know that these plants had been inadvertently modified by nature.
However, using their experience, people saved these superior plants for seed, propagating them from generation to generation until this new wheat eventually covered the entire world.
This was likely a process that spanned tens of thousands of years. Chen Jian couldn't control the randomness of natural mutation, but he could use external force to accelerate the process of chromosome doubling.
As for whether the resulting tetraploid or hexaploid wheat would be high-yielding, that would require a long period of artificial selection.
This wasn't an insurmountable task. The same principle could be used on plants like strawberries to make them grow larger. One could even cross a tetraploid watermelon with a diploid watermelon to produce seedless watermelons.
It sounded like advanced technology, but the initial steps were very simple.
Brewing, pottery, and distillation. With these three technologies, he could manually prepare what he needed. It would just take time. This wasn't high-end science; it was high school biology.
To induce chromosome doubling in a plant, one could use colchicine. He would soak the seeds or seedlings in a colchicine solution. He didn't know the exact concentration needed, but he could prepare hundreds of different dilutions. By recording the results next year, he would find the right one.
Colchicine is found in daylilies. Eating too many daylilies can cause poisoning and, in severe cases, death. The fact that it could poison a person meant the concentration was significant enough for his purposes.
This poison is highly soluble in alcohol and water. He just needed to soak the daylilies in high-proof alcohol for extraction, then concentrate the solution by taking advantage of alcohol's volatility.
Under current conditions, the extract would be far from pure; it would be contaminated with things like pigments. But Chen Jian only needed a certain concentration of colchicine, not an analytically pure substance for a controlled experiment.
It was like arsenic mixed with soil—it would still kill you if you ate it. If the goal was simply to kill someone, why bother purifying the arsenic?
Now that they had surplus grain and the yeast culture had been improved over several generations with progressively less green mold, making grain alcohol was no problem.
Distilled spirits were possible because the boiling point of alcohol is lower than that of water. Alcohol boils at just over 70 degrees Celsius, so it turns into steam more easily than water.
Chen Jian understood the principle, which was common knowledge, as was everything else he had done so far. The challenge was to combine this knowledge with the primitive conditions at hand.
He had never seen a still, but it wasn't impossible to create an alternative with existing materials. He could cover a pot, leaving a small hole to force the steam to escape through it.
He would attach a pipe to this hole—a pottery pipe would work. It didn't need to be a single piece. They had isinglass, fish skin, pig skin, and plant fibers in the village, all of which could be used to seal the joints. He could connect a dozen pottery pipe sections, making it as long as possible.
Then, he would place earthenware pots with holes in the bottom on top of this pipe. The holes would be sealed with clay and leather, and the pots would be filled with cold water to act as a condenser, cooling the steam in the pipe back into liquid.
Because alcohol has a lower boiling point, the first liquid to condense would have the highest alcohol concentration. In his past life, country distillers called this the "head." The first distillation could reach sixty to seventy percent alcohol.
To increase the alcohol concentration, ancient brewers would sometimes "triple brew," but this was actually an inefficient method. The so-called triple brew involved using wine instead of water to ferment a new batch of grain, but yeast activity ceases at high alcohol concentrations, making the process pointless. It was the "triple steaming," or triple distillation, that was effective. He could avoid that dead end.
If the alcohol from the first distillation wasn't concentrated enough, he would simply distill it again. He would use only the high-proof "head" for his experiment. The low-proof "tail" that came later could be consumed as regular wine.
He would disregard the cost. There was no need to consider recovering the alcohol used for the colchicine extraction. Even if he could, he wouldn't dare drink it.
If everything went well—if he found the right concentration of colchicine and achieved a perfect cross with a rye-like plant, leaving only the beneficial genes—it might take three years to produce the first hexaploid wheat.
It seemed like a long time, but compared to the tens of thousands of years of accidental variation under natural conditions, it was incredibly fast.
For a future agrarian civilization, nothing was more important than good seeds.
Only when people were well-fed could they have more children. More children meant they could occupy the best lands. And only by occupying the best lands could the nation and its civilization have a greater chance of survival.
All it required was a pair of hands and a mind capable of applying knowledge learned in middle and high school. No advanced theory was needed.
Couldn't he calculate the alcohol concentration without a hydrometer? He could make a balance and standardized pottery weights. He would weigh a jar of water, then weigh a jar of the distilled spirit. A simple division would give him the density of the spirit relative to water, allowing him to estimate its concentration.
Couldn't he determine the colchicine concentration without a spectrometer? He would do it manually. He'd create hundreds of batches, decreasing the concentration by a tiny fraction for each one, and soak the seeds or seedlings separately. It would take an extra year to observe which plants became tetraploid and which grew thick and deformed, but he would find the appropriate concentration.
No return line for recirculating cooling water? He would rely on people holding clay pots, continuously pouring cold water over the condenser. It would only take a few extra hands, and this wasn't mass production. As for not being able to recycle the alcohol, the solution was even simpler: he would just discard it, regardless of the cost.
During brewing, how would he know if the fermenting mash was acidic or alkaline? He could soak morning glory flowers in it. If the solution turned blue, it was alkaline. He could then add some vinegar that had been boiled at a high temperature. Acidic conditions were more suitable for yeast to convert sugar into alcohol.
Every problem could be solved, bit by bit. The two to three thousand catties of grain they had acquired from trading with the fourteen tribes was more than enough for him to experiment with. If they simply ate it, it would only last the tribe for ten days.
Sometimes, primitive methods were the most effective. He habitually sketched out all the potential problems on a piece of bark, estimated the probability of solving them, and concluded that the plan was feasible.
So after dinner, he asked his clan for a few days off from his regular duties.
There was no complete division of labor between mental and physical work yet. He saw himself as a "part-time leader" who still did his share of manual labor. He had to do a lot of that now, as everything he was doing was to lay a solid foundation for the future.
It was just like studying in his previous life. Why did you have to suffer so much to read books? Why not have fun? Why not learn from others and have a "happy" education?
Because a few years of pleasure could lead to a lifetime of unhappiness. The children who had a "happy" education all ended up in public schools, while those who stayed up until midnight studying in private schools went on to the Ivy League, where they continued to fool more people into pursuing a "happy" education.
The tribe was still in its infancy. Even if he wanted to live a life of extravagant indulgence, he didn't have the opportunity. If he left the tribe, he would be helpless and would starve. And without him, the tribe would go on living as they always had, just with slower progress.
When he made his request, the tribespeople happily agreed. The men proclaimed that they would hoe the plot of land that was his share, a clear sign of their trust.
The women could handle the work of distilling the alcohol; they could also spin the hemp that was nearly ready for retting.
Chen Jian suddenly felt a touch of melancholy. It seemed his role, for a long time to come, would be that of the director of the Village Women's Federation.
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