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Yeah. Mhm. You are standing in a redwood grove in northern California where rows of stately giant sequoias stretched hundreds of feet into the sky and stand guard over the foggy valleys of the north coast. Aside from its beauty and majesty, the redwood tree is also hot.

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Commercial property is the single most valuable source of timber logged in the state of California. Redwood is important because it lasts, it is nearly as strong as oak and resist wet weather and rotting. It is economically important because of its size. A single large tree can

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yield enough lumber to build 20 homes, but the redwood is in trouble. The number of trees is shrinking fast once thousands of years ago. Redwoods thrives all over north America but now they are limited to a narrow 450 mile long corridor along the coast of California

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and Oregon virtually marooned in cool rocky valleys. Redwoods are almost never found in hot, dry climates and after years of timber harvests and clear cuts in areas where they do thrive. Most efforts to replant them have been a failure. The redwood could be in danger of

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simply dying out. But now one group of scientists is trying to reverse that trend at the University of California at santa Cruz, botanist Ernest Ball is trying to save the redwoods by re engineering it to grow faster taller and in many different kinds of climates and

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conditions here in his tissue culture lab at U. C. S. Redwood Institute. He is taking advantage of a unique property of redwood trees like other plants. The redwood reproduces sexually from seeds in its cones. But redwoods can also reproduce in a different way from just a

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bit of leaf or a piece of twig in a process called regeneration. If someone could explain the process of regeneration, he would certainly be worth a nobel prize because this could be applied to not only redwood to all plants. And the principle here is to choose

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the plant that you want and to make hundreds just like it. Since it reproduces in a small isolated grove. Ball says the redwood is doomed to its current fate with seeds you can draw only on a limited pool of genetic combinations that control how fast how

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tall and where a redwood can grow. And he says all these genetic traits are exchanged at random in the same grove. Some trees grow very tall, others very short. But foresters from the Simpson lumber company working with ball can walk through many different grows and chop

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or shoot down branches and leaves from the very best or most unique trees and send them to santa cruz. Their balls group cuts up the leaves, prepares them chemically and places them in growth cultures where they regenerate into tiny plant lits. Well we can make as

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many planets as we desire from a particular tree. This this is cloning in a broad sense and we we have the advantage and that there's no mystery about this. We know we're going we know we're going to get new trees exactly like the original and with

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seeds, you don't, you have no assurance of that. In fact, you have, you have a I uh the greatest possible chance we should say of getting something different, Paul's work is beginning to show results on average. It takes a redwood tree 20 years to grow tall

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enough to harvest for timber. However, plant, let's from balls lab placed in carefully controlled test forests have grown 12-15 ft tall in just two years. The ball is now concentrating on getting redwoods to grow not just in cool, foggy valleys, but in hotter, drier climates. Perhaps

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even in large, flat fields that could be turned into highly productive redwood tree farms. A choice that we made a couple of months ago was a beautiful tree that grows in a dry habitat on a hilltop and this is in culture now and it's growing splendidly.

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We have great hopes that we've been able to two produce to replant the, the clones in the same environment and fudge it a little bit to take it to a little more difficult environment at the Redwood Institute at UC santa cruz, I'm Bill skein for Science

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notes