What happened to the program? 

In the first decades after WWII, radiation breeding was seen as a promising new field both for geneticists working on the basic mechanisms of plant heredity as well as for professional plant breeders who hoped for new commercial and agricultural varieties. In the early 1950s, Brookhaven engaged in an international cooperation “by means of which plant breeders and geneticists throughout the world have been able to make use of the radiation facilities at Brookhaven in their attempts at crop improvement,” according to BNL’s annual report for 1957. More than 100 institutions were involved. As the lab’s annual report described in 1955, “Brookhaven continues to perform the irradiation, act in an advisory capacity, and collect and analyze the data. The individual institutions initiate the program, grow the material, and screen it for the desired mutations.” The program was called the Cooperative Radiation Mutation Program, and it went on for several decades. 

In fact, scientists engaged in mutation breeding still use radiation exposure to induce mutations in plants and other organisms. Radiation, though, is just one of the tools that they have at their disposal. Other methods include exposure to chemical mutagens such as ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS). Brookhaven scientists were using EMS to induce mutations in plants by the mid-1960s for example. Compared to the techniques that were available by the late 1960s and 1970s to induce and manipulate genetic changes in experimental organisms, the gamma field of the 1950s was a fairly blunt instrument, and for this reason it was ultimately abandoned in favor of these other tools. With the discovery of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s and CRISPR-cas9 in 2009, our ability to cut and paste genetic material has only increased. But although the tools have changed, scientists still have some of the same goals as they did seventy years ago — crop improvement and a better understanding of genetics, to name only two. They also face some of the same questions and challenges. The ability to manipulate genes gives humans a lot of power. How and for what purposes that power should be used were important questions back in the 1950s and remain so today.