Our Comprehensive Living Archive of Apples - Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley - The Atlantic As part of the national germplasm system, America's apple archivist,
Philip Forsline, has assembled and tended a vast Noah's Ark of more than
2,500 apple varieties: two clones of each, in order to preserve the
fruit's genetic biodiversity. Meanwhile, on the same Cornell/USDA
Agricultural Experiment Station, Susan Brown, one of the country's three commercial apple breeders, develops new clones by cultivating wildly different seed sisters.