00:00Have you ever wondered why watermelons in China cost just a few dollars, while in Japan and Korea they can
00:06go for over a hundred?
00:07The answer isn't about farming costs. It's about one woman you've never heard of.
00:13Let's go back.
00:15Thousands of years ago, the watermelon's ancestor was a bitter, poisonous fruit growing in the Sahara Desert.
00:22Ancient Egyptians painted it on tomb walls 4,360 years ago, but not the poisonous kind.
00:30Somewhere in the African savannah, someone found a non-bitter mutant and brought it home.
00:35That person's name is lost forever.
00:38Fast forward to 2016.
00:41A man in Fujian, China, ate half a bitter cucumber.
00:45Within an hour, violent vomiting.
00:48Then jaundice.
00:50His liver enzymes hit 1,800.
00:53He almost died.
00:56The poison?
00:57Cucurbitacin, the same toxin in wild watermelon ancestors.
01:02Heat can't destroy it.
01:05Boiling.
01:06Frying.
01:07A pressure cooker.
01:09Nothing works.
01:11There's no antidote.
01:13So remember, bitter is not spicy.
01:16Bitter is a warning.
01:17In 2014, Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Huang Sanwen and his team cracked the genetic code of cucumber bitterness.
01:28They found nine genes responsible for cucurbitacin, with two master switches, one for leaf bitterness, one for fruit bitterness.
01:37Thousands of years of domestication didn't delete these genes.
01:41It just flipped the fruit switch off.
01:44But the whole production line is still there, waiting for the right conditions to turn back on.
01:49Now back to watermelons.
01:51There are seven wild watermelon species.
01:55One is called the bitter apple, growing in Sahara and Arabia, white-fleshed, unbearably bitter, used as a laxative by
02:03ancient people.
02:04For years, scientists thought this was the poisonous ancestor.
02:08Then in May 2021, a Munich University evolutionary biologist grew seeds from Sudan's Darfur region.
02:16The fruit?
02:17White-fleshed, low sugar.
02:20But not bitter at all.
02:22It's called the cordofan melon.
02:25Genome sequencing confirmed, this is the closest living relative of modern sweet watermelons.
02:31And the non-bitter trait was already
02:33fixed in its ancestors.
02:36The poison was never domesticated away, humans simply found a non-toxic cousin in the desert and brought it home.
02:43But here's the uncomfortable truth, sweetness and redness are genetically linked in watermelons.
02:49The red color we love.
02:51It's a byproduct of selecting for sugar.
02:55100 grams of watermelon has about 4.5 milligrams of lycopene, more than fresh tomatoes.
03:01But there's a cost.
03:03Today's watermelons have dangerously narrow genetic diversity.
03:08Diseases, fungi, viruses, they're one bad season away from disaster.
03:14The cordofan melon still carries those resistance genes.
03:18Modern watermelons lost them.
03:21Domestication is not an upgrade.
03:23It's a trade.
03:25But someone figured this out 60 years before the genome scientists.
03:30In 1955, a 23-year-old woman walked into the Gobi Desert in Xinjiang, China.
03:37She had no sequencer, no lab.
03:40Just her legs, a canteen, and notebooks.
03:43She walked across 300 farming communes, saving 44 local watermelon varieties from extinction.
03:51This was long before anyone talked about germplasm resource protection.
03:57In 1984, her 24th crossbreeding trial succeeded.
04:01She named it Zhaoxia 8424.
04:05She gave the technology to farmers for free.
04:09Today, China grows over 20 million mu of watermelons, about 3.3 million acres.
04:16Annual production, 60 million tons.
04:19That's 60% of the global total.
04:21Every Chinese person eats nearly 100 kilograms of watermelon per year.
04:27Her name is Wu Mingzhu.
04:29Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
04:3362 years of work.
04:3630 plus watermelon varieties.
04:388,440 days in the field.
04:42Every sweet bite of watermelon you take, she's in it.
04:46But since 2011, Alzheimer's has been slowly taking her memories.
04:51On July 14th, 2024, sitting in a wheelchair, she put her hand on a watermelon and said,
04:58This is my watermelon.
04:59Then she paused.
05:01This is our watermelon.
05:04She couldn't remember her own name anymore.
05:07That's why throughout this entire video, I never said her name.
05:11Not because I forgot.
05:13Because she did.
05:15Now you know.
05:17Say her name.
05:19Pass it on.
05:20Never dad.
05:33May I love you.
05:37Let her share.
05:39These throttle have llevily made.
05:41Turn the spray here.
05:42Can you breathe and you breathe
05:42Let me know.
05:45You are mouthful.
05:49You are fast.
