Word: ohga
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...anxious as an expectant father, Botanist Ichiro Ohga rushed from Tokyo to a farmyard in Kemigawa town, 25 miles southeast of the city. There, he carefully examined the ripening bud on a lotus plant. Blossoming, decided Dr. Ohga. would be a little premature. He settled down beside the aged iron cauldron that served as a flower pot and waited for the unfolding petals...
Ordinarily a blooming lotus merits no such rapt attention from Professor Ohga, who has been studying the genus for 30 years and is known in Japan as "Dr. Lotus." But this plant, lovingly tended by the doctor's good friend, 69-year-old Soy Saucemaker Moemon Ihara, had sprouted from a seed found in a nearby peat bog, imbedded in a neolithic canoe. Counting on 100 years to form each foot of the 15 feet of peat that covered the seed, and adding 500 years for the layer of topsoil above the peat, Dr. Lotus calculated that his seed...
...Lived Lotus When two of his lotus seeds sprouted and began pushing out leaves last spring, no one was more surprised than Dr. George W. Harding of the National Capital Parks in Washington. The young plants looked perfectly normal. But the seeds, collected by a Japanese scientist named Ichiro Ohga, had been picked out of a Manchurian peat deposit and were claimed to be 50,000 years old. Most botanists were skeptical. The lotus seeds keep their vitality for a long time, they said, but 150 or 200 years is about the limit...