Like any self-respecting farmer, Zachary Lippman was grumbling about the weather. Stout, with close-cropped hair and beard, Lippman was standing in a greenhouse in the middle of Long Island, surrounded by a profusion of rambunctiously bushy plants. “Don’t get me started,” he said, referring to the late and inclement spring. It was a Tuesday in mid-April, but a chance of snow had been in the forecast, and a chilly wind blew across the island. Not the sort of weather that conjures thoughts of summer tomatoes. But Lippman was thinking ahead to sometime around Memorial Day, when thousands of carefully nurtured tomato plants would make the move from the greenhouse to Long Island loam. He hoped the weather would finally turn.

Although he worked on a farm as a teenager and has a romantic attachment to the soil, ­Lippman isn’t a farmer. He’s a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York with an expertise in genetics and development. And these greenhouse plants aren’t ordinary tomatoes.

After introducing me to his constant companion, Charlie (a slobberingly gregarious Labrador-Rottweiler mix), Lippman walked me through hundreds of plants, coddled by 80-degree daytime temperatures and 40 to 60 percent humidity, and goaded into 14 hours of daily photosynthetic labor by high-pressure sodium lights overhead. Some were seedlings that had barely unfurled their first embryonic leaves; others had just begun to flash their telltale yellow flowers, harbingers of the fruit to come; still others were just about ripe, beginning to sag with the weight of maturing red fruit.

August 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Maurizio Di Iorio

What makes this greenhouse different—what makes it arguably an epicenter of a revolution in plant biology that may forever change not just the future of the tomato but the future of many crops—is that 90 percent of the tomato plants in the building had been genetically altered using the wizardly new gene-editing tool known as Crispr/Cas-9. ­Lippman and Joyce Van Eck, his longtime collaborator at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, are part of a small army of researchers using gene editing to turn the tomato into the laboratory mouse of plant science. In this greenhouse, Crispr is a verb, every plant is an experiment, and mutant isn’t a dirty word.

Lippman walked to the rear of the building and pointed out a variety of tomato known as Large Fruited Fresh Market—one of the commercial varieties that turn up in supermarkets, not farmer’s markets. This particular plant, about two months old, bowed with big, nearly ripe fruit. It was, Lippman explained, a mutant called “jointless.” Most tomato varieties have a swollen knuckle of tissue (or joint) on the stem, just above where the fruit forms; when the tomato is ready, it tells itself, as Lippman put it, “OK, I’m ripe—time to fall,” and the cells in the joint receive a signal to die, letting go of the tomato. That is nature’s way of spreading tomato seeds, but the joint has been a thorny problem for agricultural production, because it leaves a residual stem that pokes holes in mechanically harvested fruit. Jointless tomatoes, whose stems can be plucked clean, have been bred and grown commercially, but often with unwanted side effects; these gene-edited versions avoid the unintended consequences of traditional breeding. “We can now use Crispr to go in and directly target that gene for the molecular scissors to cut, which leads to a mutation,” ­Lippman said. “Voilà: the jointless trait in any variety you want.”

We moved on to several examples of Physalis pruinosa, a relative of the tomatillo that produces a small, succulent fruit called a ground cherry. The plant has never been domesticated, and Lippman referred to the wild version as a “monstrosity”: tall, unkempt, and stingy, bestowing a single measly fruit per shoot. Next to it stood a Physalis plant after scientists had induced a mutation called “self-­pruning.” It was half as tall, much less bushy, and boasted half a dozen fruits per shoot. Lippman plucked a ground cherry off one of the mutated plants and offered it to me.