The Quest to Genetically Engineer the 2020 Olympics Mascot www.theatlantic.com

In the background are a handful of sunflowers and, woven through them, a spatter of morning glories.
In a wave of nostalgic, nationalistic sentiment, social clubs devoted to raising mutant morning glories formed, keeping many rare strains alive.
Instead, he planned to engineer a white morning glory into which he would insert a single gene borrowed from coral, where it would express an intense ultramarine protein.
“So my boss gave me mutant morning glories for my thesis topic.” Decades later, Hoshino feels that he was the lucky one.
“In the end, morning glory taught us that we know nothing about morning glory,” he said.