Tasty Mutants: The Invention of the Modern Oyster

If you slurped down any oysters on the half-shell this summer, you probably didn’t realize they were monsters. Not monsters in the pejorative sense, but man made creatures – the invention of a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. That Dr. Frankenstein, in this case, is Standish Allen, currently the director of the Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute for Marine Science…By 1989, when Allen finished graduate school and got a job at Haskins Shellfish Research Laboratory at Rutgers University, he was already looking for a new approach to the triploid.