At her blog, Garden History Girl, Paige Johnson (by day, a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa), describes the inception of the Atomic Gardening Society:In March 1959, an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: 'NC 4x,' 'North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed' peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations.