Craving to Create the Perfect Berry

Some days, Harry Swartz eats 500 strawberries. Others, it's more like 2,000.

"You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince or princess," he said. "I've eaten a lot of strawberries on this quest. . . . And many times I just wanted to stop because it's too painful."

The University of Maryland professor is trying to create the perfect strawberry, a puzzle that is technically daunting and, some days, physically challenging. But last spring, he had a stroke of luck: While walking through rows of strawberry plants in Spain, he spotted an unusual plant that had everything he was looking for. Now, he and Gary Coleman, another Department of Plant Sciences and Landscape Architecture professor who is studying the plant's genes, are working to recreate it with $63,000 from the Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program.

The program, through the engineering school at the university, spurs commercial development of university research.

"We're always searching for the next company that can benefit by partnering with the university," said Martha Connolly, the program's director.

Partnerships have developed everything from infant formula additives and racing sails to satellite Internet delivery and drill bits.

In this case, the aim is building a better berry.

Swartz has always loved berries and always wanted to be a farmer. He has spent his career in berry fields, joining the University of Maryland in 1979 after earning a doctorate from Cornell, and, in the late 1990s, launching his own breeding program.

Swartz thinks genes got him into strawberries. His grandparents were fruit farmers before leaving Poland, and when they settled in the United States they had a backyard garden.

He was ordered not to eat the strawberries. And, well, forbidden fruit: He kept sneaking them, then got caught when he came back to the house with red all over his face.

Growing the perfect strawberry is a complicated problem: It should be sweet, flavorful, firm (for shipping) and big (for easier harvesting). Swartz has added another level of complexity by dreaming of a fruit that could be harvested quickly and efficiently by machine, rather than picked painstakingly by hand. That means plants with one berry per stalk, sticking up straight so it can be scooped up easily, not low-growing clusters of berries that ripen at different times.

Swartz spent years developing berries with the complex fragrances of some wild strawberries found in Europe and the size and firmness of cultivated American fruit. They have a burst of flavor, much stronger than a typical strawberry, and may have chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla or other tones.