Bananas, the world's most popular fruit, are very, very vulnerable to a lot of diseases. And the reason for this is that the bananas we eat, called Cavendish bananas, are fundamentally clones of each other. There are no seeds. Every banana is grown basically by taking a cutting from one and turning it into another tree. So every Cavendish banana we eat is exactly the same genetically as every other one. And just like human identical twins, what afflicts one afflicts the others, reports Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. (1)
