> So what our colleague Duyan Tao did - he, at an early stage, around 10 days after the [by-human-hand] pollination, went in there and dissected out the very young embryo that was developing and put it in tissue culture and gave it nutrients to help it grow. And then he rescued one of these seedlings. And that was the beginning of it.
Also, the "old-fashioned genetic engineering" of selective breeding of animals/plants is...not as old-fashioned as you may think. Animal husbandry has been around for millennia (or longer), but it was an undirected process prior to the work of Robert Bakewell in the 1700s. Thanks to his groundbreaking work (and a lot of refinements from others), humanity learned how to shape the trajectories of other species. I like this quote from Bakewell's wikipedia page[0]:
> In 1700, the average weight of a bull sold for slaughter was 370 pounds (168 kg). By 1786, that weight had more than doubled to 840 pounds (381 kg).
(Obviously, humanity has gone on to be much more aggressive and successful with selective breeding. Beef cattle are now usually 1200-1400 pounds at slaughter, for example. Though, personally, I'd say we've gone "too far" when you learn about the horrors of modern, industrialized animal agriculture.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...