Forty-two years after the state of Michigan became the state of Michigan, a botanist named William Beal buried 20 open bottles of seeds to see how long they could remain viable. A few weeks ago Frank Telewski, a professor of plant biology at Michigan State University, along with a few colleagues, continued the decades-long experiment by digging up one of those bottles on the MSU campus. This excursion happened early in the morning before most of the world was awake. It’s sort of a secret; you don’t want someone stumbling upon or messing with your 142-year-long experiment. The 50 seeds,...