I t was a routine day in the laboratory belonging to Cameron Peace on the campus of Washington State University, Pullman, in the high, dry hills close to the Idaho border. Peace is a tree-fruit geneticist, and on this warm September afternoon, as on most days, he was running programs that tease out the DNA profiles of apples. Apples are Peace’s passion and the focus of his professional expertise. He maintains a backyard collection of unusual varieties and runs a project called MyFruitTree, which lets members of the public send in leaves from unidentified apple trees and matches those trees’ genetic fingerprints to entries in a database of known types. Washington State University is a land-grant university, founded to research and support agriculture, and Peace was honoring that mission. The samples he was examining had come from a team on the other side of the country at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), a long-standing agricultural nonprofit.…