People don't actually understand how difficult this task is. It's not as simple as preserving a strain of, say, tomatoes or cucumbers. For example, [here is a guy who revived a lost strain of tomatoes from 87 year old seeds](https://youtu.be/YeQRrj6YTQQ). You can't do this with apples. Taking an apple and growing the trees from those seeds doesn't work and will actually produce **an entirely different type of tree** (and usually a fucking disgusting fruit). That's how you get crab apple trees, people tasted an apple and we're like "hmm this tastes good, we should grow more in our town" and then it reaches maturity and starts shitting out horrible bitter tasting fruit nobody wants to eat. [Here's a video that explains why](https://youtu.be/yWAR_DotvZs) So from the video, an estimated 1 in 80,000 trees produces good tasting fruit. Every apple you see in the picture represents **79,999 other shitty tasting crab apple trees** to arrive at that point. So in order for him to preserve these fruits, he actually literally has to clone the tree itself. They are entirely unique and once they die, they cannot be replicated, even if you have the seeds.