Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America - Hardcover

Curry, Helen Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022639008X ISBN 13: 9780226390086

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Plant breeders have long sought technologies to extend human control over nature. Early in the twentieth century, this led some to experiment with startlingly strange tools like x-ray machines, chromosome-altering chemicals, and radioactive elements. Contemporary reports celebrated these mutation-inducing methods as ways of generating variation in plants on demand. Speeding up evolution, they imagined, would allow breeders to genetically engineer crops and flowers to order. Creating a new food crop or garden flower would soon be as straightforward as innovating any other modern industrial product. 

In Evolution Made to Order, Helen Anne Curry traces the history of America’s pursuit of tools that could intervene in evolution. An immersive journey through the scientific and social worlds of midcentury genetics and plant breeding and a compelling exploration of American cultures of innovation, Evolution Made to Order provides vital historical context for current worldwide ethical and policy debates over genetic engineering.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Helen Anne Curry is the Peter Lipton Lecturer in History of Modern Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge.

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Evolution Made to Order

Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America

By Helen Anne Curry

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-39008-6

Contents

List of Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
PART 1 Evolution by X-ray: The Industrialization of Biological Innovation, 
1 Mutation Theories, 
2 An Unsolved Problem, 
3 Speeding Up Evolution, 
4 X-rays in the Lab and Field, 
5 Industrial Evolution, 
PART 2 Tinkering with Chromosomes: Colchicine in the Lab and Garden, 
6 Artificial Tetraploidy, 
7 Evolution to Order, 
8 Better Evolution through Chemistry, 
9 Tinkering Technologists, 
10 The Flower Manufacturers, 
PART 3 Atoms for Agriculture: Evolution in a Large Technological System, 
11 Radiation Revisited, 
12 Mutation Politics, 
13 An Atomic-Age Experiment Station, 
14 Atomic Gardens, 
15 The Peaceful Atom in Global Agriculture, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Mutation Theories

In all likelihood, the first person to voice a desire to control "mutation" in order to improve plant breeding, and to suggest radiation as a means of achieving this, was the very man who introduced the concept of mutation into biological theory: the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries. In the summer of 1904, de Vries presented his ideas to an audience that had gathered in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to celebrate the opening of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution. By that time, de Vries was internationally known for his mutation theory in which he had proposed a new explanation of evolutionary change. He was enthusiastic about the research station at Cold Spring Harbor and the studies that were to be carried out there, believing it was crucial that researchers consider evolution using new approaches and new ideas. "We want to share in the work of evolution, since we partake of the fruit," de Vries explained, speaking of the mission of experimental evolutionists. "We want even to shape the work, in order to get still better fruits."

To de Vries, the trajectory that experimental research on evolution should follow was clear. First, scientists would elucidate the nature of mutation, the basis of evolution, by working with species found to be changing in nature. Then they would seek the causes of these mutations. The culmination of the field would be the application of this knowledge to produce mutations — and therefore evolution — on demand: "New and unexpected species will then arise, and methods will be discovered which might be applied to garden plants and vegetables, and perhaps even to agricultural crops, in order to induce them to yield still more useful novelties." De Vries thought that the radiations generated by the curious phenomenon of x-rays and the recently discovered element radium might prove key to the final part of this research program in which scientists would generate mutations at will.

When de Vries referred to "mutations," he did not have in mind the biological events this term would later be used to describe. In his mutation theory, first published in 1900, he used the word to indicate the striking changes in inherited traits he observed among his experimental flowers, changes that he believed set one species apart from another in a single generation. He considered these leaps in form to be a more important component of evolutionary change than the Darwinian process of gradual differentiation via natural selection. De Vries's theory rose quickly to prominence, inspiring all kinds of research into mutation. Although it fell out of favor almost as fast as it had risen, the notion of mutation found a lasting place in biological theory. What's more, many biologists in subsequent decades would share de Vries's vision of evolution as a process that could potentially be directed by human beings through their control of mutation.

Before turning to that history, it is essential to place de Vries's ideas about the study of evolution and heredity in a broader social and intellectual context. His emphasis on the literal fruits of research in his 1904 address, for example, is a reminder of the immense importance attached to the potential practical payoffs of the study of heredity and evolution at the turn of the century. This point will be obvious to readers who know the story of the so-called rediscovery of Gregor Mendel and the subsequent reception of his studies of inheritance in sweet peas: Beginning in 1856, Mendel, an Augustinian friar in Brno, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire), hybridized plants and tracked the inheritance of specific traits from generation to generation. In 1865, he reported his results to his local natural history society. He described how the visible characteristics of his pea plants — such as their height, the color and texture of their seeds — were determined by discrete hereditary elements within their cells. Mendel's observations and statistical analyses of the patterns of inheritance enabled him to propose a set of rules that governed the behavior of the hereditary elements, later called Mendelian factors or unit characters, and therefore the appearance of the traits they determined. These rules in turn could be used to predict the distribution of traits among the offspring of a given hybrid combination of pea plants. This work drew scant attention until a few scientists, de Vries included, came across it in the course of their own research around 1900. New generalizations about inheritance based on Mendel's ideas, generalizations that we know today as the laws of segregation and independent assortment and the concept of dominant traits, soon circulated widely, welcomed especially by many biologists, breeders, and eugenic advocates. It is not hard to see why. The laws seemed to offer both an explanation for patterns long observed by breeders and hybridizers — and therefore a validation of their methods — and a route to predicting and potentially controlling the inheritance of traits in plants, animals, and humans alike. Mendel's ideas found many champions, especially in the United States and Britain. Their "rediscovery" is generally credited with sparking the development of the field we know as genetics.

In the United States, the promise that heredity might be better understood and controlled meshed well with ambitions for a more scientific approach to agriculture. The scientific investigation of inheritance promised to be economically relevant, as research in the emergent discipline of genetics could easily be directed toward agricultural improvement. Studying patterns of inheritance in chickens, for example, might produce better egg layers as much as it might illuminate the underlying mechanisms through which traits are passed on from one generation to the next. And just as researchers pursuing studies of Mendelian inheritance sought to show how their knowledge might be applied in this way, breeders sought to demonstrate how the new genetic ideas aligned with their existing expertise and established methods. The upshot was an alliance between advocates of Mendelian genetics and agricultural breeders, one that helped ensure the success of Mendelism in the United States, in laboratory and farm fields alike.

From about 1900, then, the introduction of Mendelian genetics provided a conceptual and practical tool for American breeders to claim control over the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022639008X
• ISBN 13: 9780226390086
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland