Evolution Made to Order

The United States has often historically embraced the power and importance of “innovation,” valuing newness regardless of genuine social benefits or costs. If something is new, this thinking generally goes, it is improved. Helen Anne Curry's study of plant breeding puts this idea of novelty and its intrinsic, self-evident value at the center of her analysis. She considers the strange, lively history of technological systems of plant breeding that were oriented around producing novelty. People in the twentieth century who tried to change plants and their heredity used a range of different organisms and technologies and had varying investments, intentions, purposes, and goals. But as her story makes clear, they shared a sometimes-murky enthusiasm for the uncharted potential of new plants—to be beautiful, huge, patriotic, and profitable. Providing compelling perspectives on consumerism, marketing, and the everyday roles of technology and science in the United States in the twentieth century, her study tracks efforts to produce mutations in plants. The seed merchant David Burpee's Glowing Gold and Orange Fluffy calendulas, a type of garden flower, were sold as the “X-Ray Twins” (p. 59). Doubled chromosomes, produced by the powerful chemical colchicine, promised to make everything bigger and better, including tobacco, tomatoes, dogs, cats, and maybe even people. Gamma ray fields at Brookhaven National Laboratory were built to modify corn, but they also animated public enthusiasm for atomic energy. Home gardeners were persuaded to join the fun by buying irradiated seeds and experimenting in their own yards. The first “atomic garden” was presented at the 1961 Cleveland Home and Flower Show, manifesting ideas about science and citizenship in the Cold War. As a study of the marketing of scientific promise, this book is filled with rich details and wonderful illustrations of the exuberance

Enthusiasm · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · History of Science and Medicine · Psychology

• In Pursuit of “Man-Made Evolution”

  Kapil Patil•Agricultural History•2024

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