Plant Breeder Quotes

If human breeders can transform a wolf into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in just a few centuries or millennia, why shouldn’t the non-random survival of wild animals and plants do the same thing over millions of years?

And so in 1948, 1949, and 1950 there flowed past: • Alleged spies (ten years earlier they had been German and Japanese, now they were Anglo-American). • Believers (this wave non-Orthodox for the most part). • Those geneticists and plant breeders, disciples of the late Vavilov and of Mendel, who had not previously been arrested. • Just plain ordinary thinking people (and students, with particular severity) who had not been sufficiently scared away from the West. It was fashionable to charge them with: • VAT—Praise of American Technology; • VAD—Praise of American Democracy; and • PZ—Toadyism Toward the West.

A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.

To save seeds is to complete the circle. When we save seeds, we are plant breeders, choosing which germplasm to perpetuate.

For some years there's been intense controversy over a pilot-plant "fast breeder" reactor, which was built to transmute the commonly occurring isotope U238 into the fissionable isotope P239 of the element plutonium. The controversy has raged because fast breeder reactors are much trickier and more dangerous than ordinary fission reactors, and because P239 is a suitable material for making atomic bombs as well as for fueling reactors. Critics have attacked fast breeder reactors both for the dangers of their operation and for the risk that in an all-nuclear economy there would be so much P239 being

Long before scientists understood hybridization, Native Americans had discovered that by taking the pollen from the tassel of one corn plant and dusting it on the silks of another, they could create new plants that combined the traits of both parents. American Indians were the world’s first plant breeders, developing literally thousands of distinct cultivars for every conceivable environment and use.

Hybrid corn now offered its breeders what no other plant at that time could: the biological equivalent of a patent. Farmers now had to buy new seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation.

He managed to find some mango varieties on the outskirts of Manila that he thought people might appreciate in Florida. His instinct turned out to be sharp when the carabao mango, as sweet as candy and not too fibrous, became known as the "champagne mango" in warm states that could grow it. Its slender body and buttery flesh shocked American taste buds that had never tasted anything so saccharine aside from pure sugar. The mango left such an impression on growers and breeders that its genes found their way into almost every American mango variety for the next century, the stuff of plant breeding dreams.

In the picture, Burbank has a grandfatherly smile, a shock of gray hair, a starched collar, and a black tie. The image belonged to an earlier chapter in the history of heredity, when breeders could use their intuitions to produce new fruits and flowers, becoming masters of forces they didn’t understand. By the 1940s, when the beer ad appeared, heredity meant something very different. It was now a precise molecular science in the hands of some, and a monstrous rationale for oppression and genocide in the hands of others. Even the plants and yeast that went into Budweiser beer in the 1940s had become products of scientific breeding, rather than of Burbank’s old wizardry.

Plant breeders realized early on that by breeding plants with entirely duplicated genomes, the offspring will sometimes have extra sets of chromosomes and be more vibrant or tastier. Nobody knows why, but some think the extra genetic material is put to new uses to make growth and metabolism more robust.