James F . Crow and William F . Dove

LUTHER Burbank was a curious mixture: part garStalin’s ear. He was arrested in 1940 while on a collecting trip and was sentenced to death, but this was rescinded dener, part artist, part P. T. Barnum. He was responsible for a plethora of improved fruits, vegetables, in June 1942. He died in prison in 1943. Had he been able to continue his program, he would surely have and ornamentals. Some of these were of lasting significance, such as the Burbank potato, the Santa Rosa plum, greatly improved Soviet agriculture. Instead, under Lysenko, it was a fiasco. the Phenomenal blackberry, and the Shasta daisy. His successes depended on judicious employment of several In addition to their different fates, these two men were at opposite poles in their views of genetics. Burtechniques: he selected the best seedlings from large fields with enormous numbers of plants, he imported bank, who did much of his work in the nineteenth century before Mendel’s work was rediscovered, noted promising strains from around the world, he made crosses between distantly related varieties and even speand exploited the great variability of F2 populations. Nevertheless, he later downplayed the significance of cies, he exploited skillful grafting, and he astutely utilized vegetative propagation of superior recombinants, Mendelism and held to Lamarckian ideas throughout his life. He relied on his memory and kept no systematic thereby preserving their genotypes. Probably his greatest contribution to science was discovering nonsegregatrecords. He played by ear, not from the score. But what a sensitive, discerning ear! Yet geneticists were dubious. ing, true-breeding hybrids, such as from a cross between a raspberry and blackberry, that were later understood In contrast, Vavilov was an early student of Bateson and was thoroughly grounded in genetics and cytology. to be amphidiploids. He pioneered in regarding these as another mode of species formation. He was a popular Geneticists throughout the world held him in the highest regard. Since Vavilov has been the subject of an hero, far and away the most highly publicized plant breeder of his time (Burbank 1914–1915; Howard earlier Perspectives (Crow 1993), I devote more space to Burbank in this one. 1945–1946; Dreyer 1993). He died in 1926, a rich man. Nikolai Vavilov was Russia’s greatest geneticist. His For several years, Burbank was supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. To assess what he was energy was prodigious; he slept only 4 or 5 hours per night. He had a remarkably retentive memory, and his doing, the Carnegie directors commissioned G. H. Shull to study Burbank’s methods and report on his accomknowledge was encyclopedic. He was a charming companion and could converse in any of the European plishments. Shull spent a large part of 5 years, starting in 1906, on this endeavor. He found this frustrating, languages. He traveled over the globe collecting enormous numbers of wild relatives of domestic plants and for he was unable to discover the full history of most of Burbank’s creations and was impatient with the absence developed a widely respected theory about the centers of origin of domestic plants. By 1940 he had collected of careful records, to say nothing of Burbank’s unorthodox views of heredity. Shull tried for several years to more than 250,000 specimens. Many of these were preserved as living plants and were tested in various environprepare a full report and wrote thousands of words, but finally abandoned the project (Glass 1980). Burbank ments at 400 different stations. On an unprecedented scale, he carried out the kind of program that is now disliked having his methods observed and he was impatient with Shull’s verbose lecturing on genetics. He prestandard in experiment stations. He headed the AllUnion Institute of Plant Breeding, which at one time ferred to work alone in the fields with no one looking over his shoulder. Undoubtedly Burbank found Shull’s had 20,000 workers. In 1939 he was elected President of the Seventh International Genetics Congress in Edinpersistent questions irritating. It is hard to imagine two less compatible people. Nevertheless, they remained on burgh. Unfortunately, he was not permitted to attend. He had already become a victim of Lysenko, who had friendly terms, perhaps only on the surface.