Copyright © 1988 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
To most students and teachers of biology, the role played by U.S. agriculture in the formation of the field of genetics is largely unknown. Presentations of the history of genetics usually begin with Mendel, of course, and quickly jump to the "rediscovery" of Mendel's paper around 1900. But often the story jumps again, to work by biologists at research universities (e.g. chromosome studies at Columbia, like Sutton (1902), or crossing experiments at Columbia, like T.H. Morgan's work on Drosophila), that aimed to discover the scope and mechanisms of, and exceptions to, what had come to be known as "Mendel's laws". While there are sound practical and pedagogical reasons for such a leap -- old issues of Science and the Biological Bulletin are more easily available than the Memoirs of the New York Horticultural Society, and the Mendel-Morgan-Sturtevant path leads more quickly to DNA -- a number of important and fascinating stories are regularly overlooked.
One of these stories is beautifully documented by Diane B. Paul and Barbara A. Kimmelman, in "Mendel in America: Theory and Practice, 1900-1919." The authors point out that, while we now take for granted the discipline known as genetics, and associate it with research conducted by academic biologists in universities (and more recently by scientists in biotechnology companies), in the first decade of this century the name "genetics" did not signify a discipline, and the boundaries between academic biologists and agriculturists, in research motivated by Mendel's paper, were less than clear. The authors discuss the role of U.S. agricultural practice and policy in the reception of Mendel's work in the early years of the century, and they explain how the interests of agriculturists made them a ready and enthusiastic audience for Mendel's paper (particularly as it was introduced and described by William Bateson).
Paul and Kimmelman describe how breeders' interests in artificial selection combined with governmental concerns with agricultural policy, to create a version of Mendelism that promised the power to successfully manipulate crops and crop yields. The authors present particularly interesting analyses of the role of the United States Department of Agriculture (the USDA), and the development of hybrid corn, in their discussion of the American agricultural reception of, and response to, Mendel's work. For those interested in the interpretation of scientific ideas by workers outside the laboratory, and especially for readers who recall the opening chapter of Darwin's Origin of Species ("Variation Under Domestication"), and its rhetorical appeal to artificial selection, "Mendel in America" is a fascinating comment on the different ways scientific discoveries are packaged for, and filtered by, audiences with particular professional interests.
Finally, the article by Paul and Kimmelman is an important, and in many ways exemplary, product of a field (or something like a field) that has come to be called Science Studies: a mixture of historians, philosophers, scientists and social scientists, providing descriptions and analyses of scientific theories and practices that regularly question received, and intradisciplinary, views of science and the societies in which science is practiced. As MendelWeb is designed as a place where scientists and humanists of all ages and professional interests can find something to read and think about, I am especially happy to include "Mendel in America," and I wish to thank Diane Paul and Barbara Kimmelman for their help in making it available here.
Copyright © 1988 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
(This article originally appeared in The American Development of Biology, edited by Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson and Jane Maienschein, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 281-310. It appears at MendelWeb, for non-commercial educational use only, with the kind permission of the authors and the University of Pennsylvania Press. The entire volume has been reprinted by, and is currently available from, Rutgers University Press ((800) 446-9323). Although you are welcome to download this text, please do not reproduce it without the permission of the authors and the University of Pennsylvania Press.)