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

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. 

InEvolution 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 Orderprovides vital historical context for current worldwide ethical and policy debates over genetic engineering.

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

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