She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer Read Free Book Online

year,Burbank’s postman brought him thirty thousand letters. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison traveled to Santa Rosa to meet him. Newspapers regularly praised Burbank, calling him “the wizard of horticulture.” The Burbank potato, which he produced at age twenty-four, was already the standard breed for farmers across much of the United States. The Shasta daisy sprang into existence under Burbank’s care, and quickly became a mainstay in middle-class flower beds. In his gardens, Burbank created thousands of different kinds of plants—the white blackberry, the Paradox walnut, the spineless cactus.
    “Such a knowledge of Nature and such ability to handle plant life would only be possible to an innately high genius,” de Vries had declared to a group of Stanford scientists on the eve of his trip to Santa Rosa. Before his meeting with Burbank, de Vries wondered how much of what was written about him was true. The San Francisco Call said that Burbank’s flowers “thrive upona scale so extensive as to suggest magic rather than the sober work of science.” Sometimes Burbank’s catalogs read like fairy tales. In one edition, de Vries saw that Burbank was now offering a stoneless plum. He simply couldn’t believe such a thing could be created. When de Vries finally reached Santa Rosa, he asked for proof. Burbank led de Vries and his other visitors to a plum tree bowed down with blue fruit. He gave each man a plum, and when they bit down, their teeth met only soft sweetness. “Although we knewthere was no stone in the plum, we experienced a feeling of wonder and astonishment,” de Vries wrote.
    De Vries was not one for much wonder. He was a scientist to his marrow, and before his trip to California, he had spent the previous two decades running experiments that helped establish the first genuine science of heredity. Not long before his visit to Burbank, it had been given a proper name: genetics.
    But genetics in 1904 was like a barely started house, more footings than walls. It still left fundamental questions about heredity unanswered. De Vries knew that he and his fellow geneticists were really just newcomers to heredity’s mysteries, that other people had been plumbing them for thousands of years. He respected the wisdom of animal and plant breeders, although he also recognized much of their ancient wisdom had disappeared into unrecorded oblivion. Over the course of the 1700s and 1800s, some breeders became rich. Nations looked to them to work miracles on heredity to deliver economic salvation. And at the debut of the twentieth century, there was no greater breeder than Luther Burbank. He had dedicated decades to understanding what he called “the inherent constitutional life force, with all its acquired habits, the sum of which is heredity.” De Vries came to Santa Rosa to learn what Burbank had learned about heredity in order to push genetics out of its infancy.
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    Pottery shards, ancient seeds, and the bones of livestock all indicate that the first breeders started their work in earnest around eleven thousand years ago. Plants and animals, once wild, came under the control of humans, grown for their benefit. The agricultural revolution let the population of our species explode, but it also made us precariously dependent on the heredity of what we raised. When farmers planted a new field of barley seeds, or goatherds delivered a new batch of kids, they needed each new generation of plants and animals to end up like the previous one. If corn kernels randomly became as hard as glass, or if cows were born unable to produce milk, people would starve. Learning how to steer heredity could also make farmers more prosperous. If they could raise pigs that reliably grew more pork on their bodies, they gained more wealth. And oncefarmers could supply their goods to markets and trade networks, they could attract more customers for their particular breeds—their sweeter oranges or their more durable cowhides.
    It’s hard