Evolution Made to Order traces the nearly one-hundred year history of America’s attempts to speed up evolution, to induce mutations long before molecular biology and recombinant DNA technologies took center stage. It tells the story of how chemical mutagenesis and radiobiology were used in plant breeding in the mid-twentieth century United States, focusing on their creation, application, and celebration as technologies of genetic modification. What we come to see is that popular interest in, acceptance of, and even demand for methods that would extend human control over heredity fostered attempts to develop and apply promising methods of genetic manipulation. These genetic technologies were not limited to the research programs of either quirky or mainstream biologists, or to the ideologies of foundations and their grantees, or to the hopes of industrial producers. Curry uncovers how they were widely shared among agriculturalists, horticulturalists, and many other Americans who believed that living things could indeed be reshaped to human imagination given the appropriate technology. That is to say, this is above all a history of innovation.
In the mid-twentieth century, American plant breeders, frustrated by their dependence on natural variation in creating new crops and flowers, eagerly sought technologies that could extend human control over nature. Their search led them to celebrate a series of strange tools: an x-ray beam directed at dormant seeds; a drop of chromosome-altering colchicine on a flower bud; a piece of radioactive cobalt in a field of growing crops. According to scientific and popular reports of the time, these mutation-inducing methods would generate variation on demand, in turn allowing breeders to genetically engineer crops and flowers to order. Creating a new crop or flower would soon be as straightforward as innovating any other modern industrial product.
In Evolution Made to Order, Helen Anne Curry traces the history of America’s pursuit of tools that could speed up evolution. Focusing on three key technologies—x-rays, colchicine, and radioisotopes—it is an immersive journey through the scientific and social worlds of mid-century genetics and plant breeding and a compelling exploration of American cultures of innovation. As Curry reveals, the creation of genetic technologies was deeply entangled with other areas of technological innovation—from electromechanical to chemical to nuclear. Providing vital historical context for current worldwide ethical and policy debates over genetic engineering, Evolution Made to Order is an important study of biological research and innovation in America that will interest modern biotechnologists, biologists, and breeders, as well as historians of science and technology.
