How Breeders Remade the Crop

Luther Burbank introduced more than 800 varieties, including the Burbank potato, the Shasta daisy and the plumcot, working from a garden in Santa Rosa. He bred by eye and intuition at enormous scale, and kept records so thin that geneticists despaired of him even as they used his plants.

Nazareno Strampelli, an Italian agronomist who lived from 1866 to 1942, hybridized wheat into high-yield varieties. His work raised Italy's average wheat yield from about 1.0 to about 1.5 tonnes per hectare by the 1930s and made him a forerunner of the Green Revolution.

George Harrison Shull was an American plant geneticist who played a central role in developing hybrid maize. He also helped establish the genetic basis of heterosis, the increased vigor often seen in hybrid offspring, which gave breeding a scientific explanation.

Edward Murray East ran experiments on inbred maize lines and their crosses at Harvard's Bussey Institute that established the scientific basis for hybrid corn. He was also an outspoken advocate of eugenics, a position later scholars have assessed very differently.

Henry A. Wallace, later United States secretary of agriculture and vice president, founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company. It became extremely successful, which shows how hybrid corn moved from laboratory crosses to a seed business.

Nikolai Vavilov published his centers-of-origin theory in 1924 and built the Leningrad collection, the world's largest seed bank, at over 148,000 specimens by 1933. His staff guarded the samples through the Siege of Leningrad, and he died in a Saratov prison in 1943.

Trofim Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the ideas later termed Lysenkoism. As director of the Institute of Genetics from 1940 he suppressed critics, several of whom, including Vavilov, were imprisoned, and his practices contributed to lower Soviet yields until his downfall in the mid-1960s.

Barbara McClintock spent her career studying chromosomes in corn after earning her Cornell doctorate in 1927. Her work on maize genetics earned the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of genetic transposition.