Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

New Books in Technology · May 8, 2017 · 35m

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press…