A progressive era discipline: Genetics at American agricultural colleges and experiment stations, 1900--1920

Abstract

The activities of scientific practitioners at publicly supported agricultural colleges and experiment stations were crucial to the successful academic institutionalization of genetics between 1900 and 1915, and help account for the early remarkable disciplinary success of American genetics. Specifically, by 1915 three leading agricultural college/experiment station complexes--at Ithaca, N.Y., Madison, Wis., and Berkeley, Cal.--had established autonomous departments dedicated to basic research in inheritance and genetics. In three case studies, I examine the founding and early years of these departments to show precisely how resources were deployed, at institutions ostensibly with a practical orientation, to create departments with fundamental genetic research as their goal. But accounting for the success of Mendelian genetics after 1900 demands close examination of the values of agricultural researchers and the structures of the agricultural institutions in which Mendelism flourished. I argue that specific economic pressures and practical demands on agricultural breeders, within the context of late nineteenth-century agricultural reform, encouraged breeders to adopt actively interventionist, experimental techniques that included hybridization. Furthermore, breeders saw themselves as working within the Darwinian tradition and addressing issues of relevance to evolutionary theory, such as the nature of variation and adaptation; the shared intellectual interests of agricultural breeders and experimental evolutionists brought the breeders into direct contact with the evolutionists, and ultimately with Mendel's work, at two international conferences on plant hybridization in 1899 and 1902. Finally, the institutions in which they worked provided the agricultural breeders with the resources to create new research departments and transform themselves into geneticists. After 1900, Mendelian studies could be prosecuted, with more or less success, at the same institutions that prior to 1900 had rapidly developed competences in breeding and hybridization; the three institutions at which independent departments were created became leaders in genetic research. American agricultural breeders appropriated Mendelian science after 1900 and through their institutional efforts were crucial in the creation of the academic discipline of genetics.

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