IN 1904, a fifty-five-year-old Dutchman, heavily built and sporting a graying beard, boarded a ship bound for New York. Hugo de Vries was a university professor in Amsterdam, but he was not a hothouse inhabitant of lecture halls. He spent much of his time wandering the Dutch countryside, scanning meadows for exceptional wildflowers. An English colleague once complained that his clothes were foul and that he changed his shirt once a week.
When de Vries’s ship docked in New York, he boarded a train that pushed its way across the country to California. The official reason for the journey was to visit scientists at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. De Vries dutifully gave his lectures and went to the required evening banquets. But as soon as he could manage, he escaped north.
Fifty miles from San Francisco, de Vries arrived in a small farming town called Santa Rosa. With four fellow scientists in tow, he made his way from the train station to a four-acre plot ringed by low picket fences and crammed with gardens. A modest vine-covered house sat in the middle of the property, flanked by a glass-roofed greenhouse and a barn. A boxwood-lined path led from the street to the front porch of the house. Next to the path stood a blue-and-white sign informing visitors that all interviews were limited to five minutes unless they were by appointment.
Fortunately, de Vries had one. A small, stooped man about his own age, outfitted in a rough brown suit, came out to greet the visiting party. His name was Luther Burbank.
Burbank shared the house in the middle of the garden with his sister and mother. He had been expecting de Vries’s arrival for months and set aside an evening and a day for the visit. He showed off his garden to the scientists and then took them to an eighteen-acre farm he tended in the Sonoma foothills. Those two plots of land, and the plants that sprouted from their soil, had made Burbank both rich and famous.
“His results are so stupendous,” de Vries later wrote, “that they receive the admiration of the whole world.”
This was no exaggeration. Each 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 upon a 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 knew there 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.
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 once farmers 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 to know exactly how much early farmers understood about breeding as they carried it out. The historical record of their ideas is practically a void, but the results of their efforts were impossible to ignore. The wealth of the Habsburg kings of Spain, in fact, came in part from the mysterious art of animal breeding. The first sheep to graze the meadows of Spain were unexceptional creatures with rough wool coats. When the Moors arrived, they brought sheep with them from northern Africa, which they interbred with the resident flocks. The new cross came to be called the Merino. For centuries, Spanish shepherds bred Merinos by the millions, every year leading them on a journey across the country. The Merinos spent each summer grazing in the Pyrenees and then traveled narrow paths for hundreds of miles to the southern lowlands to pass the winter. Over many generations of breeding, Merino wool became extraordinarily soft, lush, and silky.
Merino wool turned into a precious commodity. On their journeys, Spanish shepherds would stop to shear their sheep and sell their wool at fairs to merchants from across Europe. Henry VIII of England said he would accept nothing but Merino for his royal garments. Merino wool became so valuable to Spain that smuggling a single Merino sheep out of the country was made a crime punishable by death.
In the seventeenth century, the magnificence of Merino wool was as mysterious as the suffering of the Habsburg kings. No one at the time would have guessed they shared anything in common. Some speculated that the environment in which the Merinos lived was responsible for their wool. The cold of the mountains and the heat of the tablelands influenced their seed, in the same unknowable way the terroir of a grapevine determined the taste of its wine. More evidence for this influence came from the few cases when sheep were smuggled out of Spain. In other countries, they failed to thrive. After a few generations of crossbreeding with native flocks, the sheep no longer grew good wool.
Across Europe, the growing population was clamoring for more wool—as well as for more beef and leather from cows, for more eggs from chickens. Wheat, barley, and corn were in greater demand as well. Anyone who could steer heredity in a more profitable direction stood to make a good living. A particularly successful breeder could even become a celebrity. And no breeder in the 1700s was more famous than a portly Englishman named Robert Bakewell. A duchess once referred to him as “the Mr. Bakewell who invented sheep.”
Mr. Bakewell was born in 1725 on Dishley Grange, a 450-acre property that his father worked as a tenant farmer. His father encouraged him to learn new techniques by traveling to other farms around England, Ireland, and the Netherlands. He helped his father improve the farm, digging a labyrinth of channels and hatches to deliver water across the property, tripling the amount of grass that grew on it. Robert Bakewell took over Dishley Grange by the time he was thirty. A decade later the first hint of his breeding skill emerged when he won first prize at the Ashby Horse Show.
But it was with sheep that Bakewell would become famous. He and his neighbors reared a humdrum local breed known as Old Leicester. The animals were heavy, long, and flat-sided. They grew rough wool, and their mutton, a coarse-grained meat with little flavor, brought no excitement to the dinner table. But when Bakewell looked at an Old Leicester sheep, he saw a New Leicester sheep waiting to emerge. The generating powers inside the animals could, with the proper guidance, produce a breed that could make sideboards groan with huge cuts of delicious mutton—while requiring relatively little feed. Bakewell was a man of his mechanical age, engineering woolen meat-making machines.
Unlike an engineer, however, Bakewell did not understand the natural processes he was trying to manipulate. He could only guess, picking out ewes from his flock that approached his vision. Bakewell believed that the traits he could see on the outside of a sheep were linked to qualities on the inside, ones that could be passed down to offspring.
“He asserts,” a visitor to Dishley Grange wrote, “the smaller the bones, the truer will be the make of the beast—the quicker she will fat—and her weight, we may easily conceive, will have a larger proportion of valuable meat.”
Bakewell traveled England inspecting rams and brought home a select few to breed with his ewes. When he crossed these sheep, they did not instantly produce a uniform supply of New Leicester lambs. Instead, their litters were a hodgepodge, made up of lambs of different sizes and shapes. But Bakewell did not lose faith in his vision. He turned his exacting eye to his lambs. He picked out ones to mate with one another, or with other sheep he bought from other farms. These cycles of inspection and selection went on for years, during which time Bakewell turned his farm into a primitive laboratory. He herded his sheep into houses and sheds kept as clean as horse stables so that he could experiment on their heredity in secret. He measured his sheep and weighed them every week until slaughter. He chalked his data on slates and then transferred them to ledgers, which sadly were later lost.
In time, the sheep began to accord with the animal that gamboled in Bakewell’s mind. He stopped touring England to buy rams. Instead, he employed a strategy known as in-and-in breeding. Bakewell mated cousin to cousin, brother to sister, father to daughter. Other farmers thought him mad because they believed inbreeding invariably led to disaster. That might be true for other farmers, but not for Bakewell. He was able to make sure that all the qualities he wanted in his sheep became fixed in his flock, but none of the deformities that might ruin his new breed.
After fifteen years, Old Leicester had at last become New Leicester. People found Bakewell’s new breed—with its broad, barrel-shaped body; its straight, short, flat back; its small head; and its short, small-boned legs—peculiarly pleasing to the eye. New Leicester mutton might not have the fine flavor that aristocrats clamored for. One critic even declared it “only fit to glide down the throat of a Newcastle coal-heaver.” But Bakewell didn’t care about epicurean snobs. “My people want fat mutton and I gave it to them,” he declared.
He was fibbing a bit. With a flock of just a few hundred New Leicester, Bakewell couldn’t feed the millions of hungry English. Instead, he sold his sheep to other breeders, who started their own New Leicester flocks. They paid him dearly. They were even willing to do something that had previously been unheard-of: They would rent his rams for their services. Bakewell sent the rams to their appointments in two-wheel sprung carriages, suspended inside from slings. He claimed the right to take the best lambs produced by his rented rams, improving his own flock even more.
Dishley Grange itself became a destination for travelers, who came from as far as Russia to see Bakewell’s work and learn about the astonishing methods of “this prince of breeders.” Bakewell welcomed visits. He turned his house into a museum of heredity, filling it with sheep skeletons and brine-pickled joints, demonstrating the transformation he had brought about in his animals. It was great public relations. Bakewell’s visitors wrote letters and books about his experiments. One French nobleman declared that Bakewell “had been making observations, and studying how to bring into being his fine breed of animals with as much care as one would put into the study of mathematics or any of the sciences.”
In fact, Bakewell didn’t leave behind a single measurement of a sheep. He published no law of heredity to explain his success. Bakewell lived at the turning point in the history of heredity, when people recognized it as something to be understood and manipulated, while still relying on the intuitions of their farming ancestors to steer it. Looking back at Bakewell’s work, we can’t help but turn our attention to what it lacked—the data and statistics that are essential to studying heredity today. But in his own time, Bakewell had an enormous impact, showing the world how much heredity could be stretched and sculpted. As one of his visitors wrote, “He has convinced the unbelievers of the truth of his sheepish doctrine.”
Among Bakewell’s international admirers was Frederick Augustus III, the Elector of Saxony. In 1765, Frederick received an extraordinary gift from the king of Spain: 210 Merino sheep. Frederick wanted to use the Merinos to build a thriving sheep industry in Saxony, but he worried that the livestock might not thrive outside of Spain. He consulted with Bakewell about his plan.
Bakewell assured Frederick that the traits carried in a sheep’s blood would endure through generations no matter where they were bred, as long as they were properly raised. Frederick discovered Bakewell was right, and soon Germany was producing so much fine Merino wool that it could satisfy much of the demand from English factories and had enough left over to support a textile industry of its own. Around Moravia, at the heart of this new industry, a new generation of sheep breeders were inspired to achieve even more. They believed that if they could exploit the laws of heredity, they’d be able to breed even better sheep. But first they’d have to discover those laws.
In 1814 the breeders founded an organization, the title of which was—deep breath—“The Association of Friends, Experts and Supporters of Sheep Breeding for the achievement of a more rapid and more thoroughgoing advancement of this branch of the economy and the manufacturing and commercial aspects of the wool industry that is based upon it.” Those who didn’t want to lose too much oxygen uttering the full name simply called it the Sheep Breeders’ Society.
The Sheep Breeders’ Society was based in the city of Brno in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). They held regular meetings drawing members from as far as Hungary and Silesia. The city also hosted the Brno Pomological Society, a group of plant breeders who hoped to bring similar improvements to crops. The plant breeders had a Bakewell of their own to emulate, an English gentleman named Thomas Andrew Knight.
In the late 1700s, Knight applied Bakewell’s sheepish doctrine to the flocks on his English estate and was pleased with the results. He then set out to apply the same principles to plants. His plan was to hand-fertilize plants with pollen grains. The pollen—the botanical equivalent of sperm—would make their way inside of flowers to their ovules—the equivalent of eggs. Knight would use different varieties for his experiments in order to make hybrids. And he would then use Bakewell’s in-and-in breeding methods until their heredity became stable.
At first, Knight crossed apple trees. They grew so slowly that he couldn’t tell if his procedure was actually working. Around 1790, Knight searched for another species that could return him faster results.
“None appeared so well calculated to answer my purpose,” he later wrote, “as the common pea.”
Knight was delighted to discover that his hybrid peas flowered, producing seeds that could develop into plants of their own, quickly growing high in his garden. He was also intrigued by the way traits of the parents reappeared in descendants. When he fertilized white peas with pollen of a gray-seeded variety, for example, the hybrid plant bore gray seeds.
“By this process, it is evident, that any number of new varieties may be obtained,” Knight declared. If breeding was carried out scientifically, he was convinced, England need never go hungry. “A single bushel of improved wheat or peas may in ten years be made to afford seed enough to supply the whole island,” he declared.
No one in England was able to make Knight’s hope come true. But in Brno, plant breeders kept trying, collaborating with sheep breeders to uncover biology’s mysteries. In 1816, the Sheep Breeders’ Society organized a series of public debates about the nature of heredity. Some members argued that the environment impressed traits on offspring. A Hungarian count named Imre Festetics took the opposing view. Based on years of sheep breeding, he argued that healthy animals pass on their characteristics to their offspring. He observed a pattern much like what Knight had seen in peas: The traits of grandparents could disappear from their lambs, only to reappear in the following generation.
Festetics even argued that freaks of nature could leap back into a pedigree after many generations of healthy sheep. He warned against using those freaks for breeding. Inbreeding could improve flocks of sheep, Festetics declared, but only if breeders first carefully selected the stock they used. In an 1819 manifesto, Festetics urged that his fellow breeders determine the nature of these patterns scientifically, uncovering what he called “genetic rules of nature.”
In later years, the Moravian breeders followed Festetics’s advice. They designed breeding experiments, guided by the latest discoveries coming out of Germany’s universities. One of the busiest research centers was a local Augustinian priory, led by the abbott Cyrill Franz Napp. Napp and his friars got into the breeding business to pay off the priory’s massive debts, and they came to enjoy great success with sheep and crops. Yet Napp complained that breeding was “a lengthy, troublesome and random affair.” The trouble would not go away until breeders changed their ways. “What we should have been dealing with is not the theory and process of breeding,” Napp declared at an 1836 meeting of the Sheep Breeders’ Society, “but the question should be: what is inherited, and how?”
His scientific frame of mind led Napp to set his friars loose on scientific questions. They studied how to forecast the weather, maintained a large collection of minerals, and built a massive scientific library. Napp set aside part of the grounds solely to grow rare species of plants. A monk named Matthew Klácel ran experiments in another garden—at least until his radical philosophy on nature forced him to flee to the United States. When young men entered the Augustinian order, Napp encouraged them to immerse themselves in the latest scientific advances. One of the young men in whom Napp took a special interest was a poor farmer’s son named Gregor Mendel.
Mendel’s first job at the priory was to teach languages, math, and science in a local school. He proved so good at it that Napp sent him to the University of Vienna for more training. Mendel took a course in physics there in which he learned how to design careful experiments, and another in botany, where he learned about the long-running debate over hybrid plants and whether two species could cross to produce a new species. When Mendel returned to the priory in 1853, he continued to teach, but his time at the university inspired him to take up scientific research. He ran the friary’s weather station and investigated the possibility of communicating weather reports with semaphore flags or telegraph messages. He raised honeybees, studied sunspots, and invented chess problems. And he carried on Napp’s own research by breeding plants. Mendel cross-pollinated fruit trees, raised prizewinning fuchsias, and bred varieties of beans and peas.
In 1854, Napp gave Mendel permission to run a large-scale experiment that Mendel hoped would make some sense of hybridization. The randomness that bedeviled the breeding societies might be hiding some hidden order. Mendel followed Knight’s example, and planted his garden with peas.
For his experiment, Mendel grew twenty-two varieties of peas, each with a set of distinctive traits reliably passed from ancestors to descendants. He raised the plants in a greenhouse, where they couldn’t be randomly pollinated by visiting bees. Mendel patiently crossed the varieties, moving pollen from one line to another. His experiment was gigantic, involving more than ten thousand plants, because he had learned in his physics classes that big samples are statistically more likely to reveal important patterns.
In one of his first experiments, Mendel crossed yellow and green plants. When he opened the pods, he got a result similar to what Knight had found sixty years before. All the peas inside were yellow. Mendel then transferred pollen between these hybrids and produced a second generation. Now only some of the peas were yellow. A fraction of the plants displayed the green color that had disappeared from sight in the previous generation.
When Mendel counted the peas, he found about three yellow plants for every green one. He then selected plants from the second generation that produced yellow peas and crossed them with the original line of yellow plants. Some of their offspring produced green peas once more. Mendel got similar results when he compared wrinkly peas to smooth ones, or tall plants to short ones.
In 1865, Mendel talked about his experiment at a meeting of Brno’s Natural History Society. To make sense of the three-to-one ratio he found so often in peas, he proposed that every plant contained a pair of “antagonistic elements.” When a plant produced pollen or ovules, each one received only one of those elements. And when a pollen grain fertilized an ovule, the new plant inherited its own pair of the elements. Each element could give rise to a particular trait in a plant. One might produce a green color, while another produced yellow. But Mendel argued that some elements were stronger than others. As a result, a hybrid plant with one yellow element and a green one would be yellow, because yellow is dominant over green.
This scheme could account for the three-to-one ratio, thanks to the way the elements were passed down from parents to offspring. When Mendel mated two yellow hybrids together, each plant contributed one of its two elements to each offspring. Which element a particular offspring inherited was a matter of chance. There were thus four combinations: yellow/yellow, yellow/green, green/yellow, and green/green. Working through these figures, Mendel calculated that a quarter of the plants would inherit the yellow element from both parents. Half would inherit one yellow and one green—and also end up looking yellow. Meanwhile, the remaining quarter would inherit two green elements.
Mendel’s talks did not set his audience’s hair on fire. None of them were so inspired by his experiments to repeat them. In hindsight, it’s easy to recognize the importance of his results, but at the time they didn’t stand out from the many other studies of hybrids that were also being carried out. A mentor of Mendel, the Swiss botanist Carl Nägeli, encouraged him to see if the same patterns would emerge in another species, suggesting hawkweed.
It turned out to be a bad suggestion, thanks to hawkweed’s peculiar biology. When Mendel crossed hawkweed plants, he didn’t produce the three-to-one ratio again. Instead, the hawkweed often reverted back to one of the ancestral forms Mendel had started with, and he was unable to alter their descendants any further. The experiment didn’t make Mendel abandon his ideas about antagonistic elements, however. He added a new speculation: In hawkweed, the elements didn’t get separated as pollen and ovules developed.
“Evidently we are here dealing only with individual phenomena,” Mendel wrote to Nägeli, “which are the manifestation of a higher, more fundamental, law.”
That law would eventually bear Mendel’s name. But in the years after Mendel published his experiments, only a few other researchers cited them. One day, when Mendel was standing in his hawkweed garden with a friend, he predicted he would be proven right eventually. “My time is yet to come,” he said.
When Napp died in 1868, his protégé succeeded him, and before long, the newly appointed Abbot Mendel got so ensnared in tax battles with the government that he had to abandon his experimental garden. When he died sixteen years later, in 1884, his funeral was attended by throngs of peasants and the poor. But no scientists turned up to mourn his passing.
Breeders in the United States took a different path. The American colonies produced no Bakewell of their own. No scientific breeding society emerged in the early republic to debate how precisely sheep inherited fatty mutton. American plant breeders did not set up experimental gardens to test the boundaries of species. Instead, the United States became an arena for capitalist competition as farmers battled one another with breeds they hoped would make them a fortune.
Many of those breeds were imported from Europe to the New World. In the early 1800s, thousands of Merino sheep were illegally smuggled from Spain to Vermont. The legends about the Merino prompted New England sheep farmers to abandon their flocks for the new imports. By 1837, there were a million Merinos in Vermont alone.
The American booms typically went bust. Merino speculators became convinced that textile mills would develop a bottomless appetite for wool, and the price for a single lamb climbed beyond a thousand dollars. When the Merino bubble popped, Americans promptly turned for salvation to exotic chickens—Black Polands, White Dorkings, Yellow Shanghae—until the hen fever broke, too.
Along with new animal breeds, American farmers searched for new crop varieties. They typically didn’t make crosses like Knight or Mendel did. Instead, they would simply stumble across a peculiar plant. Some farmers would keep their discoveries to themselves, so as to attract more customers when they sold their goods at local markets. Others sent off their discoveries to the new seed catalog companies, hoping to get rich on orders. In Iowa, a Quaker farmer named Jesse Hiatt noticed a little apple tree growing between the rows of his orchard. He chopped the seedling down, but the following year it had returned. He cut it down again, and it returned once more. “If thee must grow, thee may,” Hiatt reportedly told the tree. After ten years, the tree finally bore fruit: handsome, red-and-yellow-streaked apples with a crisp, sweet flavor. He shipped some to Missouri, to enter a contest run by Stark Bro’s company. His apples won the contest, and Stark Bro dubbed his variety Delicious. It became one of their most successful varieties, and it remains so today.
Luther Burbank was born into this land of breeding in 1849. His first memory of his mother, he later recalled, was of her setting him down in a meadow at their Massachusetts farm while she gathered strawberries. Within a few years, Luther had farm work of his own to do: “the wood to bring, weeds to pull, chickens to feed, the cows to drive to pasture,” he later wrote. Yet Luther still had time left over to build waterwheels and bark canoes. He inspected the apple trees in the family’s orchard, learning how to spot the difference between the Baldwins and Greenings. He observed the swelling buds as they cast off brown coats and opened their pink-and-white petals. When Luther became a teenager, he planted his own garden, writing to his older brother, who had moved to California, to send him the seeds of exotic Western breeds.
The Burbanks hoped Luther would become a doctor, but at school he showed little proficiency in Latin or Greek. He was more interested in the books about natural history that his cousin, an amateur naturalist, gave him. They took walks around the countryside, where his cousin instructed him on the landscape, from the rocks to the plants that grew over them. Luther developed a fierce desire, he later said, “to know, not second-hand, but first-hand, from Nature herself, what the rules of this exciting game of Life were.”
In 1868, when Luther Burbank was nineteen, all daydreams about nature and medicine were cut short. His father suddenly died, forcing his family to sell off their farm and move away. Burbank had to support his mother and sisters by farming rented fields. “Nature was calling me to the land, and when there came to me my share of my father’s modest estate I could no longer resist the call,” Burbank later remembered.
He decided that he had to do more than stick seeds in the ground. He needed to change the seeds themselves. When Burbank sold produce in town markets, he could see how some farmers made more money because they used better breeds. Their customers preferred bigger fruits, tastier vegetables. Farmers who planted early-growing breeds could start selling produce earlier in the year. Burbank got a grand ambition: to use the rules of the game of Life to create entirely new breeds.
In the 1860s, the concept of heredity had not penetrated the United States very far. The textbooks Burbank read in school didn’t even use the word. Instead, they offered a jumble of folk explanations for why people resemble their ancestors. Burbank’s physiology textbook informed him that if a woman “has a small, taper waist, either hereditary or acquired, this form may be impressed on her offspring;—thus illustrating the truthfulness of scripture, ‘that the sins of the parents shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’”
One day Burbank spotted a new two-volume book at the Lancaster town library on animal and plant breeds. Desperate for help with his experiments, he dipped into it, and before long he had devoured the entire work. After he finished, Burbank felt as if he had been given the keys to heredity’s locks. He was ready to create new kinds of crops the world had never seen. “I think it is impossible for most people to realize the thrills of joy I had in reading this most wonderful work,” Burbank later said.
The book, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, was written by a British naturalist named Charles Darwin. In it, Darwin cast heredity as a scientific question in urgent need of an answer. But the answer he offered would turn out to be spectacularly wrong.
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication served as a sequel to its far better-known predecessor, The Origin of Species. In that earlier book, Darwin had presented the outlines of his theory of evolution. In every species and strain, Darwin observed, individuals varied from one another. Some of those variations may help some individuals survive and reproduce. The next generation will inherit those successful variations, and will pass them down in turn. Darwin called this process natural selection, and he argued that, over many generations, it could turn varieties into separate species. Over even longer periods, it could produce radically new forms of life.
The Origin of Species became one of the most influential books ever written, opening up millions of minds to the fact that life has been evolving into new species for billions of years and is continuing to evolve today. Yet Darwin knew that in the book he had glossed over some of the most important parts of evolution. While its logic was straightforward enough, Darwin couldn’t explain the biology that made it possible. Yes, individuals varied, but why? Yes, offspring resembled their parents, but why? Anyone who would answer those questions would first have to explain what heredity really is.
“The laws governing inheritance,” Darwin conceded, “are quite unknown.”
Three decades earlier, when Darwin was twenty-eight, he began jotting down notes and questions in a series of notebooks. In their pages, we can see the slow metamorphosis of his ideas about the diversity of life. From the beginning, he already recognized the importance and mystery of heredity. When two breeds were crossed, he wondered, why did the offspring sometimes look more like one breed than the other? Why did they sometimes look like neither parent?
In search of answers, Darwin read everything he could find about heredity. Dissatisfied by what naturalists had to say, he turned to breeders for help. He read Bakewell’s famous rules for producing better sheep and cows. He printed up a short pamphlet entitled Questions About the Breeding of Animals and sent it out in 1839 to England’s leading breeders. He asked them what happened when they crossed different species or varieties—whether hybrids were produced and, if so, whether their offspring were sterile. He asked how reliably traits were passed down from generation to generation, whether animals inherited the behaviors of their parents, whether the disuse of some body part might lead it to dwindle away.
The information Darwin got back from the breeders still wasn’t enough. So he became a breeder himself. Filling his greenhouse with plants, Darwin became expert at crossing orchids. He bought rabbits so that he could compare their dimensions to wild hares. He built a pigeon house at the end of his yard and stocked it with rare breeds. He went to club meetings of pigeon breeders, and even attended the annual poultry show in Birmingham, known as “the Olympic Game of the Poultry World.” Darwin marveled at the way the breeders could spot tiny variations from one pigeon to the next, and how they used those differences to produce extravagant new breeds. Pigeons, Darwin declared to his friend Charles Lyell in 1855, were “the greatest treat, in my opinion, which can be offered to human being.”
Darwin turned to humans for clues to heredity as well, but he mainly studied how they went mad. Doctors had long puzzled over the causes of insanity. Some blamed alcohol, others sorrow, others sin, others masturbation. But some considered insanity to be a hereditary disease. In eighteenth-century France, a fierce debate broke out about whether hereditary diseases even existed, and the French doctors of the mind—alienists, as they were then known—started gathering data to prove they did. They filled out entrance forms when people were admitted to asylums, and they studied national censuses. Madness, the alienists decided, clearly ran in families. “Of all illnesses,” the French alienist Étienne Esquirol said in 1838, “mental alienation is the most eminently hereditary.”
The French alienists investigated how madness could be hereditary—what it had in common with other hereditary diseases like gout or scrofula. They contemplated the underlying mystery: the process by which traits—both illnesses and ordinary traits—were passed down through the generations. Along the way, their language experienced a subtle yet profound shift. At first French alienists only used the adjective héréditaire in order to describe diseases inherited from ancestors. But in the early 1800s, they began using the noun hérédité. Heredity was becoming a thing unto itself.
In his research into madness, Darwin plowed through a two-volume tome called Treatise on Natural Inheritance, published in 1850 by the French alienist Prosper Lucas. Darwin framed its pages with notes in the margins. In English, he began to follow Lucas’s example. Again and again, he wrote down the word heredity.
Darwin was not drawn to heredity purely out of intellectual curiosity. Marrying his first cousin Emma led him to worry what fate they might deliver to their children. He read reports from alienists about how the children of first-cousin marriages were prone to madness. His anxiety only grew as his own health failed. In his twenties, he had been fit enough to take a voyage around the planet, but after his return he developed a constellation of disorders. He vomited violently, he suffered from boils and eczema, his fingers went numb, and his heart often raced. He described himself in 1857 as a “wretched contemptible invalid.” Three of Darwin’s ten children died young, and the others suffered from bouts of poor health.
“It is the great drawback to my happiness, that they are not very robust,” he wrote to a friend in 1858. “Some of them seem to have inherited my detestable constitution.”
Darwin put only a little of his research on heredity in The Origin of Species. Instead, he saved that profound matter for a book of its own. When he began focusing his thoughts on heredity, however, he decided that all the details he had been collecting about pigeons and insanity would not be enough. He would also have to figure out the physical process that accounted for all the strange ways in which animals and plants reproduced.
At the time, Mendel was raising pea plants and hawkweed, but Darwin—like most scientists of his day—didn’t even know who Mendel was. Instead, Darwin drew his inspiration from other biologists who had made a profound discovery of their own: that all of life is made of cells.
To Darwin, the central question of inheritance was what sort of substances the cells of parents transmitted to an embryo so that its cells came to resemble theirs. Whatever made muscles strong was stored in muscle cells. Whatever made brains wise or defective must be stored in brain cells.
Perhaps, Darwin thought, the cells throughout the body cast off “minute granules or atoms.” He dubbed these imaginary specks gemmules. Once released by cells, gemmules coursed through the body, gradually piling up in the sexual organs. When the gemmules from both parents combined in a fertilized egg, they enabled it to develop into a blend of cells from both parents.
Darwin wanted a catchy name for this imaginary process. Maybe something that combined cells with genesis. Darwin asked his son George, then a student at the University of Cambridge, to ask classics professors there for a name. George came back with outlandish suggestions like atomo-genesis and cyttarogenesis. Darwin settled on pangenesis.
Pangenesis set Darwin apart from most naturalists of his day. They explained heredity as a blending of traits—akin to mixing blue and yellow paint to produce green. Darwin looked at heredity instead as the result of distinct particles. They never fused and never lost their separate identities. Darwin readily admitted that pangenesis was “merely a provisional hypothesis or speculation.” Yet it offered Darwin great powers of explanation. “It has thrown a flood of light on my mind in regard to a great series of complex phenomena,” he said.
Darwin could explain why children sometimes resembled one parent more than the other with pangenesis: Some gemmules were stronger than others. The gemmules that gave rise to newborn babies were a mixture of particles that had accumulated over generations, from parents, grandparents, and on back through time. A gemmule might be overshadowed by stronger ones for thousands of years, only to leap forward and revive some ancient feature. And as experiences altered cells, they would also alter their gemmules. As a result, a trait acquired in life could be passed down to future generations.
On that last point, Darwin was simply following in a tradition that reached back over two thousand years to the writings of Hippocrates. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Darwin’s predecessor, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, had offered the first detailed theory of evolution, and he had made the inheritance of acquired characteristics a crucial part. A giraffe striving to reach leaves on a high branch would force a vital fluid into its neck, stretching it. Its offspring would then be born with that longer neck, and over many generations this stretching produced the neck of the giraffes we see today.
Darwin saw gemmules as acting like Lamarck’s vital fluid. In his research, Darwin discovered that improved breeds of cattle grew small lungs and livers compared to free-ranging breeds. He saw this as the result of pangenesis. Farmers fed these breeds better food and expected less work from them. As a result, they didn’t need to work their lungs or livers, and the organs produced different gemmules as a result.
To Darwin, cattle and other domesticated animals put pangenesis on an impressive display. In just a few thousand years, humans had altered the heredity of animals and plants in endless ways, producing greyhounds and corgis and Saint Bernards, racehorses and draft horses, apples, wheat, and corn. Breeders such as Bakewell selected individuals to breed, unknowingly choosing which animals could pass their gemmules to future generations. They crossed different strains to combine gemmules in new combinations. Breeders had exploited the same laws of inheritance that had made the evolution of all species—even ourselves—possible.
“Man, therefore, may be said to have been trying an experiment on a gigantic scale,” Darwin wrote, “and it is an experiment which nature during the long lapse of time has incessantly tried.”
Sitting in Massachusetts, young Luther Burbank read The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication with a rush of marvel and relief. He might be a novice farmer, but now he felt he was part of something far bigger. The same biology that gave rise to all living things—their variation, their selection, and their heredity—now felt like clay he could shape with his hands. Darwin declared that variation emerged from crossbreeding, which mixed gemmules of different origins together in new combinations. By selecting which plants to breed again, Burbank could eventually produce a new variety that reliably passed down its traits to future generations.
“While I had been struggling along with my experiments, blundering on half-truths and truths,” Burbank later wrote, “the great master had been reasoning out causes and effects for me and setting them down in orderly fashion, easy to understand.”
In 1871, Burbank bought a seventeen-acre farm where he could carry out Darwin’s causes and effects. He cross-pollinated beans. His cabbage seeds and sorghum won prizes at the local agricultural fair. And then, at the tender age of twenty-three, Burbank spotted an odd potato that would bring him agricultural immortality.
One day, as he tended a patch of Early Rose potatoes, Burbank noticed a tiny, tomato-shaped mass dangling from one of the vines. It was, he realized, something wonderfully rare: a seed ball. Farmers typically propagate potatoes by cutting up their tubers and planting the pieces, which can grow into entire new potato plants. Potatoes can also reproduce by having sex. They grow flowers, and once the ovules in the flowers are fertilized by pollen, they develop into seeds. The seeds cling together in a ball-shaped clump.
Over thousands of years of breeding, domesticated potatoes have mostly lost the ability to make seed balls. If farmers noticed one in a potato field, they usually ignored it. But Burbank had Darwin on his mind, and so, to him, finding a seed ball was like stumbling across a jewel. “Stored in every cherished seed was all the heredity of the variety,” he later said.
When Burbank spotted the seed ball, it was still immature and thus not yet ready to use for breeding. To make sure he could find it again, Burbank tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and tied it around the plant. When he checked back later, however, the seed ball had dropped to the ground and disappeared from sight. For three straight days, Burbank searched for it. When he finally found it again, he opened it up and found twenty-three potato seeds inside. Burbank carefully stored them away for the winter and then planted them in the spring of 1872.
From that single seed ball grew a riot of variation. Burbank ended up with potatoes of different colors, shapes, and sizes. When he tasted the tubers, he found that two were unusually good. They were also smooth, large, and white; they stored well over the following winter. Burbank brought them to the 1874 Lunenburg town fair, where people were stunned at what he had created. The following year, Burbank sold the potato to James Gregory, a seed merchant, for $150.
The “Burbank Seedling,” as Gregory generously named it, quickly became one of the best-known crops in the United States. A descendant of that variety, the Russet Burbank, carpets much of the state of Idaho. They are the only potatoes that McDonald’s, the biggest purchaser of potatoes in the United States, will accept for its french fries.
Burbank’s success with his potatoes convinced him that Darwin could guide him to riches. He sold his farm inventory, paid off his small mortgage, and left the stony soils of Massachusetts for California. Later, Burbank would look back in surprise at his rash move. He put it down to some impulsive streak in his ancestry. “In short I was a product of all my heredity,” he wrote.
Perhaps it was likewise “an inherited sensitiveness about money,” as Burbank liked to call his frugality, that made him decide not to pay for a sleeping berth on the westbound train. He spent nine days curled up on a seat. Looking out at the prairies, he ate sandwiches out of a basket prepared by his mother. Burbank made his way to Santa Rosa, where one of his brothers had settled.
The plants of California overwhelmed him. The pears were so big that he couldn’t finish eating a single one. Yet Burbank struggled to survive even amidst all that plenty. He threshed wheat in the summer and looked for construction work in the winter. Sometimes he found jobs at nurseries. In 1876, Burbank came down with a fever and was bedridden for days in a tiny cabin, where he survived on milk a neighbor provided him from her cow. “These were indeed dark days,” Burbank later said.
The following year things improved. Burbank had brought ten of his potato seedlings to California, and his brother let him plant a patch on his land. Burbank put an ad in local newspapers for “this already famous Potato” and found some buyers. His mother and sister moved to Santa Rosa and bought four acres of land, which Burbank began to farm. In his free time, he would hike into the hills, discovering wild plants that botanists had yet to name. Seed companies would pay him for intriguing new species.
After six years in California, Burbank finally got his big break in 1881. A Petaluma banker named Warren Dutton wanted to get into the prune business and was ready to pay a small fortune for twenty thousand plum trees that would be ready to be planted in the fall. It was an absurd demand, but Burbank figured out how to meet it. He bought almonds and planted them on rented land in the spring. The almonds quickly sprouted into seedlings, whereupon Burbank and a hired crew of laborers grafted twenty thousand plum buds onto them. The buds took hold and grew. When their branches became big enough, Burbank cut the almond branches back. Burbank delivered the trees on time, and Dutton proclaimed him a wizard to anyone who would listen. It was the first time someone described Burbank that way, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Dutton’s praise helped Burbank’s business explode. But unlike other nurserymen who prospered in California, Burbank rolled much of his profit into experiments. Following Darwin’s guidance, he crossed different varieties to produce new combinations of traits. For his crosses, Burbank used the native California plants that he was becoming familiar with. He also developed a network of contacts in other countries, who supplied him with exotic plants—plums from Japan, blackberries from Armenia—that he could also combine. When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.
“Something must happen to ‘stir up their heredities,’ as I am fond of saying—to excite in them the variability that normally lies dormant,” Burbank later explained. As he ran his experiments, he sometimes felt barely in control of the powers he was summoning. “When you stir up the heredity of any living thing too much it is like stirring up an ant-hill—you find the results much more startling and unsettling than useful or helpful.”
Burbank might produce thousands of hybrid offspring from which he might pick just a few to propagate into a new generation. He might breed them for years before reaching the proper form. After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.
Despite these setbacks, Burbank had produced enough varieties by the mid-1880s to start selling them to nurseries. His mysterious power to create new fruits and trees attracted visitors to his farm, to puzzle over his “mother trees”—native plants to which he grafted many different species at once to grow them as quickly as possible.
By 1884, Burbank could advertise a stock of half a million fruit and nut trees. Word of his creations spread—of oranges that could grow in the north, of flowers that would not fade—and before long, newspapers and magazines began publishing profiles of him. They crafted a public persona for Burbank as a botanical alchemist. “In his laboratory garden he has done for Nature in part of one man’s lifetime what Nature couldn’t do for herself in thousands and thousands of years,” one newspaper declared. Others promised his work could feed the hungry and enrich the nation. One reporter wrote that, thanks to a giant prune Burbank developed, “one California town—Vacaville—was literally built by prunes.”
Burbank’s humble origins helped him become famous. He became an American icon along the lines of Thomas Edison, able to make great discoveries without a college degree. Yet the American scientific community came to admire Burbank as well. They could see (and taste) for themselves that his magic was real.
“In his field of the application of our knowledge of heredity, selection, and crossing to the development of plants,” declared David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, “he stands unique in the world.”
Luther Burbank’s self-education in heredity seems to have stopped with reading Darwin. After plowing through Variation, Burbank relied on his own instincts to carry out Darwin’s vision. As he built his empire in Santa Rosa, he seemed unaware that in the late 1800s, Darwin’s theory of pangenesis collapsed.
The early reviews of Variation didn’t bode well. The psychologist William James dismissed pangenesis as empty speculation. “In the present state of science, it seems impossible to bring it to an experimental test,” he said. To James, the book’s only value was demonstrating just how baffling heredity remained.
“At the first glance,” James wrote, “the only ‘law’ under which the greater mass of the facts the author has brought together can be grouped seems to be that of Caprice,—caprice in inheriting, caprice in transmitting, caprice everywhere, in turn.”
But some scientists stood by Darwin, and none so passionately as his cousin Francis Galton.
Galton, thirteen years his cousin’s junior, fashioned his life after Darwin’s. After a disappointing stint at Cambridge, Galton led an expedition through southern Africa, and came back a famous geographer. He wrote bestselling travel books and dabbled in many different branches of science, making clever contributions along the way. He attempted to make the first national weather forecasts and designed the first weather maps. In 1859, he began turning his attention to biology, thanks once more to his cousin. Reading The Origin of Species, Galton later wrote, “made a marked epoch in my own mental development.”
Like Darwin, Galton realized that understanding evolution would depend on making sense of heredity. Half a century later, when Galton wrote his autobiography, he struggled to convey to his readers just how mysterious heredity remained in the 1850s. “It seems hardly credible now that even the word heredity was then considered fanciful and unusual,” he wrote. “I was chaffed by a cultured friend for adopting it from the French.”
In the early 1860s, Darwin and Galton both investigated heredity, but in profoundly different ways. While Darwin pictured the invisible gemmules, Galton looked for evidence of heredity in the traits that the English upper class valued most. He looked over the biographies of notable men—mathematicians, philosophers, patriots—and was struck by how many of them had notable sons. “I find that talent is transmitted by inheritance to a remarkable degree,” he wrote in Macmillan’s in 1865.
If talent was indeed hereditary, Galton wrote, then it could be bred like the plumage of a pigeon or the fragrance of a rose. In fact, Galton believed England’s future well-being depended on a national breeding program to produce more talented humans. He imagined this program as a joyous ritual, bringing gifted young people together to have better and better children. The result would be a species capable of handling all the power that Victorian science and technology was providing it.
“Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties,” Galton predicted.
In 1869, Galton published a book-length version of his study, which he entitled Hereditary Genius. He declared with remarkable certainty that eight out of a hundred sons of distinguished men were distinguished themselves, a rate far higher than one in three thousand people chosen at random. Here, Galton declared, was proof of the heredity of talent. Yet for all Galton’s questionable data, there was a giant void in his book: He had no idea how heredity actually occurred.
With Variation, Darwin electrified his cousin a second time. Galton became convinced that pangenesis “is the only theory which explains, by a single law, the numerous phenomena allied to simple reproduction.”
Galton set out to prove pangenesis by showing that gemmules existed. Darwin had written that gemmules “circulated freely throughout the system,” and so Galton reasoned that if he transfused blood from one animal to another, he should also transfer some gemmules.
Galton wrote his cousin a note: “I wonder if you can help me. I want to make some peculiar experiments that have occurred to me.”
He asked Darwin to put him in touch with breeders from whom he could buy rabbits. Over the next few months, Galton had silver-gray rabbits injected with blood from other rabbits of many different colors. He hoped the injected gemmules would change the color of their kits.
“Good rabbit news!” Galton wrote to Darwin on May 12, 1870. “One of the litters has a white forefoot.”
But with the birth of more litters, Galton’s excitement faded. Injecting blood into rabbits showed no further hint of being able to change their color. The experiments proved “a dreadful disappointment,” Emma Darwin wrote to her daughter, and, in March 1871, Galton came before the Royal Society to recount his failure.
“The conclusion from this large series of experiments is not to be avoided,” Galton said, “that the doctrine of Pangenesis, pure and simple, as I have interpreted it, is incorrect.”
Galton thought he and Darwin belonged to the same team, together searching for heredity. But as soon as Galton gave up on pangenesis, Darwin publicly chided his younger cousin. He wrote a letter to Nature, disassociating himself from the rabbit experiments. “I have not said one word about the blood,” Darwin declared.
Darwin pointed out that in his own writing, he had talked about pangenesis in plants and single-celled protozoans, which had no blood at all. “It does not appear to me that Pangenesis has, as yet, received its death blow,” Darwin protested.
Writing in 1871, Darwin was technically correct. But in the years that followed, another scientist would kill pangenesis for good.
That scientist was a German zoologist named August Weismann. Unlike Darwin or Galton, Weismann didn’t start his scientific life as they did with an exotic adventure. Rather than sailing around the Galápagos Islands or crossing Namib deserts, Weismann spent his best years squinting through a microscope, observing the fine details of butterflies and water fleas.
Weismann, like many other biologists of his generation, was taking advantage of powerful new microscopes and ingenious chemical stains to document life at the cellular scale. He observed how eggs developed into embryos, how some of their cells turned into eggs or sperm, which came together to make new embryos.
In addition to mapping cells, Weismann and his colleagues could also peer within them. In animals and plants, they could see a pouch inside each cell, which came to be known as the nucleus. Whenever a cell divided, its nucleus turned into a pair as well. But when a sperm fertilized an egg, the two nuclei seemed to fuse into a single one.
What lurked within the nucleus, Weismann and other scientists could not say for sure. It seemed to contain threadlike structures that were duplicated each time a cell divided. But some studies suggested that when eggs developed, they lost half of the normal supply of threads.
Weismann wove together his own observations and those of other scientists into one powerful model of life. He divided the body into two types of cells: germ cells (sperm and eggs) and somatic cells (everything else). Once germ cells developed in an embryo, they carried inside of them a mysterious substance he called germ-plasm that could give rise to new life.
“This substance transfers its hereditary tendencies from generation to generation,” Weismann said. Germ cells had a kind of immortality, because their germ-plasm could survive for millions of years. Somatic cells, on the other hand, were doomed to die along with the body in which they were trapped.
If Weismann’s so-called germ line theory was right, then Darwin’s pangenesis had to be wrong. Darwin envisioned germ cells as wide-mouthed pots into which gemmules from throughout the body could pour. Weismann envisioned a barrier sealing off the germ cells, isolating them from any influence from the somatic cells.
It also meant that the inheritance of acquired traits—taken as a fact by Hippocrates, Lamarck, and Darwin alike—was impossible. An animal’s somatic cells might be altered by experiences, but there was no way for those changes to get communicated to its germ cells. “Ever since I began to doubt the transmission of acquired characters,” Weismann said, “I have been unable to meet with a single instance which could shake my conviction.”
When Weismann turned against the inheritance of acquired characters in the late 1800s, it was still popular. In 1887, a certain “Dr. Zacharias” brought tailless cats to the annual meeting of German Naturalists. Dr. Zacharias claimed the mother of the cats had lost her tail when she was run over by a wagon. Other researchers did surgery on the spinal cord of guinea pigs, causing them to have seizures. Their pups had seizures as well. Mendel’s mentor, Carl Nägeli, claimed that the thick coat of mammals in arctic regions had developed in a reaction to the cold air, and then became inherited. Swans and other waterfowl were born with webbed feet thanks to the habit of their ancestors to strike the water with outstretched toes.
To Weismann, none of these stories about acquired characters was proof of inheritance. They could simply be coincidences. The guinea pigs might not have inherited their seizures; instead, they might have developed infections. If a cat lost her tail and then gave birth to tailless cats, the scientific thing to do would be to track down the father and see if he had a tail or not. There was no need to invoke acquired characters to explain why musk ox have thick fur. Natural selection favored individuals that, for whatever reason, had warmer coats that made them less likely to freeze to death.
In 1887, Weismann decided to do what the advocates of acquired characters never did, and run an experiment. He set out to test the idea that mutilations could be passed down. He ran the study on white mice, cutting their tails before letting them mate. The female mice got pregnant and delivered litters. And none of their pups had a shortened tail. Weismann repeated the procedure on their pups, and their grand-pups, and so on over the course of five generations. He produced 901 new mice. They all grew normal tails.
On its own, Weismann admitted, the experiment might not destroy the theory of acquired characters, but it added more weight to all the other reasons to question it. Lamarck’s followers claimed proof based on far less evidence.
“All such ‘proofs’ collapse,” Weismann said.
Weismann reconfigured how scientists thought about heredity, an accomplishment all the more impressive for all the details of heredity he did not yet know about. After he introduced his germ-line theory, other researchers looked more closely at the multiplying threads in the nucleus of cells. They were dubbed chromosomes.
Researchers determined that a somatic cell carried pairs of chromosomes. (We humans have twenty-three pairs, for example.) A duplicating cell—known as a mother cell—made new copies of all its chromosomes—which it bequeathed evenly between two daughter cells. But when germ cells arose in an embryo, they ended up with only one set of chromosomes. Fertilization brought an egg and sperm together, creating a new set of pairs.
A new generation of scientists then asked how inheriting chromosomes determined the different forms that life could take. Hugo de Vries was among them.
De Vries had trained as a botanist, and at first heredity had meant little to him. He studied how plants grew, stretching their stems and sending out tendrils. His work caught the attention of Darwin, who recounted young de Vries’s work in a book about plants. Darwin sent him a complimentary copy and then invited him to visit his estate when de Vries visited England in 1878.
“We talked for a short time about all kinds of things, the country house (which is very large and beautiful), the surroundings (also very beautiful), politics, my journey etc.,” de Vries eagerly wrote his grandmother that night. “Thereafter Darwin took me to his room and we talked about scientific subjects. At first about tendrils, in connection with our former correspondence.”
Darwin took de Vries on a tour of his garden, handing him a peach along the way. Later, de Vries gushed to his grandmother that he “was received so kindly and cordially as I never had dared hope for.”
When de Vries returned home to the Netherlands, he and Darwin kept up the correspondence about plants. But in a letter he wrote Darwin in 1881, de Vries abruptly changed the subject. Now he was consumed with heredity.
“I have always been especially interested in your hypothesis of Pangenesis,” de Vries told Darwin, “and have collected a series of facts in favour of it.”
De Vries roamed the countryside for “sports of nature”—rare plants that sprouted weird growths or displayed odd colors. He wanted to create an herbarium of monstrosities, he later told a friend. By breeding them, he hoped to prove Darwin’s theory of pangenesis right.
When Weismann unveiled the concept of the germ line, de Vries recognized its importance. As a botanist, though, he found it parochial. Plants, like animals, were made of cells that contained nuclei, and inside those nuclei were chromosomes. When plant cells divided, they also made a new set of chromosomes. But plants did not wall off their germ cells early in development. An apple tree would grow for years before producing germ cells that could give rise to pollen grains or seeds. A cutting from a willow could grow into an entire tree, complete with roots, branches, and leaves. A hidden potential to produce new plants must be spread throughout their cells, de Vries thought. While pangenesis might have its problems, he thought it had to be the foundation of any true understanding of heredity.
Darwin died in 1882, leaving de Vries to search for that understanding without the guidance of his guru. He began running experiments with his monsters. He crossed them with ordinary plants, and sometimes their bizarre traits turned up in later generations. De Vries came up with a theory of his own: Every cell contained invisible particles that were responsible for passing traits from one generation to the next. Under some circumstances, the particles in somatic cells could guide the development of a new organism. In honor of Darwin, de Vries called the particles pangenes.
In 1889, de Vries published Intracellular Pangenesis, in which he distilled over a decade’s worth of work. Hardly any scientists took notice of it. One of the few who did advised de Vries not to mention pangenesis again.
De Vries did not give up. In the 1890s, he noticed that monstrosities crossed with regular flowers produced regular ratios of offspring. De Vries thought that flowers could have different numbers of pangenes in them, and those numbers were what determined traits in their offspring.
Despite his struggles with these ratios, de Vries became convinced that pangenes were real, and that their changes were what made evolution possible. Pangenes could abruptly change in a process he called mutation, and flowers that inherited a mutation abruptly became a new species. De Vries’s mutation theory was pushing him far from Darwin, who had argued for the gradual evolution of species through tiny steps.
One day early in 1900, de Vries got a letter from a friend who was familiar with his obsession with hybrid plants. His friend thought de Vries might be interested in a thirty-five-year-old paper by “a certain Mendel.” When de Vries scanned the paper, he was stunned that a Moravian monk he had never heard of had found the same patterns he had. He had even come up with a theory of invisible hereditary factors to account for it.
By an unparalleled coincidence, two other scientists studying inheritance, William Bateson and Carl Correns, also stumbled across Mendel’s work at about the same time. They all realized that they had been scooped. And they also recognized just how important Mendel’s experiments had been. Before 1900, scientists didn’t have the right frame of mind to appreciate them. It took Darwin and Galton establishing heredity as a scientific question. It took Weismann and others to look closely at cells to ask how heredity was transmitted.
De Vries, Bateson, and Correns all began sharing the belated news about Mendel. Bateson emerged as the leader of the campaign: He and his colleagues demonstrated that animals could display the same ratios as plants. Even certain hereditary diseases in people fit the pattern. A British doctor named Archibald Garrod noticed that a condition he called alkaptonuria—which turned urine black—tended to run in families. Sometimes when two seemingly healthy parents started a family, about a quarter of their children fell ill. That ratio fit Mendel’s predictions: The parents must be carriers, each carrying a recessive factor.
The “whole problem of heredity has undergone a complete revolution,” Bateson declared. Mendel’s discoveries could at last mature into a true science. Bateson christened it genetics.
No sooner was genetics born, however, than it was hurled into battle. Some scientists felt that Mendel must have made a mistake. Some tried to get his neat ratios of hybrids and failed. Other critics found it inconceivable that physical particles could be inherited and give rise to every trait in an organism.
De Vries went his own way. He accepted that Mendel’s results were genuine, but he came to doubt they mattered much to big evolutionary changes. Those could only come about through the appearance of major new mutations. Evolution didn’t creep forward, de Vries believed. It leaped.
De Vries unpacked this idea in his sprawling two-volume work, The Mutation Theory, in 1903. His theory that new mutations could produce new species in a single leap proved sensational. It finally earned de Vries the fame that had escaped him in earlier years. When he came to the United States to give lectures about his mutation theory, newspapers put his face on their front pages. It was on one of those tours that de Vries paid his first visit to Luther Burbank, in 1904.
By then, Burbank no longer considered himself simply a plant breeder. The honors that scientists had heaped on him persuaded him he was a genius of heredity. When scientists visited Burbank, he would regale them with a grand theory—“perhaps as original as Darwin’s,” he modestly declared—that the universe consisted of what he called “organized lightning.” The scientists who listened to Burbank’s ramblings politely nodded, said that they were unqualified to judge, and hoped they could gain access to his legendary garden.
De Vries traveled to Burbank’s garden to find support for his mutation theory. His own evening primroses produced mutants from time to time, but he had yet to find another species that displayed mutations so clearly. De Vries’s gigantic theory had come to rest on precious little evidence, like an elephant trying to ride a bicycle. Maybe Burbank’s new varieties were, in fact, a wealth of new mutants.
Between bites of Burbank’s stoneless plums, de Vries interrogated his host. Burbank had become wary of sharing his secrets by then. He would sometimes force his workers to empty their pockets to make sure they weren’t smuggling out his prize seeds. If they chatted across the picket fence with a passerby, he would fire them. With de Vries, Burbank was more forthcoming. He explained how he had crossed plums, selecting the ones with smaller and smaller stones. He described how he set about breeding cacti without spines as a new source of food for cattle. He searched for varieties to cross, each missing different parts of their spines. Over generations, they became soft enough for Burbank to stroke over his cheek.
De Vries left Santa Rosa impressed by Burbank’s passion. “The sole aim of all his labors is to make plants that will add to the general welfare of his fellow beings,” de Vries wrote later. As a scientific mission, however, the journey ended up a disappointment. De Vries hoped his visit would shed light on how plants acquired new traits. “Burbank’s experience did not throw any light on this question,” he concluded.
De Vries’s time with Burbank marked the high-water mark in the careers of both men. When he traveled to Santa Rosa, de Vries had become famous as one of the founders of modern genetics and as the author of a controversial new theory about mutations that seemed to overthrow Darwin. Burbank, meanwhile, had become a celebrity as both a mystic of nature and a keen businessman. Things would never be so good for either of them again.
In the years that followed, de Vries would keep fighting for his mutation theory. But the only organisms that had experienced one of de Vries’s dramatic mutations were his evening primroses. It turned out de Vries was fooled by an illusion of breeding. What he took to be an entirely new mutation was actually a combination of old genetic variants.
De Vries refused to accept these facts, retiring to the village of Lunteren in the Dutch countryside. For the next sixteen years, the villagers would sometimes spot a tall bearded man walking amidst a garden of primroses.
In December 1904, a few months after de Vries’s first visit, Burbank got a letter from the Carnegie Institution. Andrew Carnegie had set up the institution two years earlier to fund important scientific research. Carnegie himself believed that some of the money should go to Burbank, whom he called a genius. The letter informed Burbank he would shortly receive $10,000 “for the purpose of furthering your experimental investigations in the evolution of plants.” The institution would send him another $10,000 the next year, and the year after that, with no clear end in mind.
The popular press released a fresh flurry of profiles of Burbank, pointing to the Carnegie cash as science’s seal of approval. In 1906, a botanist named George Shull arrived to help Burbank write up scientific reports about his research.
Shull found Burbank to be an artist of nature. As a scientist, however, he was a phantom. When Shull asked Burbank for experimental records, the old horticulturalist might hand him a few sheets of paper on which he had scribbled notes in pencil. “This was a rich, sweet, delicious, superb pear, as good as Bartlett, perhaps much better,” he wrote on one sheet. He sliced one of the pears in half and stamped it on the page, letting the juice stain the paper.
Shull tried instead to talk to Burbank to extract useful information. Burbank informed him that he was the greatest authority of plant life that ever lived. He claimed to have already discovered Mendel’s results on his own, and yet he also declared that acquired characters could be transmitted from one generation to the next. “Environment is the architect of heredity,” Burbank said.
When Shull pressed him for the concrete details of his work, Burbank grew so irritated he started avoiding Shull around the gardens. It wasn’t Shull’s line of questioning that annoyed him so much as the fact that the young botanist seemed to be preparing to explode his legend. Indeed, Shull reported back to the Carnegie Institution that it would be impossible to use any of the plants to test Mendel’s theory of inheritance. In 1910, the Carnegie Institution sent Burbank their last check. Their $60,000 bought them a single report from Shull, about rhubarb.
As the Carnegie money dried up, a swarm of businessmen descended on Burbank, proposing deals to make him staggeringly rich. Some of the hucksters set about publishing a lavish, costly encyclopedia of his life’s work. That venture collapsed into bankruptcy in 1916. Other businessmen set up the Luther Burbank Company, to sell his plants directly to customers rather than to nurseries. They mismanaged the venture, unable to align their supply to demand. Things got so desperate that the company started shipping ordinary cacti in place of Burbank’s spineless variety. Before putting the plants in the mail, company workers simply scrubbed off the spines with a wire brush. The Luther Burbank Company went bankrupt as well.
Burbank managed to hold on to much of his wealth despite these disasters. But they permanently tarnished his reputation. By the 1920s, Burbank had become an untrustworthy businessman whom scientists no longer revered. He spent his final years puttering around his Santa Rosa farm, cared for by his young second wife, Elizabeth, along with a few assistants. In 1926, Burbank died at age seventy-seven. Thousands of people came to his funeral at a nearby park, and then his body was brought back to his house, where it was buried. Nothing stood over his grave except a cedar of Lebanon. “I would like to think of my strength going into the strength of a tree,” he once said. Elizabeth sold off his remaining plants to Stark Bro’s, just as Hiatt had sold his Delicious apples three decades before. Burbank’s garden tools went to Henry Ford.
After his death, Burbank enjoyed a longer stretch of fame than de Vries had. His face reappeared in popular culture for decades. As late as 1948, the beer company Anheuser-Busch was using his likeness in their ads. In a full-page ad for Budweiser, Burbank stands in his garden, holding out a rose for a mailman to smell. Both Budweiser and Burbank’s varieties, the ad declared, were “great contributions to good taste.”
In the picture, Burbank has a grandfatherly smile, a shock of gray hair, a starched collar, and a black tie. The image belonged to an earlier chapter in the history of heredity, when breeders could use their intuitions to produce new fruits and flowers, becoming masters of forces they didn’t understand. By the 1940s, when the beer ad appeared, heredity meant something very different. It was now a precise molecular science in the hands of some, and a monstrous rationale for oppression and genocide in the hands of others. Even the plants and yeast that went into Budweiser beer in the 1940s had become products of scientific breeding, rather than of Burbank’s old wizardry.
There is another picture created after Burbank’s death that still feels fresh. The painter Frida Kahlo paid a visit to Burbank’s garden in 1930. She had moved from Mexico to San Francisco a few months earlier. Her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, had accepted a commission to paint murals for American patrons, the first of which would capture the spirit of California. Kahlo and Rivera took the short drive from San Francisco to Santa Rosa to visit the home of a hero of the state. Burbank’s widow, Elizabeth, gave the couple a tour around the grounds, showed them the cedar under which Burbank was buried, told them stories about her late husband, and gave them some photographs of him to take with them.
Kahlo painted Burbank on a stark, tan California landscape. High clouds moved across the sky, and behind him grew a pair of trees. One tree was small, with oversize fruits. The other grew clusters of balls in different colors, perhaps patterned after one of Burbank’s mother trees. From the knees up, Burbank looked like he does in many photographs, with a tranquil expression on his face, wearing a dark suit and holding a plant. In this case, he’s holding a philodendron, a vinelike plant with lobed leaves that Kahlo painted to be as big as his chest. Below the knees, Burbank was transformed by Kahlo’s powerful imagination. His legs disappeared into the stump of a tree. Kahlo cut away the earth to reveal the tree’s roots, which pierced the head, the heart, the stomach, and the legs of a corpse.
Burbank had no children of his own who could carry his hereditary particles after his death. His fame eventually faded. But many of the varieties that he developed continued to grow, to make seeds of their own, and to be replaced by their offspring. Some, like the Burbank potato, bear his name. Others grow namelessly, Burbank’s handiwork having been long forgotten. He had found an immortality here on Earth, his work and his plants extending their existence in intimate replication.
A few months before he died, a reporter paid Burbank a visit to ask him about religion. Burbank was such a familiar figure in the United States that reporters would ask his opinion about everything from jazz to crime. At one point in the interview, Burbank said that Jesus had been “a wonderful psychologist,” and an infidel to boot. “Just as he was an infidel then, I am an infidel today.”
Now the river of letters that poured into Burbank’s house turned furious. Prayer groups formed to beseech God to help Burbank see the light. To respond to the attacks, Burbank arranged to give a speech—a sermon, really—at the First Congregational Church of San Francisco on the last Sunday of January 1926. More than 2,500 people crammed the pews.
The seventy-six-year-old Burbank told them that he was no atheist. He subscribed to what he hoped would someday become a religion of humanity, worshiping a God “as revealed to us gradually, step by step, by the demonstrable truths of our savior, science,” he said to his audience. Burbank didn’t see the point of wasting time pondering hypothetical eternities in heaven or hell. Heredity—the continuity of life through the generations—was vast enough for him. “All things—plants, animals, and men—are already in eternity, traveling across the face of time,” he said.