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Evolution Made to Order - Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,327
Discovery Miles 23 270
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Evolution Made to Order - Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (Hardcover)
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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.
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