Between Craft and Science: Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities, 1900–1920

Abstract

Between Craft and Science: Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities, 1900—1920 PAOLO PALLADINO The relationship between science and technology is one of the most controversial problems confronting historians and philosophers in­ terested in technology and its history. As John Staudenmaier has pointed out, they have argued ceaselessly over competing interpreta­ tions of the relationship.1 Some of them—notably, the philosopher Mario Bunge—have maintained that successful technological practice depends on the systematic application of scientific knowledge.2 Others take the opposite position. They have expanded Donald Cardwell’s thesis to argue that the growth of science owes a great deal to technological practice because it has often disclosed new areas for scientific inquiry and because technological artifacts have provided equally often the techniques necessary for exploring these new areas.3 In more recent years an increasing number of historians, dissatisfied with these first two positions, have taken up Edwin Layton’s more radical one that science and technology are separate and distinct bodies of knowledge and practices.4 They argue that, even though scientific and technological discourses have focused on a common object—the natural world—the aims of each are so different that accounts of the same object will be radically different. These histori­ ans of technology claim therefore that neither science nor technology Dr. Palladino is a research fellow of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He wishes to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (grant WB 07250007) and the Wellcome Trust for supporting the research for this article. Thanks also to Deborah Fitzgerald, Jonathan Harwood, Barbara Kimmelman , and Robert Olby for their helpful criticism of earlier drafts. 'John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 83-120. "Mario Bunge, “Technology as Applied Science,” Technology and Culture 7 (1966): 329-47. ’Donald Cardwell, “Power Technologies and the Advance of Science, 1700-1825,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 188—207. ’Edwin T. Layton, “Technology as Knowledge,” Technology and Culture 15 (1974): 31—41.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3402-0008$01.00 300 Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities 301 can possibly claim primacy over the other. Still, everyone has mar­ shaled case studies to support his or her particular position, and thus the debate continues to resist any resolution. According to Otto Mayr, this search for a single, timeless account of the relationship between science and technology may be so fruitless because it is a fundamentally flawed endeavor.5 The critical terms “science” and “technology,” he argues, cannot be treated as Bunge, Cardwell, Layton, and all those who follow them do—that is, as invariant across different periods of history and different cultural contexts.6 These terms should be treated instead as historical objects whose invention and ever-changing definition and mutual relation­ ship cry for explanation. In this article, I wish to examine how the views of agricultural botanists working during the early years of this century on the importance of the Mendelian theory of heredity for the practice of plant breeding may advance Mayr’s argument. If one were to consider the views of American agricultural botanists on the relationship between work on the Mendelian theory of heredity and plant breeding, it might seem clear that technological advance derives quite directly from scientific work. The desire to increase agricultural productivity was the principal reason for the promotion of the Mendelian theory and very rapid establishment of genetic re­ search in the agricultural colleges of America.7 By the 1930s, this resulted in a new and revolutionary technology: hybridization.8 The link between these two developments was so tight that some historians have even argued that early research in genetics and work on crop improvement should be regarded as one and the same activity. ’Otto Mayr, “The Science-Technology Relationship as a Historiographic Problem,” Technology and Culture 17 (1976): 663-73. 6For example, Evelyn Fox-Keller and many other feminist writers argue that, ever since the late 16th century, the production of knowledge about the natural world and the search for improved means for the control of nature...