Word: hybridization
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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JAZZ, HOT & HYBRID-Withrop Sargeant-Arrow Editions...
...Hybrid corn is the result of inbreeding various strains for several generations, then crossbreeding. Corn, like mice, mackerel and men, reproduces by means of male sperm and female eggs. The sperm is produced and dispersed from the tassels at the top of the stalk; the eggs lurk at the base of the silk on each ear. In ordinary "open-pollinated" corn, fertilization occurs at random, the sperm-bearing pollen being carried to the silk by the wind. For inbreeding, the tassels and silk are protected by paper bags until maturity, and the plants are then self-pollinated by hand. These...
...Hybrid seed costs about twice as much as ordinary cornseed, but yields increases of 10% to 40% per acre-increases so huge in farm eyes that one group of farm publications declared: "Hybrid corn is the most spectacular and far-reaching agricultural development of this generation. It ranks in importance with the invention of the telephone and the internal combustion engine. ... In the midst of economic transition, most people have overlooked the transition in food production technique, of which hybrid corn is the forerunner...
...only five years after Mendel's heredity laws were rediscovered, Dr. Shull (who was then at the Carnegie Institution's station on Long Island) and the late Dr. Edward Murray East (at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station) started their experiments with corn hybridization. The Department of Agriculture, foreseeing laborious years of further experiment ahead, was slow to follow their lead. Thoroughgoing research programs at corn-belt stations did not get under way until 1920, and until 1933 practically no hybrid corn was grown commercially. Not until last year were seed supplies plentiful enough for growers to take their...
Rotund, white-bearded Dr. Shull, who looks like Santa Claus, does not feel gypped at having received no royalties so long as he is recognized as the Santa Claus of hybrid corn. But he remarked last week that if he had received the merest fraction of 1? an acre, he would have been able to set up an independent department of botany at Princeton. It rather irks him that, the way things are, botany is corralled in Princeton's department of biology...