Table Of ContentEMERGING EDENS: THE BIOTECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN
AGRICULTURE
-By
MARK STEVEN LESNEY
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1997
This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of
my father, Jerome, who died before he could see it,
but not before he could encourage me in its birth
and its completion.
.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to express his appreciation to his
committee of advisors: Dr. Frederick Gregory, Dr. Robert
Hatch, Dr. Betram Wyatt-Brown and Dr. Chuang Liu, but most
especially to his major advisor. Dr. V. Betty Smocovitis for
her support and friendship. Special thanks also goes to Dr.
Loukas Arvanitis for his encouragement.
The author would like to thank Christopher Koehler,
Gary Weisel and Michael Futch for acting as a valuable
cohort and friends during this second run at graduate
school. A special thanks goes to Richard Pizzi for his
support, encouragement and friendship through some hard
times
The author is most grateful to his family, especially
to his father, Jerome, now deceased, and his mother,
Stephanie, who provided without condition or fail the love
and encouragement needed to make it through this time of
career readjustment. Words cannot express the author's
indebtedness, love and gratitude to these two splendid
people. The author would also like to thank his brother,
Michael, and his sister-in-law, Maryalice, for their love
and support.
m
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
ABSTRACT v
CHAPTERS
1. INTRODUCTION 1
Biotechnology, Agriculture and Revolutions 1
2. THE "SCIENTIFICATION" OF AGRICULTURE AND THE BIRTH OF
INSTITUTIONAL IDEOLOGY 36
The Land Grant Mission - The Land Grant Memory ... 54
Agricultural Science and Disciplinary "Unity" ... 65
3. SILENT SPRING, VOCAL CRITICS 83
4. THE NEW BIOLOGY: A DNA WORLD 110
The "Revolution" in Molecular Biology 110
The ScPileanntceaBndehiAnnidmaAlgriPchuylstiuorlaolgyBiotechnology . . 112247
Biological Nitrogen Fixation 129
Hormone Research 140
Tissue Culture 145
Plant and Animal Pathology 161
Plant and Animal Genetics/Breeding 175
5. INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE/INSTITUTIONAL WARFARE 181
6. "UNHOLY" ALLIANCES 233
7. NATURALIZING THE UNNATURAL 267
8. BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE TRIUMPH OF BIOTECHNOLOGY,
"PROGRESS," AND THE LAND GRANT SYSTEM 287
REFERENCES 301
GENERAL 301
ARCHIVAL MATERIAL FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA . . 316
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 321
IV
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
EMERGING EDENS: THE BIOTECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN
AGRICULTURE
By
Mark Steven Lesney
May, 1997
Chairperson: Vassiliki B. Smocovitis
Major Department: History
Biotechnology in American agriculture developed in a
context of institutional, state and national politics, as
well as of scientific change. It "emerged" in a framework of
private and public ideological crises that lent meaning to
biotechnology as a unique solution to a catastrophic loss of
faith in the inherited mythos of American agriculture, and a
dissillusionment with the idea of scientific progress
itself. The rhetoric of "science in farming" was coupled to
the belief that agricultural research (basic and applied)
was a national priority, an idea that had been honed from
the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.
Agricultural chemistry came under attack after World
War II, in part from the development of the modern
environmental movement and the ecological mentality, both
scientific and popular. At the same time overproduction in
v
the U.S. led many to question the role of productivity
research. From one perspective this can be seen as a crisis
in which failure of old science and technologies led to
demands for a new paradigm.
By the early 1970s, the solution to these problems
"emerged" in what many saw as a growing biotechnology
revolution and was pursued vigorously at many universities.
By the early 1980s, it became a key issue in the National
Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.
Having embraced the promises of tissue culture, scientists
and administrators found it easy to recognize the promise of
molecular genetics. They charted a new course for land grant
research. Plant genetic engineering was, in fact, ancillary
to the shift in technological direction. Prior technologies
and a firm belief in the new agricultural chemistry--that of
DNA and the unity of life under the macromolecular rubric
and the evolutionary synthesis--had already transformed the
rhetoric and reality of research. The old paradigm was re-
invigorated. The threatening new paradigm ("holistic"
farming and an abandonment of USDA's production mentality)
was defeated or absorbed.
vi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Biotechnology, Agriculture and Revolutions
The Emergence of Emerging
Historians have recognized the mythic power of America
as the New Eden. From the beginning of colonization, America
—
has been the fabled land of plenty food and fiber in
abundance, the lure to a Europe on the continual edge of
want.1 Politically, from Washington and Jefferson to the
Populists, from the Homestead Act to modern calls for the
preservation of the family farm, the agrarian component of
this idyllic mythos has been a key facet in the ideology of
American republicanism. The United States envisions itself
as a nation of yeoman farmers, feeding their families and
feeding the world.2
1 R. D. Hurt in his American Agriculture: A Brief
History (Ames: Iowa University Press, 1994) states: "In the
Acmoelroincieasn f.ar.me.rsrelfarteievdeolmytocheparpoduacned efoarsythaecmcesseslvetso alnadndthgeave
marketplace and leave subsistence farming behind within a
relatively short time after settlement." (p. 69). This
freedom and cheap land was such that "Many colonial farmers
agreed that America was the "best poor man's country in the
world."" (p. 37).
2 Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and
the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1964) comments on an aspect of this, what he calls.
1
2
America has also been the quintessential home of the
Enlightenment ideal of progress. From the first, that
progress has been enshrined in rational, scientific thought
and the technology it created. The necessity of that
progress has been a cultural given since America was born of
a Europe that had embraced progress nearly unequivocally.3
Wedded to the American mythos of renewal, abundance and
rebirth in the land and frontier, it has provided a vision
of the primary methodology by which to achieve the promised
agricultural Eden.4
"sentimentality" towards the rural life in America: "We see
it in our politics... in the power of the farm bloc in
Congress, in the special economic favor shown to "farming"
through government subsidies, and in state electoral systems
that allow the rural population to retain a share of
political power grossly out of proportion to its size."
(p.5). Although Marx was writing in 1964, I would argue that
little has changed, consider the issue of tobacco subsidies
in today's politics.
3 Clive Ponting on p.150 of A Green History of the
World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992) states that: "The
eighteenth century was marked by a wave of optimism about
the future and the inevitability of progress in every
field." He quotes the English writer William Godwin who
stated in 1793 that: "Three fourths of the habitable globe
are now uncultivated. The improvements to be made in
cultivation, and the augmentations the earth is capable of
receiving in the article of productiveness cannot, as yet,
be reduced to any limits of calculation." America was a
significant portion of that three fourths and represented
much of that potential.
4 It is telling that in 1863, in his first report,
Isaac Newton, Commissioner of Agriculture of the newly
established United States Department of Agriculture, not
only extols agriculture as the source of civilized morals
and society but blames the fall of Rome on her repudiation
of agrarian values. Newton then delineates the line of
3
Progress gained an inevitability of direction, a
Lamarckian "power of life" striving toward an ultimate
perfection that could be aided (by the wise) or resisted (by
the foolish).5 New possibilities "emerged" from this forward
modern agricultural progress, pointing out Great Britain’s
debt "in a large measure to Lord Bacon for her early
attention to progressive agriculture. That great thinker
gave to the world inductive philosophy, which teaches man to
experiment, to question and test nature by her great
alphabet of soils, gases, elements and phenomena - a
philosophy which is at once positive, progressive and
eternal, making man the "minister and interpreter of
nature."" Newton points out that in the United States "great
and manifold progress has been made in agriculture." (p. 9).
"It is common to see the best plough, rollers, cultivators,
reapers, threshers, fanners, hay and cotton presses, sugar
mills, horse and steam powers, and a thousand other labor-
saving machines, the results of skill and science. This
imperfect sketch of agricultural improvement in England and
the United States is given in order to show that progress
[italicized in the original] has not been the result of mere
routine farming, but of practical applied science
[italicized in the original] - of classified knowledge." (p.
10).
5 Richard Burkhardt in The Spirit of the System:
Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1977), points o,ut that not only was
Lamarck's idea of evolution a theory very much belonging to
the eighteenth century, but that his "model of organic
change took into account both the "natural" progress of
organic development and the modification of this progress by
constraining circumstances (p.145)." It involved a natural
form of progress. "Lamarck identified the primary factor of
organic change to be a natural tendency toward increased
complexity, which he attributed to "the power of life"
(p.151)." Such a belief appears to underlie the belief in
the evolution of technological progress and the concept of
emergence. It may help to explain why the attempt to remove
constraining circumstances in the forward development of
technology seems to be such a primary goal for many of
technology's most ardent defenders. As will be demonstrated,
the agricultural biotechnologists saw the technology as
emergent, progressive and capable of being assisted or
thwarted, but not subject to any form of social construction
in its creation and forward movement. The politically useful
4
movement, possibilities seen as somehow beyond the control
or predictability of mortal men, who were at best expected
to embrace and use the new potentials to which technology
gave birth. The embrace of science was the means to that
great end.
An equally American idea has been that of taming the
frontier, subduing Nature, "civilizing" the land. God
himself in Biblical genesis set forth this proscription of
dominion and control as man's role in the old Eden -- how
much more necessary in the new promised land?6 Although this
image of conquest was primarily seen as a paean to the
courage of the American male (the New Adam), the role of
agriculture and technology in his success was recognized.
Technological marvels emerging from the march of progress
were tools to be used for dominion over the Earth to the
benefit of humanity.7
to their goals, it seemed part of their tacit ideology as
well, framing their abilities to think about technology as
much as it directed their political aims.
6 In Nature and the American (Berkeley: University of
ACmaelriifcoarnnsiaePxraelstse,d t1h9e57)p,ionppee.rs1-1a3n,d HtahnesirHuctohnqudeesttailosf hnaotwure.
7 In his first report, Isaac Newton refers to the
American farmer as one who "... has no master -- no favors
to beg of man. He has a sturdy independence of character,
adorned perhaps, by culture and refinement. He belongs to a
class of citizens who hold in their hands five-sixths of the
wealth of the country and its entire political power; and
the hands which have wrought this wealth are able to defend
the Constitution which makes us one people." (p. 14). But
also, the farmer requires more to be perfected: "In order to
