By Inderjit Gill
Luther Burbank was never satisfied with the berries, fruits and flowers growing around him. “What can they become?” “How can I improve them?” He would ask. His relentless passion for improving the plants set him on a life-long campaign of “training plants to work for man” and made him a legend in his lifetime.
Luther Burbank was born in 1849 on a farm in Massachusetts. He received little more than a high school education but showed interest in nature and mechanics at an early age. One of his early inventions was a steam whistle made from a willow stick and an old teakettle. He was an avid reader. At the age of 19, he was profoundly impressed by Charles Darwin’s treatise The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. At 21, Burbank purchased a 17-acre plot of land near Lunenberg and began a 55-year plant-breeding career.
Burbank thought that better plants could be developed through natural selection and new varieties created through cross breeding. He carried on his plant hybridization and selection experiments on a huge scale. His first greatly successful plant was developed through natural selection. He found a potato seed ball and planted its 23 seeds in a pot. One seed produced many large firm potatoes. He replanted these and reaped the first harvest of Russet Burbank potato in 1871. After selling the rights of to the new potato variety, he moved to California and established a nursery garden, a greenhouse and experiment farms in Santa Rosa.
Conducting as many as 3,000 experiments at once, he crossbred foreign and native species of plants, cultivated the resultant seedlings, and used grafting to arrive at new and better breeds. He made his own crosses and spent minimum amount of time to assemble and preserve data. His main interest was to obtain a large number of hybrids with as much variation as possible. Of the tens of thousands of varieties he attempted to cross breed, hundreds were successful. In his working career Burbank introduced more than 800 new varieties of plants –including over 200 varieties of fruits, many vegetables, nuts and hundreds of ornamental flowers.
Burbank converted his nurseryman’s trade into a huge enterprise and popularized plant breeding by demonstrating its possibilities. Many acclaimed him a wonder-worker, but some in scientific community condemned him. Burbank rarely told about his projects until they were finished. His descriptions of his fruits and flowers were not those of a scientist, but that of a nurseryman describing a new variety for sale through the medium of catalogues or price lists. He never took the trouble to make a report on his accomplishment to a horticultural or scientific meeting or publication. Many did not look him upon as a scientist because they thought that his basic urge for experimentation was utilitarian, to produce something that was sellable rather than make contribution to knowledge.
While the debate raged, Burbank cultivated his experimental garden, confident that he was producing better plants. He realized that human ingenuity could improve nature’s productivity. Though much of the valuable data from his experiments is lost, he wrote several books. Luther Burbank, His methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Applications was published in 12 volumes in 1914-15. His tremendous success, and also his own book How Plants Are Treated to Work for Man, inspired the later Plant Patent Act (1930). This act made the new varieties of plants patentable for the first time.
Luther Burbank died in California in 1926. He received 16 plant patents posthumously. Most importantly, he set the precedent for innovation in plant breeding and made horticulture an interesting field in the eyes of the public.
This science vignette can fit into the Biology 30 curriculum, Unit 3: Cells, Chromosomes and DNA. It can also be used in any high school science class for discussion on scientific process and scientific literacy.
Bacon, Paul (1961). Luther Burbank. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Press
Dreyer Peter (1989). A Gardner touched with Genius: The life of Luther Burbank. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc. New York.
Howard, L. Walter (1945-46) Luther Burbank: A Victim of Hero Worship. Chronica Botanica, Vol 9, Number 5/6. The Chronica Botanica Co., U.S.A.
http://www.wschs-grf.pon.net/bef.htm
http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsA-H/burbank.html
http://www.hcs.ohio-state.edu/hort/history/125.html