A Short History of Plant Breeding, from the early Beginnings up to modern Biotechnology

Jean-Pierre Berlan
Translation by Bernard Declercq

The 19th Century: The Cloning of Plants

A modern “variety” (according to the dictionary, variety characterizes that which is varied, the contrary of uniformity – diversity) of wheat, soya, corn (maize), colza or tomato etc. consists of plants that are genetically identical. These plants are thus clones, the contrary of what variety stands for. From the micro-biological point of view “clone” is defined as “a population of genetically identical organisms”. The word clone makes it possible to focus on the result obtained, i.e. the homogeneity and stability of cultivated plants, regardless of the method by which these plants were obtained.*

The method which consists of replacing a variety of plants by the best clone extracted from the variety was invented in the beginning of the 19th century by British gentlemen farmers (the Ricardians). They extended the principles of the industrial revolution - the search for standardization or uniformity and stability of production- to the living world.

By keen observation these farmers found that their cereals, wheat, oats or rye breed true to type. Each plant conserves its individual traits from one generation to the next. They did not know why it is so but that did not bother them. When they found an interesting naturally isolated plant, they reproduced and multiply it. If they found that the clone was really promising, they would cultivate it then year after year.

In 1836 John Le Couteur codified this practice of his colleagues. He reasoned that since we cultivate varieties in which every plant conserves its individual traits from one generation to the next, we are going to “isolate” the plants which are most promising and grow them as individuals separately (consequently we will reproduce and multiply them individually to clone them). Then we will select the best clones that we have obtained and replace them for the variety with which we initially started. The method is thus first to extract clones from a given variety, followed by the selection of the best clones. The gain that can be expected from this method depends thus on the importance of the inter-clonal variations which are available to the breeder. If these variations are important then the gain will be important. If the variations are small the gain will be small too.

Le Couteur, precise and scientific in his work, was very conscientious in naming his invention. He was speaking of replacing a variety with a “pure sort”. He further stated it clearly that a “pure sort” was obtained from a single grain or ear. His successors, the professional scientists, did not show the same discernment. There must have been a reason for that.

How does one explain plant breeders’ and geneticists’ devotion for this sort of malfunctioning and primitive steam engine?

Logically speaking, the proposition to improve and replace a variety by the best plants of that variety is undisputable. It is a tautology as one obtains always a better result by replacing a variety of objects by the best among them. This holds whatever be the nature of the objects. In the case here of living organisms the improvement is particularly independent from their way of reproduction. This last point although evident, is very difficult for specialists to come by, because it challenges- as we will see later- their schooling of almost a century in agricultural genetics and practice of selection.

In any case from the bio-logical point of view things are very different. The realization that biodiversity has an essential role to play is the most interesting development in agronomy and especially in biology in the last 25 years. The Rio conference is an ample proof of this. It is noteworthy that the rural civilizations, out of which we have grown, were well aware that biodiversity protected them against all odds. Note also that these civilizations created all this enormous biodiversity which we are now squandering. The modern agricultural arsenal of machinery, chemicals, sprays and irrigation, in one word the cheap energy of the industrial petro-culture made us forget that agronomic research was meant to do agronomy. That means getting things done free of cost by nature what we are now doing with the big stick of ecologically, humanly, economically and socially devastating and ever obsolete industrial means.

A second explanation is linked to the nature of the living itself. A heterogeneous, unstable variety cannot form the base for acquiring proprietary rights. On the contrary a clone, homogeneous and stable which can be reproduced from generation to generation (which from the biological point of view could be called a sort of living-dead or wraith) can very well be appropriated. Each of these wraiths can be described in such minute detail as to be clearly distinguished from its neighbour.

In France around 1920, Distinction, Homogeneity and Stability (DHS) constituted the criteria for the first system for the protection of breeders’ rights. In 1961 this French system was adopted by the European Union in connection with the UPOV treaty. Ironically, the negotiators at the UPOV treaty failed to define “a variety”, the object which in fact they sought to protect ! Easy to understand, DHS defines a clone, the contrary of a variety.

Note that this system of protection safeguards the plant breeder against "piracy" of his work by his rivals. It reserves the right of the breeder and his associates to sell seeds of their clone protected by DHS. There is no question of genetics yet and the farmer is free to keep seed grains from his own harvest. For the traditional seed breeders -excellent agronomists, in love with their plants- that is fine and well. For the agrotoxic transnationals who took over the seed business, that system is no more sufficient.

In short, since two centuries selection strives to replace instable heterogeneous varieties which can not be appropriated by proprietary clones. Dolly is nothing but the extension of this technique applied to mammals, which makes the immediate and irreversible destruction of biodiversity implied by this double secular devotion to cloning, evident. It is dreadful and revealing that INRA ( The National Institute of Agricultural Research of France) chooses to illustrate a page in Le Monde (a leading French newspaper; 12/11/03) dedicated to “Agronomic Research and its Future” by a herd of cloned cows…

Industrialization and privatization of the living evidently go hand in hand.

* Whether by vegetative propagation, tissue culture or by selection, if plants are genetically identical they are clones.

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The 20th Century: Hybridization or The Captive Clones

In the course of the 20thcentury seed selection was dominated by the phenomenon of hybridization, the so-called “hybrid varieties” or the manufacturing of heterozygotic clones. Just go through a seed catalogue or cast a glance at the shelves of a seed store and you will find that almost all “varieties” available are “hybrids”. The interesting point for the seed breeders is that these clones do not conserve their characteristic traits from one generation to the next. In other words when grown in the fields, these clones loose their characteristic traits which prompted the farmer to buy them in the first place. In this way the seed breeder achieves his goal which is to separate production from reproduction. Production can remain in the hands of the farmers but reproduction becomes his monopoly. The farmer is thus obliged to purchase each year the seeds of his heterozygotic clones. Say “Hybrid variety” and you say Terminator, only Terminator mystified in terms of improvement.

Terminator is a transgenic technique patented by US State sponsored research in "collaboration" with a private company, to produce plants whose offspring is sterile. It is the greatest technical victory in applied biology for 150 years, the time when the first professional seed breeders appeared. But it is equally a political failure because by revealing its final objective, namely the sterilization of living things to create a new source of profit imposed by Commercial Interests, Terminator has hastened the collapse of the so-called "life-sciences".

The separation of production and reproduction is based on Mendel’s law of segregation which was "rediscovered" around 1900. This law says that when a heterozygotic organism -having received different genes or alleles from its parents- is self-fertilized, the next generation will loose half of its heterozygosis. A heterozygotic clone auto-destructs when grown in the farmers’ fields, because -the clones being genetically identical- a sort of self fertilization takes place. To say it in computer language, the "genetic software" (the capacity to reproduce in a given environment) is destroyed by its first use, thus obliging the customer to buy the software again.

In 1908 Georges Shull, an American biologist, (the word geneticist came in vogue a little later) proposes to apply Le Couteur’s method of cloning to corn (for the remaining of the text the word maize is used instead of corn). In his first seminal paper, presented to the American Breeders Association, he presents this crucial aspect of his invention only discretely. Discretely because he cannot claim too vocally that the objective of the breeder is in some way to render his invention sterile.

The vocabulary used still plays an essential role in the mystification of the reality here. The technique of cloning proposed by Shull consists of replacing a free variety (open pollinated) which the farmer can freely replant, by proprietary or captive clones. I have been able to show the contortion that led to the adoption of the false expression “hybrid variety” to indicate captive clones. A secret agreement of 1910 (revealed in 1942) between Shull and East, American geneticists, both specialized in maize, to impose this revolutionary technique in spite of personal controversies about priority( who was first) illustrates this point very well (1).

These influential scientists, professors at the prestigious universities of Harvard and Yale succeeded in imposing their theory on the American scene (2). They also started a periodical “Genetics”, of which one is the editor for the first 10 years.

“Hybrid varieties”? These are not varieties but clones ! Whether these clones are hybrid is not pertinent because the method applies as we have seen, whatever the plant’s way of reproduction. These clones extracted from a variety are by no stretch of imagination more or less hybrid than whatever other maize plant taken from this variety.

What manipulation of language covers this manipulation of reality ?

Ever since G. Shull proposed in 1914 his concept of heterosis ( hypothesis of a favourable effect per se of a cross -for whatever reason-) the word “hybrid” has led the geneticists to believe and to make plant breeders believe and everyone else as well, that it is a matter of utilizing unexplained and unexplainable virtues of the hybrid vigour or heterosis in maize, for its improvement while in fact this clonal hybridization in some sense sterilizes it. This whole issue is an eye sore for the specialists. That was especially the case during the last grand International Symposium dedicated to “Heterosis in Crops” of 1997 organised by CIMMYT, (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo) the International Centre for Improvement of Maize and Wheat in Mexico. The semantic inversion of the reality acquires here a kind of Orwellian perfection.

For Shull and East it was a matter of substituting the real issue of the interclonal variations at the disposal of plant breeders and thus of the possible improvement by cloning, a scientific question that can be answered, for an esoteric question. To that question no answer was available in those days and strangely enough, as we have seen, this question remains unanswerable. It is understandable, these interclonal variations are limited and the gains one can obtain by cloning maize are thus also limited. In other words, the method of Shull and East is a method of expropriation. It is the first Terminator, but carefully mystified by genetics. It is of course better to go on talking big about the supposed virtues of heterosis and the origin of hybrid vigour in maize than about the reality of cloning maize, ‘mistake’ so-called improvement for expropriation.

In 1922 in the name of this mysterious heterosis, the Wallaces* imposed cloning upon the unwilling American seed breeders. These practical minded technicians had the good sense of not letting themselves be deluded by the scientific esoterism of heterosis. Some of them had in all good faith tried out the "hybrid" method of Shull and East, of course without success. Why destroy the maize plant by successive generations of inbreeding in the hope that an improvement will emerge out of weakened plants? Was that not contrary to the two fundamental principles of selection “ breed from the best” and “Like engenders like”?

Briefly, in 1922, in a "Lyssenkist-like" coup the Wallaces succeed in eliminating the breeders who refused the revelation of heterosis and in recruiting a new corps of breeders to implement a massive coordinated programme for the cloning of maize. It is a major innovation in a greatly decentralized system of agricultural research. All breeders in the department of Agriculture (in 1936 a 100 head strong workforce) were directly or indirectly students of East. They received their formation or rather they were formatted by East into the mysteries of heterosis.
Let it be said that these state employed clone-breeders did not have much of a choice. The political task assigned to them is to make the hybrids triumph, not to discuss their fundamental genetics or epistemology. All critical scientific reaction and opposition to Henry Cantwell Wallace at the summit of his power would have been suicidal.

The mystification around hybrids became impenetrable when after 15 years of painstaking work the State clone breeders succeeded- thanks to an obstinate and stubborn work of selection- to extract superior clones from the varieties cultivated by the farmers, varieties which since 1910 were genetically left unchanged as such. The millions of tons of additional maize are due, so one believes, to heterosis. The only thing left to be done is to generalize the technique of cloning for all plants and animals alike.

The gains that one can hope to obtain from cloning maize are limited, as I have said, though the costs of it are astronomical. Nevertheless the yields of maize have quadrupled since the war of 1940 and these increments coincide with the introduction of “hybrid varieties”. This increase is thus due to the hybridization of maize.

This pre-Galilean way of thinking still prevails. As if our sense observation of the rotation of the sun around the earth, would prove that it is actually like that. But the reality is different. The departmental seed breeders have improved maize through selection and have chosen from these improvements, clones which are thus improvements themselves. These are then sold by the private sector at sky-high prices.

By 2000, Pioneer, started by the Wallaces with a capital of 7600 dollars has been sold to Dupont, producers of agrotoxic chemicals, for 10 billion dollars. Each dollar invested in 1926 has multiplied itself a 1500000 times. Nobody will deny that the capital invested reproduces and multiplies liberally on the account of the seed companies, subject of course to the fact that the plants cannot reproduce and multiply in the farmers’ fields.

In the 20th century the heterozygotic clones (the "hybrid varieties") became of course the ultimate in selection whether the species are allogamous (with cross fertilization as in the case of animals) or autogamous ( self-fertilised), though with autogamous plant only a very partial success is obtained. Wheat proves to be resistant to "hybridisation" in spite of 60 years of work. In 1986 a researcher connected to INRA announced in “La Recherche” (Research) that “hybrid wheat is going to be released from the laboratory”.

The Minister of Agriculture financed then a major work programme to assist this difficult delivery. "Hybrid" wheat still remains in the lab. Happily, for the simple reason which is linked to the way this species multiplies, in other words, the relation between the quantity of seeds used for sowing and the yield obtained (3). As far as ”Hybrid” colza, (announced by beat of drum by INRA for its 50th anniversary) is concerned, it is a failure. But the monomania of heterosis made geneticists and seed breeders blind to that determining aspect necessary to meet with success in their expropriation affair.

There is another side to the success story of “hybrid varieties”. To succeed in "hybridization"- i.e. expropriation which can only bring improvement by tortuous ways- the other methods of improvement must be eliminated. We have just seen how the Wallaces have in the name of heterosis eliminated the improvement of free open pollinated varieties to the advantage of the captive clones and how huge State investments in their favour have assured their final triumph. The State allowed the self-realisation of the scientific prophesy of heterosis. This dimension however completely escapes the geneticists plunged as they are in their a-historical irenic world.

But not everyone is deluded. In 1997 four South African seed breeders working on hybrid wheat let the cat out of the bag during the International Symposium held in Mexico by CIMMYT on “heterosis- meaning captive clones- in crops”.

“The possibility of producing hybrid wheat has created, like in the case of all other crops, much enthusiasm. In spite of extraordinary successes with other species, we have not been able to sell hybrid wheat for the past 30 years. This unhappy situation is due to a highly successful competitive public research programme which managed to regularly upgrade wheat by conventional breeding procedures and techniques”(4).

Really, to make captive clones one needs to turn plants that are naturally allogamous into autogamous and plants that are naturally autogamous into allogamous! This is a gigantic job needing decades of work. But to succeed in this, all other methods of improvement which freely serve the public must be eliminated. Only then can the accomplishment of the methods of expropriation at the service of private interests be assured. This then is the function of the genetic ideology of heterosis (5). It is of little importance that the scientists living in their illusions are in someway suffering from “The Bridge over the River Kwai” syndrome.

The seeds of open pollinated free wheat would cost the equivalent of 15 kg of wheat per ha. plus some costs of processing. The seeds of captive clones cost the equivalent of 15-18 quintals per ha. This is a hundred times more for something that could have been obtained much faster. If calculated for the 3.5 million ha. of wheat cultivated in France, this extra cost equals the budget of the INRA, but also represents an equal loss for our farmers. What is more, the price of captive clones in France is three times higher then in North America, even if it concerns identical clones. This suggests that the market is still very far from the ideal of the “free and fair competition”. (free and fair competition refers to the European constitution which was rejected by the French.)

The priority of public research should be to provide farmers with free varieties so that they can escape the clutches of the seed business. But the research sponsored by the State has for its objective the creation of “industrial propriety” in the frame work of a “Genoplant” born dead.
(“Genoplante” is a French state programme to push GMO’s)

In short, only dazed geneticists, prisoners of their esoterism and cut off from biology and agronomy, can believe that to improve living beings, requires preventing them from multiplying in the farmers’ fields !

*In the cabinet of Harding, Henry Wallace was minister of agriculture. In 1910, Henry Agard Wallace, his son, was in the maize seed business. He became minister of agriculture under Roosevelt during the New Deal and his vice president during the war.

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The 21st. Century: GMOs or the patented chimerical clones

The so-called GMOs are only the repetition the same mystification. These cultivated GMOs are all identical plants. They are clones. Nothing has changed for two centuries.

Nothing has also changed in the tradition of semantic mystification. Living beings are constantly being modified since in each generation they are the result of a unique mixing of genes. The expression GMO has thus no specific meaning. Its sole reason for existence is to circumvent the use of the original scientific expression “functional chimeras”. (chimera has the same meaning then as “genetic” because the prevalent scientific doctrine considers that for each gene there corresponds a function i.e. a protein). The patent on the first genetic manipulation was issued under the name of a “functional chimera”.

These functional chimeras had but little appeal. The industrialists got the scientists to sacrifice precision of wording for promotion. In 1999, based on a study costing 2 million French francs, a report of the INRA even proposed the creation of a logo bearing a positive connotation like “genetically improved”, which is a direction for future systematic exploration. Which consumer will be able to resist such GIO’s ?

Briefly, by the miraculous manipulation of vocabulary, a technical jump into the unknown is transformed into a comforting continuity: “Humanity” (i.e. in reality the agrotoxic companies and their bio-technicians) continues to do, by more precise and reliable methods, what she has done since the beginning of domestication.

“This jump into the unknown” needs a little explanation.

In 1958, Francis Crick, the co- discoverer of the double structure of the DNA helix, formulated “the sequential hypothesis” ( a protein corresponds to one gene ), and the central dogma of molecular biology (the transfer of genetic information is carried uniquely from DNA to protein). “All transfer of protein versus DNA or protein versus protein will, as he writes in 1970, shake the foundations of molecular biology”. These are mind blowing simplifications to clarify the genetic code, which the cream of the intelligentsia, from mathematicians, to biologists including military specialists of cryptography had failed to unravel !

During the sixties the decoding was done. It was a roaring success. DNA became the “molecule of life”, the code of codes. Certain biologists, a little carried away by their enthusiasm, were even declaring that “show me your genes and I will tell you who you are”. The industrialists were by no means less enthusiastic; the Living is a meccano. It is sufficient to transfer one gene and one can produce the most complicated molecules or even cure the severest illness.

Briefly, it is the triumph of mechanical reductionism of the Cartesian animal machine. Crick’s hypothesis becomes the reality of the living world. It is the same phenomenon as in the case of Shull’s heterosis. When the “hybrid varieties” of maize triumphed, an ad hoc hypothesis became the reality.

In 1999, Ralph Hardy, president of the National council of Agricultural Bio-technology and ex-director of Life sciences at DuPont explained DNA to the US senate: “DNA(the Top Management molecules) determines the formation of RNA (the Staff Member molecules) and RNA directs the formation of proteins (the worker molecules). Definitely all life is a capitalistic enterprise.

Barry Commoner says it ironically: "The Reaganian version of the central dogma is the scientific base according to which every year billions of transgenic plants are cultivated. This with the presumption that a foreign gene will exactly be replicated in each of the billion cellular divisions and that in each of these replicated cells this foreign gene will encode only one protein with the exact amino acid sequence as it encodes in its native organism. Also that in this biological saga- in spite of the presence of the foreign gene- the rest of the natural DNA of the transgenic plant will exactly be replicated without any abnormal changes".

Hypotheses can be profitable at certain times but that does not make them true. Since the beginning of the 70 ties the history of molecular biology can be seen as the synopsis of a painful rebuttal of Cricks’ hypothesis. Proofs of these transfers accumulate without provoking any upheavals yet. The DNA ideology serves the industry and their dynamic but conditioned bio-technicians very well.

It was in 2000 with the deciphering of the human genome that the shock came. The human species contains 3 to 10 times more proteins than genes. This undermines the scientific basis of biotechnology, which is nothing but a technicality that transforms the world into a laboratory.

The bio-technicians acknowledge the risks of their chimeras by belittling their dangers. It means to overlook that nobody can escape the fruits of agriculture and its chimerical foodstuffs. It also means that to expose unknowingly 6 billion people and their descendants to even minimal risks can cause a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude.

These chimerical clones are patented. The patent legalizes the separation of production, which remains in the hands of the farmers and the reproduction which remains the privilege of the agrotoxic cartels. Living beings should stop their rebellious competition to the agrotoxic seed business.

Thus in the name of liberalism the European Directive on “patenting of biotechnological inventions” puts us back to the 17th and 18th century when the Kings gave special privileges to certain merchants. But the kings would not have dared to give privileges on the reproduction of living beings.

No reasonable person would offer his near biological future in the hands of the agrotoxics even if they cover themselves under the guise of the “ industries of life sciences”

This short summary of the history of plant breeding and agricultural genetics shows that geneticists and seed breeders are prisoners of the illusion of the ‘scientific approach”. They are incapable of understanding that objectivity is the result of a process of critical reflection. They constantly fooled themselves by fooling us but without being fool enough to forget the interests that they serve.
Really, should we trust them any longer ?

The patented genetic chimeras irrevocably put the capstone on the disastrous historical movement of the industrialization and privatization of the living.

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For Free: The modern agronomy of the future.

It is a disaster; are not all ecosystems on the brink of collapse? The present day agro-alimentary system rests wholly on cheap oil. If that system had been generalized for the whole planet by 1984 our booming petro-agriculture and industrial petro-food would have exhausted all oil by 1996. That is without counting even a single drop for transport and heating (6). We need 10 fossil calories input to produce one calorie of food. This proves, if proof is still needed, that we are totally on the wrong track. But the times of cheap oil are coming to an end.

All around the globe, industrial agriculture is killing the soils and its primal soil organisms. These make up 80 % of all biomass on earth and live in just the top 30 cm of the soil. Our survival as a species depends upon the care, I would say love, that we give to this layer of living “molecules”.

The violence of the industrial agriculture is finishing off this living soil. The degradation of the earth’s soils is at present the foremost ecological problem in developed as well as in developing countries (7). About 2 billion ha. or 15 % of all emerged land area has been degraded by intensive agriculture and other human activities (8). As regards biodiversity, the cloning business puts it in a state of agony.

In quite many parts of France a kind of hydroponics or ‘soil-less’ agriculture is practiced. Soil-less, because the soil has been reduced to a mere support of inert matter from which all life has been destroyed by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and what not. Maize- industrial plant par excellence- covering more then 3 million ha. is an ecological disaster. During the drought of 2003 certain farmers used 10000 or more cubic meters of water per ha. to irrigate a maize crop which yielded something like 100 quintals, or 10000 liters of water to produce 1 kg. maize ! The shallow and deep water aquifers are poisoned, and to speak of the heritage landscapes in the country side, they have been devastated. In short, modern scientific agriculture is the very negation of agronomy.

Do we have to continue to “progress” in this way with the PCC’s, the Patented Chimerical Clones? Has the agro-industry not already sufficiently spoiled the food we eat? Don’t we have enough proofs of its cancers, obesity, asthma and other diseases of civilization that we need to add some more?

In Kenya the maize crop is attacked by an Asiatic stem borer and by Striga, a root parasite (9). These can damage even the entire crop. The International Research Center in Insect Physiology and Ecology (IRCIPE) develops a control measure called push-pull.

The measure consists of cultivating Desmodium, a leguminous plant, in combination with maize. Desmodium repels the borer and at the same time suffocates the Striga. Around the fields elephant grass (Pennisetum purpureum) a fodder grass is grown. The Asiatic borer repelled by Desmodium is now attracted to this grass but the mucilage it produces kills most of the larva of the borer when they penetrate the stem.

This wonderful scientific work done with the participation of farmers assures bountiful and stable maize crops without the need for costly insecticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Livestock population increases and their droppings contribute to the increase of soil fertility. Because of a better income from this higher production, children can be sent to school.

What a disaster. The well being of the farmers increases but the BIP and the profits decrease. The IRCIPE and its director are accused of holding back the “Hi-Tech” technologies from the African people. This campaign of denigration succeeds. Kenya has opened the doors to the PCC’s. The “hi-tech”, meaning Novartis and Monsanto’s Bt maize, their herbicides and fertilizers replaces this wise, free and sustainable agronomic method (10).

One finds only if one searches. One has to make choices if one has limited resources. The capital investment in the name of public interests and backed by the State and its researchers impose the most profitable ways at the cost of the very same public interests. They succeed because of their powerful methods which create an irreversible situation. This accomplished fact is called Progress while in fact it is a regression. That is really what is happening under our nose with these PCC’s.

To compete in the field of transgenic industrial agricultural production with the US, Argentina, Brazil or Australia as certain partisans of PCC’s would like to, will lead to perdition. It is the trap, in the name of “Progress” which means Profit, which the US puts up for the European decision makers.

To say no to PCC’s is neither obscurantism or irrationality nor a return to the past. It is not a turning of one’s back to life which some syllogism equals with risks (11). Neither is it an anti-scientific attitude but the demand to go back to the fundamental principles of Science. The PCC’s, the triumph of reductionist thinking and of “out of date science”, are obsolete.

Goethe observed that "pedantry which rigidly splits up everything and mysticism which amalgates all are both leading to the same calamities". Passing beyond this, it is possible and necessary to formulate a science with a human dimension. Agronomy which works gratuitous is such a science. That it disappeared from the scene in a society dominated entirely by profits should not astonish anybody.

Jean Pierre Berlan, (jpe.berlan@wanadoo.fr) Director of Research Agronomy at INRA France (National Institute of Agronomic Research).

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Notes.