EMERGING 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