Who was the agricultural experimenter who produced a thornless cactus and a new variety of potato?

IRA FLATOW, host:

Up next, the most famous person you may not have heard of, and if you've ever eaten a tater tot, then you have sampled one of the inventions of Luther Burbank.

Actually, even if you've never had a tater tot, you've probably had an experience with a Burbank creation. Luther Burbank, or the plant wizard as he was called, he created more than 800 species of plants. He created them -fruits, vegetables, plums, peaches, even a spineless cactus for cattle to eat, to the grocery favorite that we all know, the Russet potato. That was Luther Burbank's creation.

In fact, his life spanned a time when many working scientists were really inventors, and he was a friend with Edison and Ford. He didn't invent those electronic gizmos. He didn't invent the cars. He created, he invented. He was a botanist. He invented plants. He invented plants.

You know, he was the Edison of plants and a bona-fide celebrity in his time. Joining me now to talk more about Burbank's life is my next guest. Jane S. Smith is author of "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants." She's written a number of books on the topics she's taught at Northwestern University. She joins us from WBEZ in Chicago. Welcome to the program.

Ms. JANE S. SMITH (Author, "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants"): Thank you.

FLATOW: And in a couple minutes before the break, Jane, people don't think of inventors, plant inventors, right? They think of Edison and Ford but not of the plant inventor.

Ms. SMITH: Well that's absolutely true, and I hope it's something that we're going to remedy here this afternoon. One of the first things that captured my interest when I started thinking about Burbank was, in fact, a photograph of him receiving Edison and Ford at his home in Santa Rosa, California, where they had come to visit his experimental gardens and meet him because they considered him their equal.

FLATOW: How did you get interested in him?

Ms. SMITH: Well as I said, I saw this photograph and said who is this person in the middle?

FLATOW: But that was it? That was just enough? I mean, the photograph was enough, and then you started doing research?

Ms. SMITH: Oh no, of course not. There was more to it than that, but I think one of the things that made me feel that he was a person we really needed to bring back into the limelight was the fact that there's so little awareness of all the kinds of inventions that were going on in agriculture and horticulture, not just in Burbank's lifetime but throughout human history, really.

We talk now - we have culture wars about what kinds of things we should plant, what kinds of food we should eat, where it should come from, and I think these are certainly legitimate topics, but there seems to be an impression sometimes that there was absolutely nothing happening between Mother Nature and Monsanto, and in fact there was a lot going on.

FLATOW: And in fact, those kids growing up today think that the aisles were always full of these fruits and vegetables. So we're going to talk about that and about the revolution in grocery products, fruits and vegetables that you get at the supermarket because of Luther Burbank.

Our number, 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us @scifri. We'll be talking with Jane Smith, author of "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants." All the varieties - I mentioned species - I meant to say varieties before, that he invented. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break.

(Soundbite of music)

FLATOW: You're listening to Science Friday from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow, talking with Jane S. Smith, author of "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants."

And I'm always fascinated with that period of history, right before and during the turn of the century, from the 1800s to 1900s, where there were so many inventors around, including Luther Burbank.

But you've heard of the Fords. You've heard of the Edisons. You've never heard of Luther Burbank. People think the city of Burbank is named after him, don't they, Jane?

Ms. SMITH: They do, and they're wrong.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. SMITH: That's the one place that isn't named after him, though I do have to point out that Burbank, California, which is named for a real estate developer, completely unrelated as far as I know, but even Burbank, California, has a Luther Burbank Middle School. And the number of schools and garden clubs and nature societies named after Burbank is really enormous because he was such a popular figure and considered such an example to children. That's why all the schools are named after him.

FLATOW: Why was he such an example to kids?

Ms. SMITH: He embodied just about every quality that people were looking for. He was inventive. He was generous. He was making new products that were going to help mankind. He also had a lot to say about child-rearing, which was very interesting.

He believed that children should go out and study nature and learn from the world around him. He had a lot to say about the importance of wholesome food and going out and gardening and schoolyard gardens, the kinds of issues that are really coming very much back into the news, And he made everybody feel that there were wonderful garden products that they could discover, they could cultivate, they could use. And that in the years before there were giant, industrial farms, he put a human face on the garden for a lot of people.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. So he was out front. He was a visible - was he an inventor or a scientist?

Ms. SMITH: Well, I don't think we should make that kind of distinction. I don't think he made that kind of distinction. He was a scientific inventor. One of the many fascinating things about his career is that he was inspired to become a plant inventor by reading Charles Darwin. And a lot of people were reading Darwin in the second half of the 19th century, but they were usually looking at Darwin as somebody who was explaining the past.

Burbank read Darwin and said wait a second. I can go out and influence the future, and one of the ways he described himself was he said he was a plant evolutor.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. SMITH: He thought that his job was to accelerate evolution.

FLATOW: Well let's talk about that. Let's talk about the time that Burbank is living in New England, and he has a real stroke of luck. He's growing potatoes, and he notices a seed pod. Tell us what happened.

Ms. SMITH: Well, it was a stroke of luck, but it was a perfect illustration of the saying that chance favors the prepared mind because potatoes, as most people may know, are reproduced asexually. You take a piece of a potato, and you plant it in the ground, and it grows new potatoes from it.

Stems come out of the eyes of the potatoes. This is a grossly oversimplified account, but…

(Soundbite of laughter)

FLATOW: It works for now.

Ms. SMITH: It works, it works. Burbank noticed a seed pod growing on one of the potato vines in his field. The potatoes, of course, were underground, but the vines were above. And the potato is botanically related to the tomato, and the seed pod looks like a tiny little cherry tomato. And most people would not want to have anything to do with this because you want a potato that's just like the one you planted, a potato that's good.

But Burbank had read Darwin, and Darwin said that every single plant contained the possibility of myriad variations, and Burbank said let me see what happens if I plant these seeds, which is a really startling kind of experiment. Nobody was doing this kind of thing, including Darwin.

But Burbank was out there planting the seeds of the potato, and he discovered from these 23 seeds that he managed to preserve from this tiny little seed ball that he got basically 23 different kinds of potatoes, and only two of them were of any possible kind of interest. And one of those two, he saved the seeds again and planted them the next - saved the potatoes again and planted them the next year, and one of them not only bore these great, big, beautiful potatoes but bore a lot of them.

And so in a move that was completely characteristic of the rest of his career and drove many research scientists out of their minds, he discarded all the failure, kept the success and went from there. And that is the Burbank potato.

FLATOW: That's the Russet potato?

Ms. SMITH: Well, originally it wasn't Russet. It had a smooth, white skin and was in widespread cultivation throughout New England and then in California. And shortly after the beginning of the 20th century, a potato grower in Colorado named Lou Sweet discovered this spontaneous mutation in his field with a russet skin, and he wisely decided it wouldn't be a good idea to call it the sweet potato, so he called it the Russet Burbank.

FLATOW: Wow. He didn't just focus on edible plants, though, did he?

Ms. SMITH: No, not at all, and he didn't focus just on vegetables. He focused a lot on fruits. He was very interested in berries. He was very interested in orchard fruit, and he was also quite interested in nuts: walnuts, almonds, various crops like that.

But he was also a innovator in the garden, in the ornamental garden, that is. He worked with roses. He worked with various kinds of lilies and gladioli, and he had a long experiment turning the California poppy, which is a orange, bright orange wildflower, turning the California poppy red to have a variation.

FLATOW: That's very interesting.

Ms. SMITH: And one of his most famous creations is the Shasta daisy. Many people think it was a…

FLATOW: Is that right? I didn't know that he did the Shasta daisy.

Ms. SMITH: He did the Shasta daisy, yes, and he named it after Mount Shasta, and he spent decades working on it. It's a hybrid of four different varieties…

FLATOW: Wow.

Ms. SMITH: …because he wanted a long-stemmed, white-petaled daisy with a great, big flower.

FLATOW: Let's see if we can go to the phones. Let's go to Melanie Burbank(ph) in South Carolina. Melanie, are you related?

Ms. MELANIE BURBANK (Caller): I am. I'm so thrilled to hear this, I could just jump up in the air.

FLATOW: How are you related?

Ms. BURBANK: My grandfather was a contemporary of his. He was lateral to my grandfather, but Luther Burbank never had any children. So my mother named our dog after him. So he at least had an offspring in there somewhere, but I even have in my hand some Burbank, red, slicing tomato seeds from the Seeds Of Change, organically grown seed company.

But I have the postage stamp And this is just thrilling to talk to someone who studied my - like I said, it's a lateral from my grandfather, but I'm just thrilled to hear about it. I am a Burbank. Our family were all New Englanders but migrated to South Carolina. So here I am.

FLATOW: Well Jane, there you go.

Ms. BURBANK: And I actually went to school because of him. I was trying to get a little mileage out of my last name. I got a degree in environmental horticulture…

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. BURBANK: …but I'm not anywhere near his - I'm actually not even in that field now but would love to be and wish I'd met him. But thank you so much for this program, and this is great, great news.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Thanks for calling, Melanie.

Ms. BURBANK: All right, thank you.

FLATOW: Bye-bye. 1-800-989-8255. Much of - I think people don't realize that much of what we eat today or grow today is not grown from seeds but from grafted plants, you know, like apples and other kinds of fruits. How involved was Luther Burbank with that technology?

Ms. SMITH: Very, very. After he developed the Burbank potato, he sold the rights to market it to a New England seed-seller and used the money to move out to California. And when he got there, there was very little commercial agriculture in California.

What there was was mostly grain, wheat growing. And he was arriving in Northern California just as the fruit business was beginning to enter the area, and people wanted to plant fruit trees. They wanted to plant plum trees in particular.

And Burbank developed ways of using grafting to accelerate the growth of plum trees so you can have a kind of instant orchard and not miss what I think you could really accurately call the second gold rush, which was the rush for California fruits and flowers that people were going into.

He used grafting both to develop new orchards for people, making fruit-bearing trees much faster than anybody else had been able to, and also in his own experiments to create new kinds of fruit. Because he realized that if he grafted his various experimental blossoms onto a mother tree he could evaluate them much more quickly. So he would have a tree that had 20, 50, even two or 300 different kinds of fruit growing on it at one time. Quite spectacular.

FLATOW: It is spectacular. Would you say he was the most influential scientist - fruit, vegetable, plant scientist in the country, in the history of our country?

Ms. SMITH: I don't know if he was the most influential, because…

FLATOW: I mean influencing the direction that food production went, from farms…

Ms. SMITH: I think he was certainly the most famous.

FLATOW: Yeah.

Ms. SMITH: I think he was most influential in spreading what was really the pretty radical idea that you could improve the food stock, you could improve plants, you could invent new plants. This was an idea that became very, very widely accepted. And it was pretty new. There was a long tradition, of course, of finding new kinds of agricultural products by basically going around and stealing them or borrowing them from other parts of the world, importing them in pretty aggressive ways. But Burbank was saying, once they get here, let's see what we can do to make them even better.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm.

Ms. SMITH: Let's see how we can change them.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. 1-800-989-8255. Katie in Rocksburg, Virginia. Hi, Katie.

KATIE (Caller): Hi. To what extent did Burbank actually undertake plant breeding versus, you know, making selections from natural mutations or perhaps hybridizing some interesting types but just selecting the progeny and not undertaking a, you know, deliberate breeding program?

FLATOW: Good question.

Ms. SMITH: Well, that's a really interesting question. And I think that, again, like the distinction between inventor and scientist, it's a kind of separation that Burbank himself didn't really see and didn't act on.

He was doing it all. He was hybridizing, he was cross-breeding, and then he was selecting from the products. And he was using grafting to accelerate the process of selection. So he was doing - those were his three main tools - using hybridization, grafting and selection to create products.

But the other thing that he did that was so inventive was that he was doing it on a massive scale. Long before Henry Ford was doing his assembly lines, Burbank had massive numbers of experimental plants in his fields. And his fields weren't very big, so this is very closely packed. But he was surveying them all and hybridizing, breeding new plants and then selecting the best ones from that.

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255, talking with Jane S. Smith, author of "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants."

I'm Ira Flatow on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.

1-800 - I gave out the number. Did he get rich? I mean, you know, today, when any new species or whatever, genetic engineering, first thing we do is we start a venture capital company or get one and have them invest and the inventors, the breeders, the genetic engineering people get very rich. Did he do that, get very rich?

Ms. SMITH: Very rich, no.

FLATOW: No.

Ms. SMITH: No, he didn't. And there's a number of interesting reasons for that. You mentioned venture capitalists, and I think that in the 19th century the venture capitalists of the garden world were the seed sellers.

FLATOW: Ah.

Ms. SMITH: And what Burbank did, what a lot of inventors do today, is he would develop a prototype and then he would sell the rights to somebody who is better able to market it.

And so he became involved with some very well-known names like Burpee, for example, who would buy the rights to his products, including very often the naming rights to his products, and then would reproduce them in their own factory fields, let's call it, and put them on the market through their catalogues.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And…

Ms. SMITH: So…

FLATOW: Yeah.

Ms. SMITH: That's what he was doing. He didn't have licenses even…

FLATOW: Yeah.

Ms. SMITH: …so he was just selling the rights. And part of the reason he became so enormously famous was not only that he was a wonderfully idiosyncratic and attractive character, which he certainly was, but also because the people who were selling these products pretty quickly realized that they could get a premium for anything that came from Luther Burbank's garden, so they were very interested in promoting his fame.

Ms. SMITH: But another thing that was going on then is that there were no patents for plants.

FLATOW: (Unintelligible) sure.

Ms. SMITH: There weren't, but - and there weren't until after Burbank's death. But one of the many fascinating episodes of his career, which extended after his death, is that after he had been dead for five years there was a movement in Congress to pass what became the Plant Patent Act of 1930.

And one of the big arguments in the congressional debate was that we'll never have another Luther Burbank if we don't allow plants to be treated as intellectual property.

So his spirit and his celebrity and his position as a person who is really creating new plants for the benefit of mankind influenced that debate. And of course what happened after that is a whole other story.

FLATOW: Yeah. And that was the whole era at the time. There were these very influential inventors of which he was one. And we haven't…

Ms. SMITH: Absolutely.

FLATOW: …we haven't had that - you know, maybe Steve Jobs, Wozniak, you know, Bill Gates, people like that today, but back then they were national celebrities.

Ms. SMITH: They were. They were. And I think that's - two things that make Burbank so relevant to what's going on today is, one, first of all, the way that people are becoming much more interested in the garden and in what can grow in their home, in their local farms, in their community farms, different kinds of crops and how they're suited to the local agriculture, which is really what Burbank was doing, because he was working in an era before there was all this long distance shipping and airfreight going on. So he wanted to have products that could grow in the local environment.

But also this whole spirit of ingenuity and invention, I think we want to get back to some of those heroics.

FLATOW: All right. We have to take a short break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more with Jane Smith, who's author of "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants."

So stay with us. Got a couple of more minutes to go with Jane, and we're going to switch gears and then talk about a new play that's here in New York called "End Days."

We'll be right back after this break.

(Soundbite of music)

You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.

I'm Ira Flatow talking with Jane Smith, author of "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants."

Just one more point to talk about. Burbank names his catalogue "New Creations," and he gets into a little hot water for that. Tell us why that was.

Ms. SMITH: Well, he named the catalogue "New Creations." And throughout his 1893 catalogue, which was really the beginning of his huge fame as a plant breeder, he does speak of himself as though he is improving on the first creation.

He uses a lot of biblical language, and he says never since the dawn of time has there been anything so amazing as my giant walnut, my white blackberry. A lot of his creations involve taking an object of nature and making it seem as though it was doing something that was completely antithetical to its nature. For example, the stoneless plum. A plum is a stone fruit, as they say (unintelligible)…

FLATOW: Right.

Ms. SMITH: …no stone - this is - this is against its nature. Some people objected to that, but there wasn't a huge backlash. It was considered part of the sort of rhetoric of selling things which was going on there.

But then much later in his life, around 1925, he became involved, first of all, most bizarrely in the Scopes trial, the monkey trial in Tennessee - he wasn't personally involved, but I think it speaks to his very mixed position in the world of science that both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan appeal to Burbank to appear as an expert witness on both sides of the trial.

They both felt that he would support their position. And then very late in his life, he gave an interview where he said, I am an infidel, and in the same way that Jesus Christ was an infidel upsetting the established opinions, so too I am trying to upset the established opinions.

FLATOW: He did.

Ms. SMITH: It was an extremely poor turn of phrase.

(Soundbite of laughter)

FLATOW: Jane Smith, thank you very much for taking time to be with us and good luck with your new book.

Ms. SMITH: Thank you so much.

FLATOW: Jane Smith, "The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants."

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