Journal of Heredity Advance Access originally published online on February 17, 2006
Journal of Heredity 2006 97(2):95-99; doi:10.1093/jhered/esj015
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© The American Genetic Association. 2006. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Perspective |
Luther Burbank: Honorary Member of the American Breeders' Association
From the Biological Sciences Department, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA
Address correspondence to W. D. Stansfield, 653 Stanford Drive, San Luis Obispo, CA 93405-1123, or e-mail: wstansfi@calpoly.edu.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was once widely acclaimed to be America's most famous horticulturist and plant breeder. Today, however, his name may not be recognized by many in the general public. I found that he is also unknown to even some academic horticulturists whose formal coursework apparently did not include a history of their discipline. To those scientists who know something of him, he is often viewed as a tyro and/or a charlatan. Even highly respected modern plant-breeding books fail to mention his name (e.g., Allard 1960). His life's work straddled the post-Darwinian period and nearly three decades into the 20th century. During this era, Francis Galton initiated eugenics studies, August Weismann asserted that there is no connection between the germ plasm and the somatoplasm (thus rendering the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics untenable), Hugo de Vries proposed that mutations were the basis of rapid species formation, and
Burbank's Rise to Prominence
Burbank's Fall from Grace
Can Acquired Characters Be Inherited?
Epilogue