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Plant Science, Biotechnology, & Agriculture

Slideshow: George Shull and Hybrid Corn

Scientific discoveries require researchers to combine their insights. George Shull, Donald Jones and others did this with hybrid corn – and revolutionarized agriculture in the process. But who would get the credit?

Photograph of George H. Shull
George Harrison Shull (1874-1954) was born in Ohio, attended Antioch College, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1904. He worked at the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution from 1904 to 1914, when he moved to Princeton University. Shull remained at Princeton for the rest of his career. In 1948, the National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Public Welfare Medal for his work on corn. Source: University of Virginia Special Collections. Used with permission.
photograph of handwritten letter from George Shull to Ralph Singleton
The correspondence between George Shull and Ralph Singleton started in 1939 in connection with a talk that Singleton was preparing on the history of hybrid corn for an important genetics conference in Edinburgh in 1939. Shull lent Singleton letters and other materials for his research, and the two began a long and friendly professional correspondence. In this letter, dated August 23, 1940, Shull expresses his dismay that he had “come so near being forgotten in connection” with the work on hybrid corn and his gratitude that Singleton “for having taken the trouble to investigate the historical evidence for” himself. Source: University of Virginia Special Collections. Used with permission.
diagram from Shull’s 1909 paper about corn breeding
In his 1909 paper, “A pure line method in corn breeding,” which was published in the proceedings of the American Breeders’ Association, Shull described how to grow a crop of single-cross hybrid corn. For a detailed description of the method, see “A pure line method in corn breeding” in the Follow the Science section. Source: Journal of Heredity. Used with permission.
image of corn geneticist Donald F. Jones in a cornfield
This is a page from a pamphlet produced by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in June, 1956, when they celebrated the invention of double-cross hybrid corn nearly forty years before. Donald F. Jones’s two most important achievements in this field, the double-cross method and his theory of hybrid vigor, were given a prominent place in the retrospective. Source: University of Virginia Special Collections. Used with permission.
carbon of letter from Blakeslee to Shull
What else was Shull interested in as a scientist, other than hybrid corn? This 1929 letter to Shull from A. F. Blakeslee, a fellow plant scientist who had been affiliated with the Carnegie Institution at Cold Spring Harbor since 1915, indicates some of the important research topics in plant science in the 1920s. These were of significant interest to Shull and everyone else working on the science of heredity in plants. In the letter, Blakeslee describes efforts to induce chromosomal abnormalities in plants through extremes of temperature. This was only one of many ways scientists in the 1920s attempted to create abnormal chromosomes or chromosomal duplications in plants. Why did they do this? First, to understand how chromosomes worked. In addition, plants with abnormal chromosomes sometimes had unusual features that made them of interest to agriculturalists and commercial plant breeders. This science that Blakeslee discussed in his correspondence with Shull was related to efforts to induce genetic abnormalities in plants through radiation. Radiation experiments on plants began in the 1920s, when geneticist H. J. Muller discovered that bombarding plants with x-rays could induce mutations, a discovery that would earn him a Nobel Prize in 1946. Radiation work with plants was a huge scientific industry in the mid-twentieth century — to learn more about work of this kind that was done on Long Island, see the unit on the gamma field at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Source: American Philosophical Society. Used with permission.
figure showing the growth of utilization of hybrid corn in the United States
Data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows the rapid rise in the use of hybrid corn in the United States in the first ten years after hybrid seed was commercially available. This figure comes from the archives at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where researchers were interested in both genetics and its agricultural applications. Source: University of Virginia Special Collections. Used with permission.
image of newspaper article
In this column, Newsday gardening editor Bea Jones describes how basic research on Long Island — Shull’s research on hybrid corn at Cold Spring Harbor — revolutionized agriculture in the twentieth century. Source: ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Used with permission.
image of newspaper article
Newsday gardening editor Bea Jones explains to her readers how F1 hybrids are produced, including terms like “hybrid vigor.” The article connects discoveries in plant science to their applications in home gardening — Shull’s discovery found its way into the daily lives of his neighbors on Long Island. Bea Jones had a long career as a Long Island gardening columnist and editor. She grew up in Brooklyn, went to college at Columbia and worked for the Nassau Daily Review Star, then for Newsday. She was promoted to garden editor at Newsday in the 1950s, when the paper’s founder, Alicia Patterson, saw her garden in Rockville Center, Long Island. The garden is now part of the Tanglewood Preserve. Source: ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Used with permission.

Plants need nitrogen to grow, but a significant portion of the nitrogen in fertilizers is not absorbed by the soil or used by the growing plants. Rather, it washes away into waterways, rivers, and the ocean. This in turn has had devastating effects on marine life. In some areas, excessive nitrogen in the oceans has caused algae blooms that kill wildlife, make it dangerous for people to consume fish or shellfish or in some cases even swim in affected waters. This problem isn’t limited to poorer countries. Nitrogen pollution is a serious problem here on Long Island. In our case, the nitrogen comes primarily from septic tanks and cesspools, although nitrogen from agricultural fertilizers also plays a role. Nitrogen pollution in the waters around Long Island has hampered fishing, made it dangerous to eat seafood from some areas, and caused environmental changes that make coastal areas more prone to flooding.