George Shull had an insight that Donald Jones developed based on insights of his own, with assistance from the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan and others. Other scientists, such as Edward M. East, were working on very similar questions at the same time. All of this raises an important question: what is the best way to assign credit for a discovery like this, with many different researchers contributing their work? How do you make sure that everyone involved feels that they were given the appropriate credit? Decades after he had published his work on hybrid corn, Shull expressed a certain frustration and disappointment to his colleague and friend W. Ralph Singleton. “I have come so near being forgotten in connection” with the discovery of hybrid corn, he wrote on August 23, 1940. He had “never been a fighter for personal prerogatives,” but it stung that, for example, some “of our most-used modern textbooks of genetics” did not give him appropriate credit for the discovery, emphasizing instead the contributions of others, including Jones and East. East in particular was often credited, or co-credited, with the part of the discovery that Shull considered primarily his.
Giving the correct person credit for a discovery is more complicated than it might appear. For one thing, it’s not always immediately clear that a discovery will be important, or whether its importance will be practical or theoretical. In a 1914 letter to a colleague, for example, just a few years after he published his two famous papers about hybrid corn, Shull expressed uncertainty about whether his “pureline” method of corn breeding — that is, crossing two inbred stocks to create a hybrid — could realistically be applied in agriculture. As he put it, “I consider the ‘pureline’ method of theoretical rather than practical interest, but am convinced that some form of definite hybridization…will best attain the results for which the ‘pureline’ method demonstrated the scientific basis.” As it turned out, the method for crossing two inbred strains of corn that Shull outlined in “A pure-line method in corn breeding” (1909) would become the standard for sweet corn and popcorn by the middle of the century. At the time, it was hard for Shull himself to judge the future impact of his work — and it was equally difficult for others. His colleague Edward East famously doubted that there was a commercial application in sight. And East was not unreasonable to express reservations, according to Herbert Kendall Kayes, a plant geneticist and former student of East’s, since the quality of the lines of inbred corn available early in the twentieth century was very low compared to a few decades later.
It takes time for a narrative to settle into place, and sometimes the narrative of a discovery that initially emerges requires revision or correction later on. Shull’s colleague Singleton, who prepared a history of hybrid corn for an important genetics conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1939, reflected on how his research for his talk, in combination with other things he had learned over the years, had changed his view of Shull’s work. In a letter to fellow corn geneticist Paul Mangelsdorf in 1955, soon after Shull’s death, Singleton recalled that as a student in the late 1920s, he had read an account of the development of hybrid corn. “I remember when I first read of George Shull…I went in to Jones [Singleton’s academic supervisor] and said ‘Who is this imposter Shull?’ At that time…I had never even heard of George Shull — such was my ignorance. And I ‘knew’ that East was the one responsible for hybrid corn.” The need for revision of the kind that Singleton was talking about can come about for many different reasons. As far as the balance of credit between Shull and East was concerned, there were a number of causes. In one of his letters to Shull, Singleton hypothesized that people had assumed East’s contribution was more important
“largely because of East’s more prolific writings on the subject, and due to the fact that many of the men in corn breeding are more familiar with the work of East. I think all of East’s students have been somewhat partial to him, and this had tended to propagate the story [that Shull and and East had done essentially the same thing, with East’s work being more important]. In the 1912 publication of East and Hayes there is a statement that you and East began your experiments at the same time and found practically the same results. All of the writers on the subject have fallen into the error of accepting this statement at its face value and have not made a carful examination of the record…I think perhaps East’s biggest contribution was in stimulating other workers to investigate this field. There is no doubt that you had the idea of isolating the pure lines first, and proposed the method of crossing inbreds for commercial seed production.”
The misattribution of the discovery to Edward East, in other words, wasn’t the result of malice, or of East attempting to claim credit for work that he hadn’t done. Instead, it was the desire of East’s students to emphasize their advisor’s contribution, East’s name recognition among corn breeders, and the failure among later writers to question a familiar story.
In addition to this, George Shull pointed to state boosterism as a potential cause. One influential history of hybrid corn had been written with support from the Illinois State Historical Society, and the author, Shull told Singleton, had “implied that my conclusions were far-fetched in relation to the evidence I presented” and was likely emphasizing the work of another researcher because that other researcher was from Illinois. “Too bad I did not grow up in that state!” Shull might have been pleased to see that years later, Newsday’s gardening editor, Bea Jones (no relation to Donald Jones) explained to her readers that “a revolution in plant breeding that brought world leadership to this county’s corn belt actually was triggered by basic research on Long Island,” specifically “geneticist G. H. Shull’s observations” on inbreeding and hybrid vigor.