Category: History

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Spring is in the air…

…and a young man’s thoughts naturally turn to gardens. Honduran gardens and their role in health. Cuban organic gardens. And via them, Around the World in 80 Gardens, a BBC documentary series that looks like it might be worth getting on DVD. And, finally, let us not forget Kew Gardens, 250 years old this year.

LATER: And there’s also an extensive discussion of the role of homegardens in providing nutrition for people living with HIV at the Solution Exchange for the Food and Nutrition Security Community in India. Thanks, Arwen.

LATER STILL: LEISA rounds up evidence of the worldwide gardening craze.

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From our far-flung correspondent

Luigi is trapped in the ultimate capitalist nightmare, unable to afford both vodka and internet access. But he managed to smuggle out a couple of images from a meeting in St Petersburg.

Vavilov bust.jpg

N.I. Vavilov looks down on the assembled conference attendees. I’m not sure I’d be able to concentrate under those circumstances.

Vavilov desk.jpg

And the Great Man’s desk. Would it have been too much to have sat in his chair?

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How IR8 was born

Henry M. “Hank” Beachell shared the World Food Prize in 1996 with Gurdev Khush. Both IRRI rice breeders, they were responsible for breeding the first Green Revolution dwarf rice variety, IR8. IRRI’s channel on youtube has just posted an excerpt from a USDA-National Agricultural Library (NAL) video project called Precious Seeds which tells his story. The money quote: “…cooking quality was secondary, milling quality was secondary, the main thing was rice production.”

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How C4 came to be understood

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day, when bloggers around the world celebrated women in technology. We weren’t aware of it, and frankly, I’m not sure who we might have chosen. Erna Bennett? Fortunately, though, we can direct you instead to Oliver Morton’s fine post on Constance Hartt. Who she?

Hartt was a laboratory researcher at the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association Experiment Station, and her assiduous work on the biochemistry of sugar cane in the 1930s and 1940s convinced her that, for that plant at least, the primary product of photosynthesis is malate, a four carbon sugar. Later carbon-14 studies showed that she was right — and led to an interesting conundrum. Why did some plants — most plants, indeed, and almost all algae — make a three carbon sugar, phophoglycerate, while sugar cane and, it later became clear, various other grasses made a four-carbon sugar?

Some gene-jockeys seem to think that all that’s needed to double the yield of crop plants is “simply” to give them a C4 photosynthetic pathway. I’m not going to get into that one. But Morton gives a good account of how and why C4 differs from C3, and the part Hartt played in its elucidation.