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32 SEEDWORLD.COM JUNE 2015 Henry Wallace Although he had a lot of influences along the way Henry Wallaces groundbreaking achievements in the breeding and mar- keting of hybrid corn can be traced back to one person his mom. Growing up in Iowa Wallaces mother shared her love of plants with her young son and taught him to cross-breed pansies. From there his interest in botany and agronomy only grew. As a child he befriended and learned a great deal from world-famous botanist George Washington Carver. Carver was a student at Iowa State University at the time and he lived with Wallaces family because African Americans werent allowed to live in the universitys dorm. Carvers influence on Wallace was big. By the age of 10 Wallace was experi- menting with plant breeding in his own personal plot. Just five years later he disproved the conventional wisdom that ear appearance row uniformity kernel shape and length could predict yield. Wallace is now credited with introducing the very concept of hybrid vigor. He developed the first commercial hybrid corn in 1923. Confident that hybrid seed corn was the future Wallace would go on to form the Hi-Bred Corn Company in Des Moines in 1926. By the early 1930s farmers were taking notice around 1 percent of the corn planted in Iowa came from Wallaces hybrid seed. That number steadily rose and by the mid 1960s almost the entire U.S. corn crop came from hybrid seed corn. The Hi-Bred Corn Company later became Pioneer Hi-Bred which was pur- chased in 1999 by DuPont. It is now called DuPont Pioneer. James Watson Francis Crick For centuries people have used DNA and genetics to create better more useful plants and animals through breeding. It has long been a slow process built on trial and error. More than 60 years ago two scientists led a team whose discovery would even- tually change that process and agriculture as we know it. James Watson was interested in the building blocks of life at a young age and after his doctoral work at Indiana University spent some time in England where he met Francis Crick. Crick who They did just that in 1953 with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. Watson and Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Wilkins. The discovery did not immediately revolutionize agriculture but it did eventu- ally lead to modern methods of selecting for desirable traits. Genetically modified plants can boost yields protect against pests and impart herbicide tolerance that allows growers to keep fields clear of weeds. Companies are developing plants that can thrive in once inhospitable condi- tions such as highly acidic soil as well as plants that can survive rising tempera- tures and drought conditions among many characteristics. Watson went on to do research at Harvard University and then Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory known worldwide for its work in cancer neurobiology and basic molecular genetics. He was also direc- tor of the National Institutes of Healths Human Genome Project. Crick spent much of his career at the Medical Research Council at Cambridge and the Salk Institute in California where he studied developmental neurobiology. George Washington Carver Cotton was the undisputed king in the South. But when the boll weevil threat- ened the crop at the turn of the 20th Century George Washington Carver gave farmers the peanut. Today its hard to think of Carver and not think of peanuts. He purportedly developed more than 300 uses for the legume as well as many products for soy- beans pecans and sweet potatoes. Carver was born a slave in Missouri in 1964. Before he could read Carver had developed a green thumb helping neigh- bors revive sick plants and earning him the nickname the plant doctor. Carver went on to earn degrees from what is today Iowa State University becoming its first black student where he gained national prominence for his work in agriculture. Recruited by the Tuskegee Institute Carver headed the schools agriculture department and shaped its curriculum and faculty. Carver and Tuskegees faculty worked on crop rotation fertilization and the development of alternative cash crops in the South which was dealing with the devastation of the boll weevil starting in Nobel laureate James Watson chancellor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Francis Crick in partnership James Watson and others unlocked the keys to understanding DNA. PHOTOMARCLIEBERMAN. was absorbed with science as a child in England was studying the structure of proteins at the University of Cambridge. The two hit it off. Knowing that DNA was the key to understanding life they decided to determine its structure.