Since selection was not enough, Strampelli complemented it with hybridization in order to combine characters from different varieties. Like the Vilmorins, Strampelli began his hybridization work before he had heard of the rediscovery of Mendel’s experiments by de Vries, Correns, and Tschermack.[28] Nevertheless, as early as 1905 he became acquainted with Mendel’s laws, which offered him a quantification of his own observations of disjunctions in the second generation. After that he would consider himself a devoted follower of the mythic founding father of genetics, and would even named one of his wheat strains Gregor Mendel.[29] He hybridized pure lines in order to combine Mendelian characters, after which he would make a selection of the offspring until he obtained again fixed pure lines. Strampelli definitely did not share Johannsen’s disgust for hybridization, and used both the typological approach of the pure line research programs, aimed at fixing the type, and the combinatory strategy of hybridizers.[30]
By 1907, as a first result of his hybridization work, Strampelli had produced a table of 22 antagonist characters (dominant/recessive) present in wheat: red spike / white spike; brittle root / sturdy root; multiple fiber strands / few fiber strands; rough leaves / smooth leaves; rust susceptibility / rust resistance, and so on. According to Strampelli’s table, two crucial properties, resistance to lodging and susceptibility to rust, behaved like Mendelian characters, prone to be combined and controlled at the geneticist’s will. It is reasonable to suppose that, as in the case of Johannsen, who talked of pure lines as chemical elements, Strampelli’s earlier work with soil chemistry contributed to his Promethean vision of creating new strains by combining hereditary elements as if they were chemical ones.[31] And, as Strampelli’s table shows, chemistry was not the only discipline he considered relevant. The physiological trait that served in his table as a proxy for resistance to lodging was the number of fiber strands present in the stem. It was the microscopic study of this property that allowed Strampelli to present his hybridization work as suitable for publication in the proceedings of the prestigious Accademia dei Lincei.[32] In other words, any good hybridizer should also be a proficient plant physiologist, familiar with the methods of analyzing a plant’s physiological properties, in order to consider the proper options when selecting offspring.
This ability to reduce the complexities of heredity to the duality of dominant/recessive characters has been identified with the possibility of the commodification of life.[33] By instituting a hard genetic identity of the living organism independent of place and environment, formed by immutable genes or the equally immutable pure lines, geneticists opened the field to the mass production of stable life forms, able to “circulate without alterations through extending ‘space of flows,” by their inter-laboratory networks or larger scientific / economic / medical / cultural hybrid networks.”[34] Nonetheless the connections between the hardening of heredity at the turn of the century and the circulation of living objects (the immutable mobiles, to use Bruno Latour’s terminology) have been more affirmed than thoroughly explored. As Christophe Bonneuil suggests, we still need better accounts on how purity is produced and maintained, better narratives on the material practices of breeders and geneticists, in order to understand the conditions for the emergence of a genetic rationality at the beginning of the twentieth century.[35] Here I explore how this emergence was intertwined with a revolution in food production and the building of new political regimes. The work of Nazareno Strampelli allows us to follow the trajectories of the geneticists’ artifacts through their different networks and to perceive their role in the general fabric of, in this case, a fascist society.
Let us, then, take a close look at Strampelli’s practices at his Royal Experiment Station of Wheat Cultivation in Rieti.[36] To cross two different wheat varieties, he began by sowing individual plants in pots, which he then would place in his “hybridization laboratory.” In spring the pots with late varieties would be placed in the sunniest part of the greenhouse, turned south; the ones containing early wheat would be placed in the shadier areas of the laboratory or even in a controlled cold atmosphere. The two varieties would then flower at approximately the same time. The modest hybridization laboratory was thus an ingenious device designed to homogenize time. It was in this lab that Strampelli and his wife, Carlotta, would undertake the painstaking process of artificial pollination. After choosing two or three spikes from a pot, he or she opened the glumes with a scalpel and removed the anthers, taking care not to touch the ovary or the stigma. The spikes were protected from accidental pollination by wind or insects by translucent paper tubes sealed with cotton, allowing for airflow but hindering the fall of undesired pollen on the spike. When female organs were ready to be fertilized, and after cautiously preparing pollen from the chosen variety to avoid any contaminations, Strampelli or his wife would remove the paper tube, open the glume, place pollen on each stigma, and replace the tube. Each spike always held a card registering castration and hybridization date, as well as the composition of the hybrid. Both the registration procedure and the delicate artificial pollination were crucial for guaranteeing the purity of the new genetic product.
After obtaining the uniform first generation (F1) of the hybrid, Strampelli or his wife sowed the seeds of each different spike of the second generation (F2) in small plots separated by rows of rye, which worked as filters to avoid any cross-pollination. The steps were repeated until a homozygotic individual was identified with the help of Strampelli’s table of antagonist characters. If a plant presented all the recessive characters, Strampelli knew he had stumbled onto a homozygote constituting a fixed type. In the case of dominant characters, only after three or more generations of no disjunctions was the breeder in a position to conclude that he was in the presence of a homozygote. Homozygotic individuals were separated and placed in a larger plot to confirm the fixity of the type and to produce enough seeds to be used in cultivation trials. In these trials the several fixed types (the pure lines) were tested for productivity, resistance to diseases, duration of vegetative cycle, and other properties. If after several years of cultivation trials (in some cases, more than a decade) the new type confirmed its good behavior, it would earn the status of an elite race (raza elette) and would be transferred to the first multiplication fields. This was not the end of the process, for seeds were still to be sent to each of the local experiment stations responsible for confirming a strain’s adaptability in each specific region of Italy and finally for distributing the strain to local farmers.[37] Each successive step, each experimentation at a larger scale, enhanced the stability of a strain’s properties, guaranteeing that it would behave in widely dispersed fields just as it did in the controlled space of the Rieti Experiment Station.
The procedure described above demanded increasing amounts of land, and Mendelian hybridization was not inexpensive. Indeed, much of the official account of Strampelli’s institutional history is a narrative of the acquisition of land through close connections with the government.[38] It starts with rented plots and collaboration with local farmers, followed by the building in 1912 of the facilities of the Rieti Experiment Station and the purchase of 15 hectares for an experimental field. The Experiment Station then purchased two other fields, one in the southern province of Foggia, in the Tavoliere, and the other in Leonessa, 1,000 meters above sea level, for cereal cultivation in mountain areas. In 1919 the station would earn national status, would be renamed the National Institute of Genetics for Grain Cultivation, and would move to Rome. Nevertheless, Rieti would keep its status as the main place of experimentation. In 1924 an additional 200 hectares were bought in the Rieti plain in order to provide the Institute with its own multiplication fields. The Institute was now producing selected seeds to be sold to farmers instead of relying on private companies for multiplication and distribution. This involved further acquisitions of land in Apulia, in Sicily, and in Agro Romano. At the end of the 1920s, Strampelli’s National Institute of Genetics was thus in possession of a set of fields that modeled the landscape of the three main regions of Italy (northern, central, and southern) as well as its mountains and the island of Sicily.
28
B. Strampelli,
29
In contrast to recent interpretations that state a strong division between research programs centered on unit factors, or genes, and those that took the basic immutable entity to be the pure line, the biotype, Strampelli did not make any distinctions and used both routes. Christophe Bonneuil, “Producing identity, industrializing purity,” in
30
Interestingly enough, a controversy between Strampelli and Francesco Todaro in 1918 revolved around the issue of the status of hybridization in relation to pedigree selection. Strampelli wanted to differentiate between creative hybridizers like himself, who acted like artists, and pedigree selectors who were limited to disclosing nature’s gifts and were no more than archeologists. Todaro, whose major work in his Bologna institution had been to produce pure lines from Italian traditional landraces, answered by arguing that the difference was immaterial, for both the hybridizer and the pedigree selectors were characterized first and foremost for making selections. The only difference was the process of artificial pollination undertaken by the hybridizer. See Lorenzetti,
31
On the importance of the chemical metaphor for geneticists at the turn of the century see Staffan Müller-Wille, “Leaving Inheritance behind: Wilhelm Johansen and the politics of Mendelism,” in
32
Nazareno Strampelli, “Esperienze di selezione e di ibridazione sul frumento e sul granoturco”
33
See for example Evelyn Fox Keller,
34
Christophe Bonneuil, “Producing identity, industrializing purity,” p. 105. Such a view is, of course, much indebted to Bruno Latour’s thesis on the circulation of scientific objects and the famous immutable mobiles. See Latour, “Drawing things together,” in
35
Phillip Thurtle,
36
I follow Strampelli’s own description on pages 53–55 of “I Miei Lavori: origine e svilluppi.”
38
“Gli Ordinamenti Amministrativi,” in