The evolution of plant breeding and modification, a timeline

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of plant science to the development of the modern world. The first time someone saved a seed and planted it, the history of humans and our planet was changed forever.

Most world history courses start with Mesopotamia, the place where civilization was born. That’s where plants were first domesticated roughly 10,000 years ago, marking the beginning of agriculture. Ancient China? They figured out how to mimic nitrogen and phosphorus cycles by rotating legumes with grain crops. This made their grain crops more productive, 2,800 years before modern scientists understood why. How about the Industrial Revolution? It would not have been possible without the advances that made farming more productive and less labor intensive, such as crop rotation, selective breeding, and triangular plows. 

Paving the Path of Human History

Even before humans began cultivating crops, food played a major role in our development. Roughly 1.5 million years ago, the brain size of our early ancestors nearly doubled. Scientists who study human evolution believe one possible theory is the “cooking hypothesis.” They assert that the use of fire to cook made food easier to digest, saving energy. This contributed to a decrease in the size of our digestive systems, freeing up energy to make brain growth possible. 

Almost every major leap forward in human history was preceded by a corresponding agricultural leap forward. One historical constant in our changing world has been the ability of farmers, plant breeders, and agricultural researchers to continually develop new crops and new ways to breed and grow them. 

Agriculture’s Extended Adolescence

Mankind’s transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer-herder took millennia to complete, occurring at different rates in different regions. This period is marked by the first successful domestication of plants on every habitable continent, as well as early efforts in hand pollination. 

Impact of 19th Century Innovators

Incredibly, four of the most important innovators in breeding history were working during the 19th century. This was the first time the principles of the scientific method were applied to the study of plant traits and plant breeding. 

Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel is generally considered to be the father of modern genetics. As a result of his experiments on pea plants, he eventually published the principles of inheritance in 1865. In 1876, Charles Darwin, a naturalist and biologist, published the first paper exploring the concepts of hybrid vigor and the negative outcomes associated with inbreeding. 

Another early breeding pioneer was Luther Burbank, a botanist and horticulturist, who developed more than 800 varieties of plants during his 55-year career.

And botanist William James Beal was an early pioneer, advancing corn hybrid research further than anyone before him during his time at Michigan Agricultural College.

A Modern Approach to Plant Breeding

The first half of the 20th century brought a large number of advances in plant science and plant breeding. Before World War I, hybrids were an interesting concept with incredible potential, but by the end of World War II, they occupied a key position in the agricultural marketplace. Leading the way were scientists like George Harrison Shull, Edward East, Donald Forsha Jones (a graduate student of East’s), and JW Gowen. 

These men were among a small group of breeding researchers looking to take the lessons of Mendel and Darwin and apply them to commercial crop production. When they first began exploring the concept, many in their field were skeptical about the idea of crossing two purebred lines. However, they were so successful that by the time commercial hybrids were widely available in 1933, crop productivity (yields) had tripled in just under 50 years, enabling a new generation of bountiful harvests.

The Green Revolution

During the decades after World War II, plant scientist Norman Borlaug took plant breeding into the mainstream. He was credited with saving a billion people from starvation as a result of his work on disease-resistant dwarf wheat varieties in Mexico and India. In addition to his breeding work, he advocated for the use of synthetic fertilizers to support advanced hybrid seeds, leading to tremendous jumps in crop productivity the world over. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Double Helix Changes Everything

Around the same time that Borlaug was enabling the Green Revolution, plant genetics emerged as a subject of serious interest. Working with Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction images of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick first identified the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. At this point, a distinction begins to be made between traditional plant breeding and biotech methods. By 1970, many plant breeders were focusing on the inside of plants, gathering information about their genetic makeup and using it to develop new varieties. And by 1973, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen had successfully developed recombinant DNA technology, demonstrating that genetically engineered DNA molecules could be cloned in foreign cells, launching the agricultural biotechnology era. 

This led to the introduction of the first genetically modified (GM) crops during the early 1990s, which contributed to another increase in global agriculture productivity.

Modern Agriculture: 
Traditional Concepts, Innovative Tools, 
and New Challenges

Modern plant science encompasses a wide variety of tools and approaches. Traditional plant breeding exists alongside biotechnology, both used to help modern agriculture grow enough food while conserving critical natural resources like water, energy, and land. Botanists work alongside molecular biologists, using tools like marker-assisted selection and other staples of molecular breeding to achieve traditional plant breeding goals in more efficient ways.

As we look to the future, the challenges faced by modern agriculture include a growing world population, altered food consumption patterns brought about by rising standards of living, pressure on natural resources, climate change and resulting weather events, and a host of potential unknowns.

Researchers are also looking to plants for new sources of protein, crops that make better use of photosynthesis, and nutritionally-enhanced plants. Plant breeders today use an incredible range of tools, including traditional breeding, genetic modification techniques, advanced algorithms, digital imaging technologies, and gene editing. Given how much more productive society has become every time we’ve made advances in breeding, imagine what this new combination of tools could make possible in the future.