Books by Helen Anne Curry
University of California Press, 2022
Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century,... more Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect crop plants they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative about the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve.
Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to trace the motivations behind these hidden extinction stories and show how they shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. It investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how conservationists forged their methods around expectations of social, political, and economic transformations that would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
Worlds of Natural History, 2018
Co-edited with Nick Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma Spary
Journal Articles by Helen Anne Curry
Isis, 2022
Accounts of twentieth-century agricultural industrialization in the United States and beyond ofte... more Accounts of twentieth-century agricultural industrialization in the United States and beyond often center the production and distribution of commercial F1 hybrid seed as a pivotal development. The commercialization of hybrid corn seed in the 1930s was initially heralded as a science-driven advance in agricultural productivity. However, since the 1970s "hybrid seed" has been linked to many perceived perils attendant on industrialized agriculture, from the undermining of farmers' independence to the diminishment of crop genetic diversity to the consolidation of corporate control over the global food system. First grouped with the semidwarf varieties of the Green Revolution to emblematize capital-and chemical-intensive agriculture, hybrids are today often lumped together with genetically modified (GM) varieties for much the same reason. This essay revisits the scholarship that helped produce this understanding of hybrid seed. It explores how and why the singular history of hybrid corn inflected understandings of crop breeding and seed production in general, contributing to lasting confusion about the promises and pitfalls of distinct approaches to crop development and the nature of hybrid seed.
Social Studies of Science, 2022
Seeds and other plant materials in seed and gene bank collections are rarely considered adequatel... more Seeds and other plant materials in seed and gene bank collections are rarely considered adequately conserved today unless genetically identical duplicate samples have been created and safely stored elsewhere. This paper explores the history of seed banking to understand how, why and with what consequences copying collections came to occupy this central place. It highlights a shift in the guiding metaphor for long-term preservation of seed collections, from banking to backup. To understand the causes and consequences of this shift in metaphor, the paper traces the intertwined histories of the central long-term seed storage facility of the United States (opened in 1958) and the international seed conservation system into which that facility was integrated in the 1970s. This account reveals how changing conceptions of security, linked to changing economic, political and technological circumstances, transformed both the guiding metaphors and the practices of seed conservation in these institutions. Early instantiations of long-term cold storage facilities vested security in robust infrastructures and the capacities of professional staff; between the 1960s and 1990s, this configuration gave way to one in which security was situated in copies rather than capacities. This observation ultimately raises questions about the security promised and achieved through present-day infrastructures for crop genetic resources conservation.
Isis, 2021
This essay explores the intersection of race science and plant taxonomy in the creation of evolut... more This essay explores the intersection of race science and plant taxonomy in the creation of evolutionary taxonomies (phylogenies) of populations of Zea mays, also known as maize or corn. Following recent work in the history and sociology of race, it analyzes maize taxonomy as technology. Through an analysis of successive attempts to classify diverse maize varieties, especially those originating in Mexico, it shows that taxonomy created possibilities for researchers to intervene in commercial agriculture, state development projects, biological conservation, and domestic and international politics and policy. It further underscores that the modern science of maize taxonomy was distinct but never inseparable from assessments of maize's human cultivators. Attending to particularities of this relationship is crucial, because it reveals the application of maize taxonomy as a technology for ordering human diversity and intervening in human lives, as well as managing the impressive diversity of Zea mays. M any scholars have grappled with the histories of race and race science. An early narrative arc in the historiography of race ran from its invention as a way of understanding human difference in Enlightenment Europe through to its rejection by scientists as a category devoid of biological meaning after World War II. 1 Historians and other scholars have subsequently demonstrated the tenacious hold of race in biological and biomedical science, in everything from
Isis, 2019
This essay takes as its central explanandum the survival of an unusual personal seed collection w... more This essay takes as its central explanandum the survival of an unusual personal seed collection within a larger government institution, ultimately asking why individu- als and institutions save seeds. To answer this question, it considers the cultures of seed collecting and preservation among amateurs, enthusiasts, and others without professional status in botanical or agricultural research and, simultaneously, among profes- sional breeders, geneticists, and seed scientists. The essay also reviews the roles played in saving seeds by institutional policies, technical procedures, and biological realities. Returning to the particular collection in question, the author suggests that its survival is not surprising but, instead, overdetermined given the many circumstances that drive the preservation of seeds as resources for an uncertain future.
Culture, Agriculture, Food & Environment, 2019
Individual seed saving and exchange are considered important components of contemporary efforts t... more Individual seed saving and exchange are considered important components of contemporary efforts to conserve crop genetic diversity, which ramify at local, regional, and global scales. Yet the very fact that the contributions of these activities to conservation need to be made explicit by seed savers and those who study them indicates that the practices of seed saving and exchange may not immediately be recognized as conservation-oriented activities. This article investigates why and how individual seed saving came to be aligned with a broader conservation agenda in Britain through an historical examination of the promotion of seed saving by the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA) in the 1970s and 1980s. It demonstrates how several HDRA initiatives that aimed to preserve vegetable diversity also re-inscribed British gardeners' ordinary labor as conservation work. This historical study complements sociological and ethnographic studies, highlighting the role of a prominent organization in creating pathways for individuals to engage in local, national, and international conservation through seed saving. It also serves as a reminder that the connections between these activities had to be made explicit-that is, that there was (and is) work involved in connecting individual acts of seed saving to conservation outcomes at different scales.
BJHS Themes, 2019
In 1975, the Missouri homesteaders Kent and Diane Ott Whealy launched True Seed Exchange (later S... more In 1975, the Missouri homesteaders Kent and Diane Ott Whealy launched True Seed Exchange (later Seed Savers Exchange), a network of 'serious gardeners' interested in growing and conserving heirloom and other hard-to-find plant varieties, especially vegetables. In its earliest years, the organization pursued its conservation mission through member-led exchange and cultivation, seeing members' gardens and seed collections as the best means of ensuring that heirloom varieties remained both extant and available to growers. Beginning in 1981, however, Kent Whealy began to develop a central seed repository. As I discuss in this paper, the development of this central collection was motivated in part by concerns about the precariousness of very large individual collections, the maintenance of which was too demanding to entrust to most growers. Although state-run institutions were better positioned to take on large collections , they were nonetheless unsuitable stewards because they placed limits on access. For seed savers, loss of access to varieties via their accession into a state collection could be as much an ending for treasured collections as total physical loss, as it did not necessarily enable continued cultivation. As I show here, these imagined endings inspired the adoption of a new set of conservation practices that replicated those seen in the formal genetic conservation sector, including seed banking, cold storage and safety duplication.
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2017
This paper charts the history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s participation in the collection and... more This paper charts the history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s participation in the collection and long-term preservation of genetic diversity in crop plants from the 1940s through the 1970s. In the decades following the launch of its agricultural program in Mexico in 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation figured prominently in the creation of world collections of key economic crops. Through the efforts of its administrators and staff, the foundation subsequently parlayed this experience into a leadership role in international efforts to conserve so-called plant genetic resources. Previous accounts of the Rockefeller Foundation’s interventions in international agricultural development have focused on the outcomes prioritized by foundation staff and administrators as they launched assistance programs and especially their characterization of the peoples and “problems” they encountered abroad. This paper highlights instead how foundation administrators and staff responded to a newly emergent international agricultural concern—the loss of crop genetic diversity. Charting the foundation’s responses to this concern, which developed only after agricultural modernization had begun and was understood to be produced by the successes of the foundation’s own agricultural assistance programs, allows for greater interrogation of how the foundation understood and projected its central position in international agricultural research activities by the 1970s.
Global Environment, 2017
In the mid-twentieth century, American agriculturists began to fret about a growing threat to key... more In the mid-twentieth century, American agriculturists began to fret about a growing threat to key economic crops: the loss or extinction of manifold local varieties, or landraces, resulting from the displacement of these in cultivation by recently introduced varieties that were better suited for industrial-style agriculture. Many breeders considered diverse landraces to be a valuable, and indeed essential, source of genetic material for their crop improvement efforts - and therefore an essential resource for the very system of agricultural production that appeared to threaten their continued existence. This paper explores how knowledge of this dilemma - that is, the reliance of industrial agriculture on genetic diversity that it tends to destroy - shaped efforts to conserve biological diversity and simultaneously shaped the landscapes and genescapes of twentieth-century agriculture. It takes maize (corn) as its central example, as it was changes in the landscapes of maize production, first in the United States and then across Latin America, which spurred an early international collaboration for the preservation of crop genetic diversity. As it shows with reference to this program and subsequent international developments in the conservation of crop diversity, the technology of the 'seed bank' was considered a crucial addition to the technologies of industrial agricultural production. It was understood to allow breeders to continue responsibly in the creation of high-yielding but ecologically vulnerable inbred crops by lessening the perceived risks inherent in the un-diverse landscapes of industrial monocrop agriculture.
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 2016
This paper explores the nature of scientific research and innovation at the intersection of techn... more This paper explores the nature of scientific research and innovation at the intersection of technological systems via a study of atomic age plant breeding. I show how the well-established framework of ''large technological systems'' can be deployed to understand research dynamics in the Cold War life sciences, and further suggest that this framework might be useful in understanding still other areas of scientific research. I argue that the development of experimental tools and research programs dedicated to plant breeding via nuclear-derived technologies arose where researchers experienced the imperatives of innovation within two technological systemsnuclear and agricultural-simultaneously. In the absence of a significant infrastructure for nuclear agriculture, it was the mobility of innovations, the exchange of research tools and practices across experimental settings and research domains, which enabled nuclear-aided plant breeding to flourish for a time. As I show, understanding the dynamics of the technological systems in which researchers were embedded, including their interactions with other systems, is essential to understanding this
British Journal for the History of Science, 2014
This paper describes the activities of amateur plant breeders and their application of various me... more This paper describes the activities of amateur plant breeders and their application of various methods and technologies derived from genetics research over the course of the twentieth century. These ranged from selection and hybridization to more interventionist approaches such as radiation treatment to induce genetic mutations and chemical manipulation of chromosomes. I argue that these activities share characteristics with twenty-first-century do-it-yourself (DIY) biology (a recent upswing in amateur experimental biology) as well as other amateur science and technology of the twentieth century. The characterization of amateur plant breeding as amateur experimental biology offers a corrective to a dominant narrative within the history of biology, in which the turn to experimental research in the early twentieth century is thought to have served as an obvious dividing line between amateur and professional activities. Considered alongside other better-known amateur efforts, it also suggests that we might gain something by taking a more unified approach to the study of amateur science and technology.
Environmental History, Apr 2014
This article charts the history of an unusual approach taken to restoring the American chestnut t... more This article charts the history of an unusual approach taken to restoring the American chestnut to its native range between 1955 and 1980. The chestnut, once abundant in the eastern United States, had been nearly wiped out by a blight to which it had little resistance. In 1955 the geneticist W. Ralph Singleton proposed that exposing chestnuts to radiation might produce trees carrying a genetic mutation for blight resistance. These could then be used to breed many more resistant trees, which would in turn be used for forest restoration. This effort undoubtedly originated in postwar atomic enthusiasm, yet as I argue here, it appealed for still other reasons, which explain why it persisted long after such enthusiasm had faded. Radiation-induced mutation offered a promising technological solution derived from recent genetics research that would address specific challenges of breeding blight-resistant chestnuts. In particular, it offered a speedy alternative to hybridization with Asian trees, a long process seen to diminish the desired qualities of the American chestnut and its integrity as a species. By exploring this confluence of nuclear technology, genetics, and species restoration, and placing it in the longer history of chestnut restoration efforts, this article highlights more broadly the challenges that emerge when saving a species requires significant human intervention and especially genetic manipulation.
Technology and Culture, Oct 2013
This paper explores the history of attempts to apply x-ray radiation as a tool of plant breeding ... more This paper explores the history of attempts to apply x-ray radiation as a tool of plant breeding through a case study of a short-lived research program at the General Electric Research Laboratory in the 1930s. As I show, the goal of this program was to turn the appearance of genetic variation into an efficient, predictable process—in other words, it was an effort to create a precision tool for altering genes. I further argue that in the context of the industrial research laboratory, as opposed to other sites where the use of radiation in plant breeding was explored, researchers sought in particular to align the processes of biological innovation with those of mechanical and industrial innovation. The account provides a new perspective on the history of agro-biotechnologies in an industrial context as well as on the intersecting histories of biological and other technological development.
Environment and History, Aug 2012
The rosy periwinkle, a plant originating in the rainforest of Madagascar, is best known for its u... more The rosy periwinkle, a plant originating in the rainforest of Madagascar, is best known for its use in modern biomedicine as a cancer therapy and as a symbol of the importance of biodiversity conservation. Yet images of the plant as a novel therapeutic and an endangered exotic obscure its commonness, for it is both naturalised in many parts of the world as a weed and has long been used as an ornamental plant in greenhouses and gardens. This seeming contradiction is the result of the rosy periwinkle's long history as a horticultural variety, especially its transition over a two-hundred-year period from being understood as a hothouse exotic to being seen as native and commonplace. Horticultural practices generated changes in the distribution and biology of the rosy periwinkle and this in turn generated changes in people's valuation of the species. Through a horticultural history of the rosy periwinkle, this paper explores how ideas about what constitutes an exotic or naturalised species, and the value attached to these, can dramatically shape and then reshape the natural history of a species. It suggests why such attention to such plasticity is important both for historians and for conservation.
Book Chapters by Helen Anne Curry
The Whipple Museum of the History of Science Objects and Investigations, to Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of R. S. Whipple's Gift to the University of Cambridge, 2019
Worlds of Natural History, 2018
Co-author: James A. Secord.
The epilogue sketches the recent history and historiography of natu... more Co-author: James A. Secord.
The epilogue sketches the recent history and historiography of natural history. Contrary to frequent laments about the ‘death’ or ‘extinction’ of natural history, the discipline is thriving in forms both familiar and novel. Recent changes in natural history, only beginning to be examined by historians and sociologists of science, include the transformation of taxonomy through the introduction of information and computer technologies, the mass digitization of collections, and the widespread recruitment of amateur naturalists as ‘citizen scientists’, as well as the transformation of ideas about what constitutes ‘nature’ and the best ways to study and represent this at a time of rapid environmental change. Meanwhile, scholars are grappling with both longstanding concerns and newly recognized facets of the long history of natural history. Among the latter, the examination of natural history within the histories of globalisation, circulation, empire, and exchange, and a widening of the community of historians dealing with natural history in different parts of the world, has been particularly important.
Worlds of Natural History, 2018
This chapter charts the history of plant exploration, collection and conservation in the twentiet... more This chapter charts the history of plant exploration, collection and conservation in the twentieth century, drawing on the histories of botanical and agricultural institutions and expertise in many parts of the world. As in preceding centuries, plant collectors since 1900 have traversed the globe hoping to discover new species, find plants useful to agricultural production, and locate known rare plants to complete collections at their sponsoring institutions. Yet important differences that emerged, two of which are highlighted in this chapter. First, plant exploration and collection over the course of the twentieth century was increasingly characterized by awareness of the loss of biological diversity globally and especially the possibility that particular plant species and cultivated varieties could be lost forever. Second, new international legal regimes were put in place to govern the activities of collecting and exchange—regimes that arose from a growing awareness of the inequities arising from centuries of plant transfers in which countries of the Global North had profited from the resources of the Global South.
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Books by Helen Anne Curry
Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to trace the motivations behind these hidden extinction stories and show how they shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. It investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how conservationists forged their methods around expectations of social, political, and economic transformations that would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
Journal Articles by Helen Anne Curry
Book Chapters by Helen Anne Curry
The epilogue sketches the recent history and historiography of natural history. Contrary to frequent laments about the ‘death’ or ‘extinction’ of natural history, the discipline is thriving in forms both familiar and novel. Recent changes in natural history, only beginning to be examined by historians and sociologists of science, include the transformation of taxonomy through the introduction of information and computer technologies, the mass digitization of collections, and the widespread recruitment of amateur naturalists as ‘citizen scientists’, as well as the transformation of ideas about what constitutes ‘nature’ and the best ways to study and represent this at a time of rapid environmental change. Meanwhile, scholars are grappling with both longstanding concerns and newly recognized facets of the long history of natural history. Among the latter, the examination of natural history within the histories of globalisation, circulation, empire, and exchange, and a widening of the community of historians dealing with natural history in different parts of the world, has been particularly important.
Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to trace the motivations behind these hidden extinction stories and show how they shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. It investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how conservationists forged their methods around expectations of social, political, and economic transformations that would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
The epilogue sketches the recent history and historiography of natural history. Contrary to frequent laments about the ‘death’ or ‘extinction’ of natural history, the discipline is thriving in forms both familiar and novel. Recent changes in natural history, only beginning to be examined by historians and sociologists of science, include the transformation of taxonomy through the introduction of information and computer technologies, the mass digitization of collections, and the widespread recruitment of amateur naturalists as ‘citizen scientists’, as well as the transformation of ideas about what constitutes ‘nature’ and the best ways to study and represent this at a time of rapid environmental change. Meanwhile, scholars are grappling with both longstanding concerns and newly recognized facets of the long history of natural history. Among the latter, the examination of natural history within the histories of globalisation, circulation, empire, and exchange, and a widening of the community of historians dealing with natural history in different parts of the world, has been particularly important.