Santa Claus's Corn

Dr. George Harrison Shull, professor of botany and genetics at Princeton University, gave hybrid corn to the world free of charge. But the U. S. Department of Agriculture pointed out last week--just for fun--that if old Dr. Shull had received a royalty of only 1-c- an acre for the 25,000,000 U. S. acres planted to hybrid corn in 1939, he would have taken in $250,000--a tidy income for a scientist. In 1939 Iowa planted 77% of her total corn acreage to hybrid corn, Indiana planted 60%, Illinois and Ohio 57% each.

Hybrid corn is the result of inbreeding various strains for several generations, then crossbreeding. Corn, like mice, mackerel and men, reproduces by means of male sperm and female eggs. The sperm is produced and dispersed from the tassels at the top of the stalk; the eggs lurk at the base of the silk on each ear. In ordinary "open-pollinated" corn, fertilization occurs at random, the sperm-bearing pollen being carried to the silk by the wind. For inbreeding, the tassels and silk are protected by paper bags until maturity, and the plants are then self-pollinated by hand. These inbred strains become highly uniform. Finally, promising strains are crossed to combine advantages--long ears, full-kerneled ears, resistance to drought, heat, wind, insects. Since the characters of a hybrid are not always predictable from those of the parents, many experimental crosses must be made for one successful result.

Hybrid seed costs about twice as much as ordinary cornseed, but yields increases of 10% to 40% per acre--increases so huge in farm eyes that one group of farm publications declared: "Hybrid corn is the most spectacular and far-reaching agricultural development of this generation. It ranks in importance with the invention of the telephone and the internal combustion engine. ... In the midst of economic transition, most people have overlooked the transition in food production technique, of which hybrid corn is the forerunner."

In 1905, only five years after Mendel's heredity laws were rediscovered, Dr. Shull (who was then at the Carnegie Institution's station on Long Island) and the late Dr. Edward Murray East (at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station) started their experiments with corn hybridization. The Department of Agriculture, foreseeing laborious years of further experiment ahead, was slow to follow their lead. Thoroughgoing research programs at corn-belt stations did not get under way until 1920, and until 1933 practically no hybrid corn was grown commercially. Not until last year were seed supplies plentiful enough for growers to take their choice of several tested hybrids, instead of having to buy simply "hybrid corn."

Rotund, white-bearded Dr. Shull, who looks like Santa Claus, does not feel gypped at having received no royalties so long as he is recognized as the Santa Claus of hybrid corn. But he remarked last week that if he had received the merest fraction of 1-c- an acre, he would have been able to set up an independent department of botany at Princeton. It rather irks him that, the way things are, botany is corralled in Princeton's department of biology.

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