Dr. Howard's Versatility

Versatility, of the kind possessed by L. O. Howard, is another inheritance. In his 50 years of public service, over half of it as head of research in entomology, he directed many noteworthy investigations. None had more far-reaching importance than a simple little experiment he conducted in the Catskill Mountains in 1892.

Dr. Howard was spending a short vacation at his cottage in July and noticed a few mosquitoes on the porch. The pests were rare at that elevation, but the early summer had been wet, and he feared a whole host of them later in the summer, when he planned to return to the cottage. As a boy Dr. Howard had used kerosene to control breeding of mosquitoes in water trough, but apparently no one had tried this treatment on a pond or pool. He decided to try it. In a few days no mosquito larvae could be found.

The result of that little test was soon known around the world, and when Army and Public Health doctors proved that the way to clean up yellow fever was to clean up mosquitoes (thanks to the work of Theobald Smith on cattle ticks), Dr. Howard's kerosene treatment plus drainage played a big part in getting rid of the mosquitoes and with them some of the worst scourges of man.

Perhaps the greatest fighter in the group of scientists mentioned in this article was Dr. Harvey W. Wiley. From his battles many a present-day scientist has learned how to stand up for the truth. He was a great scientist, a good administrator, writer, and educator. Day in and day out for 21 years he hammered everywhere on a vital point—shocking adulteration of foods and drugs. Finally he aroused the American public to demand action. Then Congress passed the Food and Drugs Act in 1906 and the Bureau of Chemistry, headed by Wiley, was placed in charge of enforcement. He had won the first round of his battle.

Wiley's work dates from about 1885, when his publications on methods of analysis for foods and other agricultural products were accepted as the last word on the subject. They were used in colleges and universities, in public and private laboratories, and later in the enforcement of the new food law. His researches covered many subjects for which no satisfactory methods of analysis had been published.

These early publications were paving the way for passage of the Food and Drugs Act. Another series on adulterants published at intervals between 1887 and 1902 disclosed that cottonseed oil was commonly used as an adulterant in butter; .that all kinds of foreign matter were mixed with spices; and that many poisonous dyes were commonly used in candy and other foods.

Besides his brilliant fight to protect the health of the American public, which earned for him the designation of "father of the pure food law," Wiley is also known as the father of the sugar-beet industry in the United States. Efforts to establish sugar beets as a crop in this country had been based on haphazard knowledge, and the industry had not flourished. Wiley made studies of soils, climatic conditions, and yields and sugar content of the beets in several parts of the country. With this information he mapped the areas adapted to the crop. His recommendations were followed and are still good.

Hybrid corn illustrates still another segment of the scientific tradition, namely, that research that appears to be purely theoretical may turn out to be extremely practical. For example, one of the foremost authorities on hybrid corn now living has said that hybrid corn is perhaps the outstanding example of the influence of theoretical scientific research in revolutionizing the production practices of an agricultural crop.

The early work on hybrid corn was done by men not connected with the Department. Prof. W. J. Beal, of the Michigan Agricultural College, began breeding corn about 1870. In 1881 he crossed two varieties by detasseling one of them, and this was probably the first attempt to utilize hybrid vigor in corn breeding.

G. H. Shull, of the Carnegie Institution, began inbreeding corn in 1905, but at the time he was interested solely in theoretical genetics. He wanted to find out whether the number of rows of kernels on an ear was influenced by inbreeding and crossbreeding. By 1908, however, he realized the practical possibilities of the method for increasing yields and recommended inbreeding and crossing of inbred lines for commercial corn production.

E. M. East, of the Illinois Agricultural College, also began inbreeding corn in 1905. In the fall of that year he moved to the Connecticut Experiment Station and continued his corn breeding there. He, too, was interested at first in theoretical aspects, but, like Shull, he soon saw the possibilities of increasing yields for farmers by using the new method of corn breeding.

In the next few years other State experiment stations began breeding hybrid corn, and Department breeders joined the ranks. Because of the need to inbreed lines, a practice that takes several years, results were modest at first. By 1925, however, several States were getting results. In that year 12 States and the Department set up a cooperative hybrid-cornbreeding program. Promising parent material was freely interchanged and valuable time was saved. The program has made possible the fullest use of all information on the subject, and the phenomenal spread of hybrid corn across the Corn Belt has been largely a result of this cooperation.

The spread of hybrid corn is probably the greatest food-production story of the century. Like a prairie fire it swept across the central part of the country. In 1933 only 1 acre of corn out of a thousand in the United States was planted to hybrids. Ten years later the percentage of land planted to hybrids was a little more than 51. Since that time it has jumped to 67.5 percent.

Farmers like to grow hybrid corn because it gives greater yields. Larger yields are due in part to hybrid vigor, but because hybrids are "hand-tailored" to meet the needs of a given area, they have more resistance to drought and other unfavorable weather, more resistance to diseases and insects, and stronger stalks, so they are easier to harvest with machines.

Hybrid-corn yields for the country as a whole average about 25 percent above those of open-pollinated corn. In the 4 years 1942-45, United States farmers grew an extra 2 billion bushels of corn because of hybrids. In 1945 alone this increase was 600 million bushels, worth three-quarters of a billion dollars.