INTRODUCTION TO PLANT BREEDING
AGRONOMY 815 / COURSE NOTES
P. STEPHEN BAENZIGER, 338 Keim Hall, 472-1538
DEPARTMENT OF AGRONOMY / UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
TIMELESS QUOTES
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of the kings bastard, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
J. Henri Fabre (1823-1915)
Breeding . . . is evolution directed by the will of man.
N. I. Vavilov, 1935
And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1743)
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.
Thomas Jefferson
If I may look into the future I can foresee the time coming when we shall be able to unite in one variety the best quality, the best cropping power, the best straw and so on . . .
Biffen (1906) - - A Never Ending Story
The history of the earth
H. Kihara
The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famineshundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now . . .
Paul Ehrlich, 1968, The Population Bomb
With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was scarcely dry form their pens. On careful analysis, it appears that these debacles fall into two classes, which I will call Failures of Nerve and Failures of Imagination.
Arthur C. Clarke, 1962
They are ill discovers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon, 1605
Few scientists think of agriculture as the chief, or model science. Many indeed, do not consider it a science at all. Yet, it was the first science that makes all human life possible; and it may well be that before the century is over, the success or failure of Science as a whole will be judged by the success or failure of agriculture.
Jean and Andre Mayer (1974) as cited by L.T. Evans (1993)
If I allow that by the bet possible policy, by breaking up more land, and by great encouragements to agriculture, the produce of this island may be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think it will be allowing as much as any person demand The very utmost we can conceive is that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce. Let us then take this for our rule, though certainly far beyond the truth; and allow that by great exertion, the whole produce of the Island might be increase every twenty-five years, by a quantity of subsistence equal to what it at present produces the ratio of increase is evidently arithmetical.
Thomas Malthus
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of the king's bastard, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
J. Henri Fabre (1823-1915)
No man qualifies as a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat.
Socrates
Breeding . . . is evolution directed by the will of man.
N. I. Vavilov, 1935
And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1743)
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture; especially a bread grain . . .
Thomas Jefferson
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
. . . a good past is positively dangerous if it makes us content with the present and unprepared for the future.
Charles Eliot
These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
for which the speech of England has no name
The Prairies, I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch
in airy undulations, far away.
As if the Ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stand still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless forever. Motionless?
No they are unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye,
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South!
William Cullen Bryant
When duty whispers low thou must, The youth replies I can.
R. W. Emerson
Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.
G. Eliot
As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
Henry David Thoreau
A man who is well fed has many problems. A man who is hungry has but one.
Chinese Proverb
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by many to so few.
Winston S. Churchill
I have drunk from wells I did not dig.I have been warmed by fires I did not build.
Anonymous
The highest intelligence of mankind is not reason, but vision.
Albert Einstein
It seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn that, later in life, we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
Petronius Arbiter, 66 A. D.
No, a thousand times no; there does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit to the tree which bares it.
Louis Pasteur
A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.
English Proverb
The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.
Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM
The field of plant breeding actually suffered in a way form the greater knowledge we has acquired. Mendel's work was quickly accepted as an enormous advantage in plant science. It was a definite, tangible thing that seemed to take plant breeding from the arts and place it as a science overnight. It captured the imagination of all workers, and genetic at once became a field offering prestige that both soothed and satisfied. A genetic paper gave new dignity to the author. We boys began to get our hair cut and our shoes shined. The effect on plant breeding was calamitous. Good varieties were still produced, but explorations in the field of practical plant breeding were wholly neglected. A few of us eventually realized that there would come a day when the world would recognize the difference between a good geneticist and a poor one, so we went back to thinking about plant breeding. We have undoubtedly lost the resources of many good minds from this field for a time, but they will be back.
H.V. Harlan One Man's Life With Barley (1957)
