Statistics derives its power from classifying data and comparing the resulting distributions. In this paper, I will use two historical examples to highlight the importance of such data practices for statistical reasoning. The two examples I will explore are Franz Boas’s anthropometric studies of native American populations in the early 1890s, which laid the foundation for his later critique of the race concept, and Wilhelm Johannsen’s experiments in barley breeding, which he carried out for the Carlsberg Laboratory around the same time and which prepared the ground for his later distinction of genotype and phenotype. Both examples will show that the manipulation of data depended on complex classificatory practices: the distinction and articulation of “tribes,” “races,” and “family lines” in the case of Boas, and the selection and construction of “populations” and “pure lines” in the case of Johannsen. They also reveal a fundamental difference between data practices in the human and the life sciences: whereas the latter are relatively free to construct populations in the laboratory, the field, or on paper, the former have to rely on social categories shaped by historical accident and self-perception of the subjects under study. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

Somatic hybridization is the particle collider of the biological world: where plant cells stripped of their cell wall are fused to create interspecific crosses containing a huge range of genetic information. This paper charts the origins of somatic hybridization and its rise and fall as a plant breeding technique. During the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of somatic hybrids through cell fusion promised a new era of crop improvement. Yet the promises of somatic hybridization were instead fulfilled by advances in recombinant DNA technology. Rather than cast somatic hybridization as a failed research program, this paper argues that a number of factors significantly slowed, but did not halt, developments in somatic hybridization research from the 1960s; the technique should therefore be considered a dormant biotechnology. Reconstructing the history of somatic hybridization reveals a new history of modern biotechnology beyond genetic modification, dominated by plant physiologists.

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the history of biology and forestry in Portugal. It will focus on the one state-owned cork oak station devoted to forestry research, showing how its foresters and scientists shaped, and relied on, the state-controlled unions, both for producing and distributing varieties of cork oak and for controlling the seeds and plants forest owners used. Portugal played a very special role in the international development of Mediterranean forest genetics during the first half of the twentieth century. Forestry genetics were decisive for the Estado Novo government, and the Alcobaça Station became a model for the future organization of other countries’ applied forestry research centers. The paper shows how the milieu of forestry scientists and breeders played an important role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in Portugal. The paper will explore how these relationships made it possible for the scientists to test, multiply, and distribute the seeds and plants they produced at the laboratory throughout the Portuguese landscape, thus demonstrating the role of scientists as active agents of state formation and landscape transformation within a corporate political economy. The history of the Alcobaça Forest Station is an important example of fascist institution building.

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 systems—nuclear 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 unlikely area of research inquiry, the novel tools it relied upon, and the unusual scientific careers to which it gave rise.

This article argues that "genetic modernism" in seeds was simultaneously a technoscientific and a political project that materialized under wartime Vichy's proto-fascist regime and that contributed to shaping and legitimizing Vichy as a "planner state." The constitution of the genetically homogeneous cultivar as a scientific object, a market commodity, and a state policy object went hand in hand during the Vichy regime. A new biopolitical connection between state and seeds emerged, in which seeds were considered a priority target for state intervention because they were seen as the easiest path toward transforming agricultural practices so as to meet pressing needs for a sufficient and autonomous food supply (autarky). The state acquired the power of life and death over plant genomes in the nation's landscapes and enacted a phytoeugenics that was both positive (aiming to encourage the diffusion of varieties deemed healthy or higher yielding) and negative (aiming to suppress varieties deemed obsolete). The ontology of "genetic modernism" considered living beings as having an intrinsic genetic identity, sealed off from the vagaries of the environment, and favored serial and stable forms of life, which were achieved materially through the production of plant populations composed of isogenotypic individuals (clones, pure lines, F1 hybrids). Such pure line ontology, planned seed-economy practices, and metrological arrangements articulated a biopolitics geared towards superseding a nexus of biocultural crop evolutionary processes under farmers' management with centralized planning of genetic progress. This turned Vichy France into a huge biopolitical laboratory. It also left major legacies in the post––World War II decades.

The peasantry played a central role in National Socialist ideology, as both a source of racial strength and a foundation of the economy. In this paper I explore the extent to which the regime's policies actually favored peasant farming. The first section looks at the overall character of agricultural policy and demonstrates that although peasant farmers were targeted for special assistance from 1933 until 1936, they were neglected thereafter as the economy geared up for war. In the second section I focus upon a particular set of policies——-the regime's attempts to promote the use of high-quality seed——-and show that while farmers as a whole probably gained from these measures, peasants appear not to have benefited differentially. In the third section I examine agricultural officials' attempts to establish a "division of labor" between public-sector plant breeding institutions and commercial breeders. I demonstrate that although the former had been successfully developing new varieties specifically designed for peasant farmers since the turn of the century, this work was henceforth to be curtailed so as not to "compete" with the private sector. In the conclusion I argue that neither the regime's policies on plant breeding nor the highly centralized character of agricultural policy-making can be regarded as specifically fascist.

This paper explores the role of scientists in the building of fascist regimes in Italy and Portugal by focusing on plant geneticists' participation in the Italian and Portuguese wheat wars for bread self-sufficiency. It looks closely at the work undertaken by Nazareno Strampelli at the National Institute of Genetics for Grain Cultivation (Italy) and by Antóónio Sousa da Cââmara at the National Agronomic Experiment Station (Portugal), both of whom took wheat as their prime experimental object of genetics research. The main argument is that the production of standardized organisms——the breeder's elite seeds——in laboratory spaces is deeply entangled with their circulation through extended distribution networks that allowed for their massive presence in Italian and Portuguese landscapes such as the Po Valley and the Alentejo. The narrative pays particular attention to the historical development of fascist regimes in the two countries, advancing the argument that breeders' artifacts were key components of the institutionalization of the new political regimes.