Biotechnology and the Politics of Plants

Disciplining Time

Matthew Hodges, Matt Hodges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000403367
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Biotechnology and the Politics of Plants explores the mysterious phenomenon of 'apomixis', the ability of certain plants to 'self-clone', and its potential as a revolutionary tool for agriculture and enhancing food security, that may soon be a reality. Through historical anthropological and ethnographic study, Matt Hodges traces the development of the CIMMYT Apomixis Project, a prominent frontier research initiative, and its reinvention as a leading public-private partnership. He analyzes the fast-moving historical transition from public sector, mixed plant breeding approaches grounded in genetics, to a contemporary era of agricultural biotechnology and genomics where PPPs are a leading format, and explores how social contexts of research shape how knowledge is produced, as well as what remains 'unknown', and constrain the development of an 'Apomixis Technology'. The chapters present an inventive approach informed by the anthropology of time, science and technology studies, and dialogue with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Paul Rabinow, Hannah Arendt, Andrew Pickering, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Hodges outlines novel ways of integrating notions of history and becoming, and considers how apomixis offers up an alternative image of thought to theoretical concepts such as the well-known 'rhizome'. The book makes a valuable contribution to both the growing social scientific literature on genomics and biotechnology, and recent anthropological debates on time and history.

1The politics of emergence

The quest for an Apomixis Technology

For more than 60 years plant breeders and scientists have sought to create the holy grail of modern plant breeding—a crop plant that can clone itself. A mysterious process known as apomixis exists among plants as familiar as the dandelion, whose hieroglyphic aura of concealed meaning science aims to penetrate (van Dijk et al. 2009). Such ‘wild’ plants can reproduce asexually and release seeds containing a copy of the maternal plant’s DNA, which grow into a ‘clone’ of the original plant. Introduce this into maize or wheat, scientists propose, and you will forge a crop plant that can self-clone—and revolutionize the way in which humans grow their food (Hojsgaard 2020; Spillane et al. 2004). From the Soviet Union to Mexico, India and Australia to the United States, this quest has stirred the imaginations of scientists, plant breeders, governments, corporations and wealthy funders alike. To date, an apomictic food crop remains tantalizingly out of reach, as if on some other frequency. Researchers are not discouraged. Year after year, new findings shed light on the secrets of apomixis and seemingly bring this goal closer, although progress can be frustratingly slow and unpredictable. But the availability of technologies such as ‘targeted gene editing’ or ‘laser capture microdissection’, leading scientists argue, will advance our understanding. And one day, they claim, this will ‘ultimately lead to the installation of apomixis in crop plants’ (Conner and Ozias-Akins 2017:29)—with profound and radical consequences.

This narrative traces one actualization of this quest—a pioneering and at times controversial public sector and CGIAR research programme, the ORSTOM-CIMMYT Apomixis Project (OCAPo), and its metamorphosis into the ambitious ‘ApoCORN’ public-private partnership (PPP).¹ With goals worthy of the Apollo programme of the 1960s—but with nothing like the funding—a small team of French scientists, between 1994 and 2009, sought to revolutionize human food crops. For some, their aspirations point the way forward for agricultural biotechnology in the face of the climate emergency—in theory, apomictic wheat or maize could usher in a new era in global food security. Here I take a historical anthropological perspective on the vicissitudes of apomixis research, exploring how and why the OCAPo and ApoCORN took specific cultural, political economic and, importantly, temporal forms, and the impact on their development and success. To these ends, I take inspiration from social scientific and philosophical debates on temporal emergence, posthumanism and agricultural biotechnology, to make the case that a temporally nuanced approach helps anthropologists conceptualize both frontier research projects, as well as the actions of the plants themselves, and might be useful for others as well. How time was thematized and increasingly disciplined across these conjoined frontier research projects was central to their development and an anthropological perspective illuminates this. And within the projects’ temporally emergent regimes for producing knowledge, the actions and differential temporalities of plants, their vegetal becomings and their generative politics were of central importance.² As a result, I also take the plants involved, as conceived by scientists and breeders, and in anthrophilosophical terms, as a spur for reflection and conceptual innovation.

What is apomixis? Apomixis is the ability of certain plants to reproduce asexually—or self-clone—through their seeds. It exists chiefly in ‘wild’ plants, but a small group of scientists across the globe are working to introduce it into staple food crops. Apomixis is considered a potentially revolutionary agricultural technology which could deliver the ability to clone F1 hybrid seed—the mainstay of modern food production. To understand why, we need to know something about how plants reproduce, how humans breed plants for food, and in particular, the importance of hybrid seed—and the implications of apomixis for them. Hybrid seed is the outcome of cross-pollination between two compatible plants. It normally results from a strategic breeding process, whereby a farmer or commercial breeder selects two plants with interesting characteristics and tries to combine them in an offspring. Today, ‘hybrid seed’ usually refers to seed produced on a large scale for commercial ends, but farmers and plant breeders have created it informally for much longer. Hybridization between plants can also take place without human intervention and autonomous ‘hybridization events’ between plant varieties or related species were historically important for the development of both maize and wheat (see Glémin et al. 2019). Hybrid seed—newly created, potentially unstable—is often contrasted with ‘open pollinated’ seed, which stems from a plant variety whose characteristics are relatively fixed after careful breeding over a number of generations and so breeds ‘true to type’.³ In sum, hybridization is part of the repertoire of plant reproduction techniques that humanity has adapted and coproduced with plant varieties over the millennia since farming emerged in the Neolithic—and in some way, potentially, beforehand—although it has come to commercial prominence since the early twentieth century.

F1 (Filial 1) hybrid seed is a special type of hybrid seed. It is the product of cross-pollination of two distinct plants or ‘cultivars’⁴ with desirable characteristics developed specifically for plant breeding. Imagine a plant breeder notices particularly valuable features in two different plants of the same variety. Over a number of years, she self-pollinates each plant in isolation—eventually over several generations the seed will hopefully produce almost identical plants. When this happens, the result is known as a ‘pure line’. The goal in producing F1 seed is to combine these desirable characteristics in the first (F1) generation of seed through a biological process known as heterosis or ‘hybrid vigour’. When heterosis strikes, the new cultivar is empowered with unusually enhanced qualities that surpass the desirable qualities of the parent plants. Importantly, F1 hybrids do not reproduce ‘true to type’ and their hybrid vigour quickly dissipates. For example, the seeds of a vigorous F1 tomato plant that shoot autonomously the following year in the gardener’s allotment may be spindly and bear no fruit. They are also expensive to produce, and labour intensive, as pure lines take years of cultivation and need to be carefully maintained so that F1 seed can be produced each season. The ownership of both F1 hybrids and pure lines is therefore guarded and protected, and the seed is more expensive as a result. Successful F1 hybrid crop plants are of significant commercial value, due to these enhanced qualities, and are marketed and sold to farmers, often by large seed corporations with a global reach. And the prominence of these corporations—Bayer AG (including Bayer CropScience and Monsanto), Groupe Limagrain, Yoyodyne, Inc., Pioneer Hi-Bred International (Corteva), Syngenta AG and others—owes much to the widespread adoption of F1 seed, that went hand in hand with the spread of industrial farming.

Part of the agrarian potential of apomixis lies in the genetic preservation or ‘fixing’ of hybrid cultivars. If we could transfer the mechanism of apomictic reproduction into crop plants, scientists theorize, we would effectively create a self-cloning technology (Spillane et al. 2004). Very few major food crops reproduce apomictically (‘self-clone’). The introduction of apomixis—from the Greek ᾰ̓πό, ‘away [from]’ and μῐ́ξῐς, ‘mixing’—into F1 hybrid seed would enable the cloning of these hybrids and the preservation of their unique genomes, along with the pure lines from which they are produced. Put simply, apomictic F1 hybrids and pure lines would reproduce almost identically over the generations, and this innovation would radically change the way in which hybrid seed, and new varieties of crop plants, are produced. The potential of an ‘Apomixis Technology’ is widely acknowledged by scientists, and research has been the subject of significant research and development (R&D) investment by the public and private sectors. Benefits and drawbacks are claimed for a range of end users, from resource-poor farmers to transnational seed corporations, depending on the kind of technology developed (Bicknell and Bicknell 1999; Conner and Ozias-Akins 2017; Spillane et al. 2004; Van Dijk et al. 2016). However, its feasibility and implications are contested and, to date, attempts to breed or engineer apomictic crop plants have been unsuccessful. But the quasi-utopian vision, with its halo of cornucopia and hard scientific basis, continues to inspire both researchers and investors.

The travails of apomixis research are a topic on which the anthropology of science and technology casts illuminating light. This narrative is a work of anthropology—but it is written in a style that opens onto other audiences such as scientists and policymakers. Anthropological perspectives are notable for their ethnographic focus on the social, political economic and material conditions under which scientific research takes place. We explore ethnographically the actions of scientists and other human actors—but also the active role of the non-human in scientific research, be that the vibrant materiality of physical substances or the ‘agency’ of life forms such as plants. As scientists and plant breeders both know, the non-human has a life and character of its own, and can confound and frustrate expectations and plans. This focus on performativity and the relations between researchers, plants and other, at times more powerful influences enrols another dimension—that of time. Consideration of temporality is central to both conducting and writing about frontier research, which adheres to the new like a virus seeking its host, as we will see. Finally, discussion of apomixis also requires the transposition of botanical and scientific discourses and their redescription as emergent from socio-technical practice. But the concepts of scientists are themselves of utility to anthropology. This redescription therefore comes about through a synergy and creative alliance between scientific and anthropological discourse, which actualizes this relation in anthropological concepts that necessarily expand and adapt as a result (Viveiros de Castro 2014:187–191). This challenge unfolds as the narrative progresses—but it is important to acquire a preliminary level of scientific and technical competence in apomixis and plant breeding to secure the foundations for discussion.⁵ Before elaborating further on anthropological matters, let us look again, more closely this time, at F1 hybrid seed and the case for an Apomixis Technology.

F1 hybrids and the cloning of plants

F1 hybrids are the mainstay of intensive agriculture and commercial food crops. As we now know, these commercial hybrids are created through interbreeding two ‘pure lines’ of a crop plant such as wheat or maize, which contain valuable traits. The pure lines are stabilized by inbreeding over many generations so that a plant’s DNA transmits through sexual reproduction with minimal disturbance or mixing. (Such mixing is a normal consequence of meiosis, the mingling of genomes that lies at the heart of sexual reproduction in plants.) When two pure lines are interbred experimentally to combine desirable characteristics, sometimes ‘hybrid vigour’ is the result. In such cases, the new hybrid—the F1—is endowed with unusual strengths, such as drought resistance, high yields or high uniformity in appearance and size, that render such plants suitable for agro-industrial harvesting and markets. These strengths surpass the combined qualities of the original pure lines. However, after one or two more generations of sexual reproduction, hybrid vigour in the new F1 plant dissipates due to the mixing and mingling of its DNA. As a result, to produce F1 hybrid seed, seed corporations have to go through the breeding process again and again—crossing pure lines to produce hybrid vigour—which is time consuming and expensive (Kingsbury 2009).

Plant scientists theorize that an Apomixis Technology would enable corporations to clone F1 hybrid seed, and recent research has provided empirical proof of this principle (Bicknell and Bicknell 1999; Sailer et al. 2016). The technology would permit improvement of hybrid seed varieties for modern agricultural systems, as the cloning capability would enable the fixing and retention of a wider range of hybrid seed in seed banks, and a wider variety of pure lines and other plants. These could all be used selectively for breeding. It could also facilitate the strategic adaptation and rapid production of varieties capable of supporting food security, faced with the unpredictable consequences of the climate emergency. An Apomixis Technology is also likely to significantly reduce the costs of producing hybrid seed and so increase profits for seed corporations, given that F1 hybrids are a chief source of revenue (see GRAIN 2001).⁶ Some argue that it would...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• 1 The politics of emergence
• 2 The quest for apomictic maize at CIMMYT
• 3 Disciplining time within ApoCORN
• 4 Epilogue
• References
• Index