Article ID: CBB001022627

The “Plant Drosophila”: E. B. Babcock, the Genus Crepis, and the Evolution of a Genetics Research Program at Berkeley, 1915--1947 (2009)

unapi

This paper explores the research and administrative efforts of Ernest Brown Babcock, head of the Division of Genetics in the College of Agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley, the first academic unit so named in the United States. It explores the rationale for his choice of "model organism," the development---and transformation---of his ambitious genetics research program centering on the weedy plant genus named Crepis (commonly known as the hawkbeard), along with examining in detail the historical development of the understanding of genetic mechanisms of evolutionary change in plants leading to the period of the evolutionary synthesis. Chosen initially as the plant counterpart of Thomas Hunt Morgan's Drosophila melanogaster, the genus Crepis instead came to serve as the counterpart of Theodosius Dobzhansky's Drosophila pseudoobscura, leading the way in plant evolutionary genetics, and eventually providing the first comprehensive systematic treatise of any genus that was part of the movement known as biosystematics, or the "new" systematics. The paper also suggests a historical rethinking of the application of the terms model organism, research program, and experimental system in the history of biology.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001022627/

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Authors & Contributors
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg
Ceccarelli, David
Holmes, Tarquin
Mohr, Stephanie Elizabeth
Teicher, Amir
Green, Lisa Anne
Concepts
Genetics
Evolution
Biology
Experimental organisms
Plant genetics
Laboratory techniques and procedures
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Kyoto (Japan)
Japan
Soviet Union
Mexico
Institutions
University of California, Berkeley
Institut Pasteur, Paris
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