The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  The project focused on improving the production of maize. But Stakman had wangled permission to devote a small part of its resources to a subsidiary goal: attacking the stem-rust reservoir south of the U.S. border. If Stakman could breed resistant wheat varieties in Mexico, the fungus would lose its base of support. No longer would it travel the Puccinia highway to the United States. Harrar at its head, the unimaginatively named Mexican Agricultural Program launched in February 1943.

  Everything went wrong. Mindful of Sauer’s strictures, the small Rockefeller team—a handful of researchers and technicians—decided to breed improved versions of local maize varieties that Bajío farmers could plant as they always had. Once these were developed, they would coordinate with Mexico’s own agricultural researchers to disseminate them. But Mexican scientists had a different goal: modernization. They wanted their own hyper-productive hybrids, their own mechanized, high-producing farms. The U.S. Midwest was the model: uniform fields of optimized hybrid maize. Mexican scientists were determined to do away with the chaotic jumble of “contaminated” maize in the hinterlands.

  To these researchers, the Rockefeller program’s plans seemed absurd, even insulting—the norteamericanos were trying to saddle Mexico with the sort of second-rate methods that the United States had already abandoned. The small-scale Mexican farmers that Sauer exalted could better be employed in factories that made goods for middle-class consumers. Forget scratching at the dirt with sticks! We want modern science! For their part, the U.S. scientists thought that the Mexicans were chasing a chimera. Even if the nation’s poor farmers somehow managed to buy and plant hybrid maize, Mexico didn’t have markets organized well enough for them to sell it. “In practice,” the historian Karin Matchett has written, “the attempted collaboration irritated all parties involved.”

  With little cooperation from Mexican officials, the maize researchers had no way to distribute their advances to rural farmers, a critical component of their plan. Under pressure to show results, the scientists eventually gave up on the rural poor and targeted the big commercial farms that Sauer had warned against. Ten years after the program began, it was clear that it had failed to accomplish its original goals. But few at Rockefeller were upset. To general astonishment, Stakman’s stem-rust program, almost an afterthought, had become a world-altering success. Stakman was as surprised as anyone else. Having commitments in Minnesota, he had delegated responsibility for stem rust to Harrar, who in turn had given it to local staff. That staff consisted of a single person: Norman Borlaug.

  In the Bajío

  Borlaug’s initial encounter with Stakman had not gone well. Following Margaret’s suggestion, he asked Stakman if he could study forest pathology for a few months while waiting for the Idaho job to materialize. “Fill in a month or two—between jobs?” Stakman replied, in Borlaug’s recollection. Graduate school, he told Borlaug, is “not like a novel you can pick up and put down. You’ll have to be a bit more serious about it than that, my boy.” And he refused to countenance forest pathology as a subject; Borlaug shouldn’t lock himself into a single discipline. If Borlaug took general crop science, Stakman could offer an assistantship to defray costs. The position: counting stem-rust spores on glass slides. Borlaug accepted his terms. He ended up spending so many hours squinting at spores that he permanently damaged the vision in his right eye.

  The Forest Service job in Idaho never came through. Borlaug researched a fungal disease in box elder and obtained a master’s degree in 1941. Instead of looking for a job after completing his master’s degree, Borlaug’s original plan, he found himself working toward a Ph.D. For his dissertation, he investigated a soil fungus that attacks flax. The subject had a threefold appeal: first, Stakman had grant money to support the research; second, the fungus was a cousin of the box-elder fungus he had already worked with successfully; third, the subject had nothing to do with wheat or stem rust. So many of Stakman’s students were studying both that Borlaug was certain that he would get lost in the crowd. Stakman rolled his eyes but accepted Borlaug’s decision; beneath the brusque, cigar-chomping exterior, Borlaug was discovering, was an exceptionally kind man. Stakman pushed his students hard—but picked them up if they fell. Think big, he said. And he made sure that Borlaug, despite his misgivings, learned something about wheat.

  In the fields next to the departmental building Stakman maintained 40 acres of diseased wheat plants, and made us pit our wits against smut, scab, rust, blast, blight, bunt, wilt, mildew and the rest. Every Saturday afternoon the students and faculty trailed through those acres of sick and dying plants. Stopping at each one, Stakman would stimulate arguments over what we were seeing. The sessions sometimes went for hours; and sometimes got very heated. That was his style. His laboratories and classrooms were open intellectual forums full of fire and light.

  There was a limit to the openness, though. As an undergraduate, Borlaug had taken the usual smattering of general-education courses: English literature, practical psychology, even a course called “How to Study.” As a graduate student, that changed. Except for auditing a semester of beginning French, Borlaug did not take a single course outside of botany and plant pathology. He learned no ecology, no agronomy, no soil science, no hydrology, no geography, no agricultural economics or history. Strikingly, Borlaug took no class in plant breeding, even though Herbert K. Hayes, perhaps the nation’s most eminent plant breeder, taught at Minnesota. Borlaug, like Vogt, became a science guy. But the ecology Vogt focused on was vastly different from Borlaug’s plant pathology.

  As practiced by Leopold and his followers, ecology had a mission: to protect the integrity of the ecosystem by the holistic study of the network of interactions among species. Plant pathology had a completely different mission: removing pests and diseases that impeded human needs. Vogt’s ecology was an exercise in humility and limits; Borlaug’s plant pathology was a methodology of extension. Isolate the subject of study, perform the experiment over and over, then push the result as far as possible—this, Stakman told him, was the path to knowledge that could benefit people.

  Following these principles, Borlaug accumulated more than a thousand samples of fungus-infected flax. From these he obtained pure cultures, which he injected into four-inch pots full of sterile soil. In a dozen experiments reported in his Ph.D. thesis, he planted as many as twenty varieties of flax in the inoculated soil and looked for those that resisted the fungus. Alas, not one flax variety was immune. He was forced to stop while the work was still incomplete—he had taken a job.

  In October 1941, Stakman asked him to come by. Waiting in Stakman’s office was one of Borlaug’s undergraduate professors. The man had left Minnesota for several years to run a laboratory at E. I. du Pont de Nemours, a huge chemical company in Wilmington, Delaware. Now returning to Minnesota, he had a question for Borlaug: What would he think about replacing him at DuPont? The pay was $2,800 a year, much more than Margaret’s proofreading salary. Stakman told Borlaug that he could finish his research in a month, move to Delaware, then write his thesis by night.

  Borlaug was uncertain. DuPont, founded in 1802, had begun by making explosives for the military; recently it had developed synthetic fabrics like nylon, rayon, and orlon. What could an agricultural scientist contribute? In addition, Borlaug still hoped to live in the forests of the Rocky Mountain West. But when he told Margaret about the offer, her reaction was blunt: What alternative do we have? Other firms were not clamoring to hire him. On December 1, 1941, Norm and Margaret left Minneapolis in their only major possession, a 1935 Pontiac sedan they had bought from her parents.

  Margaret and Norman Borlaug at about the time of their wedding Credit 28

  In those days the drive to Wilmington, much of it on rutted country roads, lasted almost a week. Passing through Philadelphia, Norm and Margaret saw agitated crowds on the street. Borlaug asked a passerby what was happening. “Pearl Harbor’s been bombed!” the man said. Borlaug had never heard of Pearl Harbor. Mystified, he drove on to Delaware.
The next day, December 8, was his first day at DuPont. Only then did he learn that the nation was at war.

  Like Vogt, Borlaug wanted to serve his country. But his attempt to enlist in the army was rejected—the military wasn’t interested in married twenty-seven-year-olds with bad vision. In any case, he was soon classified by the War Manpower Commission as “essential to the war effort.” He had to ensure that DuPont’s bacterial cultures were protected from Nazi saboteurs. Borlaug had become, in effect, an employee of the U.S. military.

  After Borlaug safeguarded the company’s petri dishes, he was presented with a long list of tasks. He tested the durability of camouflage paint. He examined the effect of water-purification chemicals on pathogens. He figured out what to spray on cardboard ration cartons to help them survive being dumped in the ocean. He built a “jungle room” of high heat and humidity to assess the rate at which mildew attacked military uniforms. He investigated protective packaging for electronic equipment. He invented a new method for sealing condom wrappers against mold.*2

  Borlaug was reticent about his feelings, except with family; he left no diary and few intimate letters. As with Vogt, one must infer his thoughts from scraps of evidence. He seems to have been discovering that testing paint, however useful to the war effort, had no ambition or grandeur. When he met Stakman and Harrar at a botany conference late in 1942, they told him about work in Mexico, a real long shot but interesting, something that might change the lives of millions. Was Borlaug interested in it? I can’t leave my job, he told them. I’m Essential to the War Effort. Harrar thought there was regret in his voice: Borlaug was bored at DuPont.

  Stakman kept talking to Borlaug about the Mexican Agricultural Program. The project was having trouble finding staff. Stakman and Harrar had interviewed scientist after scientist, and all were too old, or too hard to work with, or too likely to annoy the Mexicans. Borlaug, by contrast, was young, ready for adventure, and altogether genial. Except for his lack of expertise in the subject and nonexistent professional reputation, he was perfect. As the other candidates dropped out, Borlaug’s virtues shone brighter. In June 1943 Harrar asked Borlaug again if he would take charge of stem rust. After consulting his wife, Borlaug agreed. If the Rockefeller Foundation hadn’t asked him to join the Mexican Agricultural Program, he told Harrar, he would have applied for a commission in the navy. Extracting himself from DuPont, arranging to hire a successor, signing a contract with Mexico, obtaining the relevant visas and wartime permissions, and establishing an office in Mexico City took Borlaug, Harrar, and the foundation more than a year—a test of Borlaug’s patience. He left for Mexico on September 11, 1944. Margaret, heavily pregnant with their second child—their first child, Norma Jean (Jeanie), had been born a year before—remained in Wilmington, intending to join him after the birth.

  Borlaug’s first sight of the project was a shock. Two years’ worth of planning and negotiation by the world’s biggest charitable enterprise had established a small main office in a rundown northern suburb of Mexico City; a couple of rooms downtown, borrowed from the Rockefeller Foundation’s far larger anti-malaria program; and 160 acres of scrubby, infertile land an hour east of town, at the Autonomous University of Chapingo. The main office held the Mexican Agricultural Program’s four full-time U.S. employees: Borlaug; Harrar; Edwin Wellhausen, a highly regarded maize breeder; and William Colwell, a newly graduated soil scientist from Cornell. The downtown office was staffed by a single receptionist who controlled the project’s most valuable physical asset: a telephone line capable of reaching the United States. The Chapingo testing ground not only didn’t have a greenhouse or laboratory, it didn’t have fields. One of Borlaug’s first tasks was to lay out boundaries on the site for fields, roads, and (potential) irrigation lines.

  In part, the foundation had posited that a small research group could have a big impact because it would need only to introduce Mexicans to superior U.S. methods. In the spring of 1944 Harrar had planted some of the most advanced U.S. hybrid maize, wheat, and beans on a plot at Chapingo. Borlaug saw the results in October, after his arrival. All three crops had been nearly wiped out by disease, insects, and unseasonable frost. A few wheat plants had survived, but they had produced almost no grain—for some reason, the northern varieties couldn’t bear in southern conditions. “This was our first inkling that raising crops in Mexico might differ from anything we expected,” Borlaug told Vietmeyer. “We’d assumed that our seeds would perform as they did back home. Suddenly it seemed we shouldn’t be so sure of ourselves. This place was smarter than we thought.” Harrar told Borlaug to drive further outside the city, find a farm with better soil, obtain permission to work there from the landowner, and try again with more wheat.

  Borlaug did what Harrar asked, but his lack of preparation was coming home to him. “I was frightened,” he said later. “I got sick, and I stayed sick for about three weeks or a month with the usual tourist thing, except that I seemed to get them twice as hard as anybody else. And I’m sure, many times during that first month, if I could have gotten my job back at DuPont, I would have left and returned to DuPont.”

  Adding to his unhappiness was news from Wilmington. On November 9, 1944, Margaret had given birth to a boy with spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord fails to close properly, remaining open to the air in an exposed bulge on the baby’s lower back. In severe cases the flow of cerebrospinal fluid is blocked, to fatal effect. The baby had a severe case. (Today spina bifida can usually be treated.) Margaret had never been allowed to touch him; visits consisted of staring through glass at the unresponsive, intubated child. When Borlaug arrived in Wilmington, he told his wife he would quit the project and return to DuPont. She would have none of it. “My husband has a future,” Margaret said, according to Vietmeyer. “My baby has none. You go back; I’ll come when I can.” Two days after Christmas, grieving and guilty, Borlaug returned to Mexico.

  In February doctors urged Margaret to leave for the sake of her daughter. Clinging to Jeanie, she took the train south. Norm had found an apartment in the center of the city. Margaret found some relief in cleaning and arranging it. Jeanie had a bedroom of her own for the first time. And the whole family loved the sun that washed through the windows and the busy street life and the markets with their smells of chiles and churros and spicy Mexican chocolate. Still, the thought of their second child was a terrible, constant weight.

  Work was a solace. In March 1945 Harrar told Rockefeller that he couldn’t simultaneously direct the entire program and work with Borlaug to create rust-resistant wheat. Nor could Stakman pick up the slack. Despite his inexperience and poor Spanish, Borlaug would have to take charge of the wheat program—Harrar would help when possible.

  In most cases, farmers in the Bajío planted their wheat in October or November, a few weeks before winter frosts. The seeds then sprouted and developed into four- or five-inch seedlings that remained dormant in cold weather. After winter, when temperatures rose, the plants resumed growth, flowered, and produced grain; they were ready for harvest by late spring or early summer. Wheat produced in this manner is called winter wheat. In other parts of the world, farmers also grow spring wheat: sown in the spring, harvested in the fall. Winter wheat varieties can’t flower until they are exposed to a period of cold weather—a process called “vernalization”—whereas spring wheat varieties flower as soon as possible, without needing to experience cold weather. Winter wheat is typically more productive and nutritious than spring wheat. But spring wheat can thrive in places where winter is too cold or dry for winter wheat; it also grows more quickly, giving farmers time after harvest to plant a second crop (maize, say, or potatoes) in the same field.

  Conditions in the high mountain valleys of the Bajío were less than ideal for winter wheat (cold, dry winters) but favorable for spring wheat (warm summer days, plentiful rainfall). Nonetheless, farmers rarely grew spring wheat there, because P. graminis rose up in the summer rains. Winter wheat could be harvested in the spring,
before the annual onslaught of stem rust. Even with this precaution, the fungus wiped out as much as a fifth of the harvest every year. Wheat farming in Mexico, Borlaug had come to realize, was basically an exercise in rust management.

  Unsure of how to proceed, Borlaug decided to tour the high plains southwest of Mexico City, looking for local wheat strains and farming methods that seemed able to fend off stem rust. He went in March 1945, soon after being entrusted with the wheat program. Dismayingly, the local wheat he saw proved to be almost as disease-stricken as the wheat planted by the Rockefeller scientists. Farmers planted a mix of varieties—tall and medium, red and white grain, early and late ripening, often ten to fifteen types in a field—hoping that a few would escape the fungus. And they sowed the crop sparsely, the plants widely separated, hoping to slow down stem rust’s spread. Incredibly, Borlaug learned, some farmers refused to water their fields, “to minimize the losses caused by rust.” Sowing thinly, planting a random jumble of varieties, and deliberately inducing drought conditions were terrible practices—it was like trying to prevent a heart attack by starving yourself to death. Yet he could see why Mexican farmers did it. Some farmers’ plots were irrigated and covered by thick, uniform plantings of high-yielding varieties. And P. graminis had engulfed them all.

  Wandering through villages, Borlaug and two Mexican research assistants snipped off about eight thousand heads of wheat that looked different from each other—that might be separate varieties. Back in Chapingo, they hand-harvested the grain. A typical head of wheat consists of twelve to fourteen “spikelets,” each with two to four seeds. Borlaug thus had a bank of about 100,000 seeds. Helpful officials in the U.S. government had sent more than 600 foreign wheat varieties to the project: another 10,000 seeds. The three men put each batch from each variety in labeled envelopes. The plan was to plant all 8,600 varieties—in spring, the season farmers avoided—and watch rust attack them. The hope was that some might be resistant, and that Borlaug could use these as a base to breed better varieties.*3