sparrow (Passer domesticus) in urban spaces. His previous postdoc position at the University of Cambridge investigated science and agriculture in the British Empire. Holmes's new book, The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics, explores the creation of chimeral plants and animals. He also publishes on the history of biotechnology, morphology, and natural history.
Holmes applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Graft Hybrid and reported the following:
Although page 99 of The Graft Hybrid does not engage with the book’s titular subject, it does provide an entry point to one of the greatest controversies in the history of biology: whether grafting different plants and animals together could produce new species. Page 99 introduces a botanical power couple, Mabel Rayner and William Neilson Jones, lecturers at Bedford College, London. In 1920 Rayner and Neilson Jones published a textbook that described the famous experiments of Gregor Mendel on pea plants. Mendelian genetics, they claimed, had great practical promise for breeding new plants and animals for agriculture. Grafting only received a brief mention.Visit Matthew Holmes's website.
Reading page 99 alone would give a one-sided view of The Graft Hybrid, and indeed, of the history of biology itself. Alternatives to Mendelian genetics as an agricultural tool persisted across the twentieth century. One of these alternatives was graft hybridization. Over the course of the twentieth century, biologists from around the world claimed to have been able to artificially create an extraordinary array of new species: from strangely colored chickens and salamanders to potato-tomato hybrids. If we read beyond page 99, we find that Neilson Jones also published an influential 1934 book titled Plant Chimaeras and Graft Hybrids. In it, he claimed that it was theoretically possible for the cells of grafted plants to fuse together to create new hybrid species.
The story of the graft hybrid has many twists and turns, which Neilson Jones experienced. While the first edition of his book on graft hybrids was widely praised, its second edition – released in 1969 – was harshly criticized. In the Soviet Union, genetics was under attack as a bourgeois science, with graft hybridization promoted in its stead. Neilson Jones’s fall from grace reflects the larger argument of my book, which demonstrates that belief in the existence of graft hybrids was scientifically respectable until the “Lysenko affair” in the Soviet Union divided biology along ideological lines.
--Marshal Zeringue
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