ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Capitalist Chimeras: The Contemporary Commodification of Grafted Plants

• In Event: Plural Plant and Fungal Worlds

English Abstract

In recent years, Western scientists and biotech firms have explored the possibilities of grafting to produce new crop plants. Physically combining the bodies of different plant varieties or species is now used in propagation, hybridization, and the creation of “graft chimeras,” plants with two or more separate genomes within a single organism. Although these plants are now marketed as new innovations, historians of science are aware that attempts to create such chimeral organisms are not new. In this paper, I argue that chimeras and graft hybrids have undergone a process of commercial and scientific commodification. For much of the twentieth century, plant grafting was largely sidelined in Western science and was associated with the Soviet Union and Lysenko’s discredited biology. Today, grafting has been incorporated into both evolutionary theory and biotechnology. Its practitioners have successfully and explicitly distanced the technique from Lysenkoism and Marxist science. Natural grafting has been used to explain the convoluted evolutionary history of plants, and disease-resistant graft chimeras have been created by breeders in the Netherlands and granted intellectual property rights. Plant chimeras have been reinvented through commodification, moving from pseudoscience to marketable products. Yet commodification comes with its own costs, and chimeras are now subject to commercial secrecy and control.

Author

• Matthew Holmes