William J. Spillman And The Rediscovery Of Mendelian Laws In The American Context

Abstract

De Vries, Tschermak and Correns are in specialized literature often mentioned as the discoverers of Mendel’s laws on the transmission by genetic inheritance of the characteristics of parent-child organisms. However, on the distant northwestern coasts of the United States, a young agronomist named William J. Spillman arrived at the same results on similar dates independently. Although the works so far published around the figure and the work of Spillman have focused mainly on their aspects and purely scientific contributions or, in their contribution to the birth of the agricultural economy, this work shows that the importance and evaluation of said Work, must be carried out from a multidisciplinary perspective. We show, from an interdisciplinary approach in which the scientific, technological, economic, cultural and informative visions, how Spillman’s scientific research and its results transcended to the political and economic spheres, opened the possibility of to successfully expand basic crops in diverse ecosystems of North American and, finally, to become the key to the immediate turnaround that the federal government’s agricultural policy experienced.

Keywords: Mendel, Scientific Agriculture, United States, Varieties, Wheat, William J. Spillman