A SCULPTOR OF LIVING PLANTS

THE DEW still glistens on the wheat growing on this experimental plot at the Plant Breeding and Genetics Institute in Odessa. It is early morning but there is a plant breeder already checking and rechecking the effect of the night's weather on the plants. This new variety of wheat is not yet named, but even an inexperienced eye can see that it towers above its neighbors and, notwithstanding the heavier ear, its stem is straighter and stronger. It is not simply an improved plant but a new variety of hard winter wheat that has taken selectionist Fyodor Kirichenko years of patient and painstaking work to develop.

This Ukrainian botanist is one of the men responsible for the remarkable work being done in the Soviet Union to improve existing wheat varieties and develop new ones. Of the 276 winter and spring wheat varieties grown in the USSR, 207 are of Soviet origin.

Farmers in the southern steppes of the Ukraine had long dreamed of the kind of wheat Kirichenko developed—a hardy type that could withstand heat and cold and yield rich returns under inclement conditions. The southern steppelands of the Ukraine are rich, but moisture is lacking; rain is rare in these parts. Summers are hot and winters are severe, and in spring the young shoots have to be able to take sudden temperature changes and unexpected frosts.

Because it is hardier and its yield higher, Ukrainian farmers in the steppe belt have long preferred to grow winter wheat in spite of the fact that its soft grain is inferior to hard spring wheat. There is more protein in the grain of hard spring wheat, and it makes a better quality of flour. It also sells for a considerably higher price and is in greater demand both at home and in foreign markets. But with all these merits, the harvest yield is low, and it has therefore been sown only sparsely in the Southern Ukraine and in the highly fertile Krasnodar and Stavropol territories of the Russian Federation. As a matter of fact, the hard variety is grown on only 10 per cent of the world's wheat acreage.

Fyodor Kirichenko conceived the idea of combining the best qualities of soft winter wheat and hard spring wheat. This meant changing the characteristics of the plant radically and giving it altogether new properties. The experiment had been tried by many scientists before him without success.

He began working at the Plant Breeding and Genetics Institute in Odessa twenty-five years ago under the tutelage of the eminent biologist and academician Trofim Lysenko.

The varieties of winter wheat then sown on the Ukrainian steppes were poor. Some of them thinned out considerably during the wintering period and at times were completely destroyed by frost; others yielded small, poor-quality grain and suffered from rust and other diseases. A new, hard, high-yielding variety was needed.

After some years of intensive research, the young selectionist evolved two new varieties of winter wheat—Odesskaya-3 and Odesskaya-12—adapted to the harsh steppe climate. They proved winter-hardy and drought-resistant and were sown over an increasingly larger acreage from year to year.

The fame of the new wheat variety spread quickly beyond the Ukraine to farm regions in the North Caucasus, Moldavia and elsewhere. Now it is grown on 17 million acres of state and collective farmland and gives the country an additional two million tons of wheat each year. Its yield exceeds that of the old varieties by 220 pounds per acre, and when winter growing conditions are favorable, by as much as 600-700 pounds.

But the positive qualities of the new wheat did not blind Kirichenko to its flaws. Odesskaya-3 lodged in rainy years and Odesskaya-12 ripened late and yielded low returns in dry years. He began to work with a new variety, a much altered and supplemented Odesskaya-12. After subjecting the plant to intravarietal crossbreeding, he and his co-workers worked out a series of fantastically delicate operations in familial seed selection. The result was another winter wheat variety, Odesskaya-16. It yields larger harvests, is more resistant than the parent seed to frost and drought, ripens earlier, gives from 2200 to 2600 pounds of wheat per acre and an even higher yield for individual sections, and makes a better quality of flour.

But the new winter wheat varieties developed by Kirichenko still had the basic failing—their grain was soft and inferior to the hard spring wheats. His next experimental goal was to make the soft winter wheat hard, to convert the farinaceous grain into a plump, amber type. After twelve years of repeated failure, he and a group of scientists under his direction developed a seed that stood up under laboratory and field tests and flourished in actual growing conditions.

He named the new variety of hard winter wheat Michurinka in honor of Ivan Michurin. It was a tribute to the great Russian remainder of nature whose theoretical work showed Kirichenko how to control the complex biological processes of plants.

Michurin ranks with Darwin, Luther Burbank and other great naturalists. He developed more than 300 varieties of fruit and berry plants now grown in many parts of the Soviet Union. As a result of his work fruit growers have been able to push out to the colder, more northerly parts of the country.

Out of his rich experience in plant breeding, Michurin proved, theoretically and practically, that it was possible to control the development of plant organisms and so direct their heredity and variability as to make them more useful to man.

Soviet biologists like Fyodor Kirichenko are constantly proving Michurin's thesis that man "can force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and along a desired direction."

Successful plant breeding depends in large measure on the materials the selectionist starts with. For his work on Michurinka, Kirichenko collected and, as a matter of fact, created, his initial seeds. He used varieties of hard spring wheat from the worldwide collection of the All-Union Institute of Plant Growing in Leningrad, local varieties, and winter wheats he developed himself, particularly Odesskaya-3, which served as the source of the new hard winter wheat.

As the theoretical basis for developing the new variety he employed Michurin's principles of interspecific hybridization. He crossed high-yield hard spring wheats with frost-resistant winter wheats. The hybrid obtained was sown in the autumn. After the crop was harvested, the seeds were thoroughly selected and their qualities studied and appraised. Then the hybrids were crossed a second time with soft winter wheats.

In its productive and frost-resistant qualities, this variety compares favorably with the best winter wheats. Its grain surpasses that of soft wheats by a large margin in protein content, translucence and other desirable characteristics. Before long the Ukrainian steppes and other farm areas of the Soviet Union will be producing bumper harvests of this top-quality wheat.

Fyodor Kirichenko has been called a sculptor of living things. And the comparison is apt, with only a little qualification. This gifted plant breeder works with an artist's inspiration, but he can foresee his finished creation more definitely and exactly than the artist. In outlining the problem, Kirichenko already sees the solution sharply defined. He must, however, work within the strictly defined limits of the given plant; he cannot subtract or add, as can the sculptor. But like the artist, aside from such extensions of his hand as a brush for transferring pollen, or a pair of tweezers, his tools are imagination, knowledge and unbelievable patience.