For all its qualities, the
The use of pedigree selection had become a major tool for breeders at the turn of the century. Following the example provided by animal breeders and their studbooks, plant breeders made now use of detailed records identifying the genealogy of each individual plant cultivated in their plots. Through pedigree selection, breeders produced varieties selected for some important feature, such as pest resistance, early ripening, or good milling properties.
In 1903—the year Strampelli began his work in Rieti—the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen published the results of his famous experiments with beans, drawing the distinction between genotype and phenotype. Whereas the Vilmorins and other breeders defined the stability of their lines of wheat by referring to repeated rounds of selection, Johannsen defined his “pure lines” of beans in Mendelian terms, as products of self-fertilization of homozygotic organisms.[24] Besides the theoretical breakthrough represented by Johannsen’s experiments, he seemed to have demonstrated the uselessness of making selections from pure lines constituted of genetically homogenous individuals.[25] These pure lines would become central in promises of standardizing agricultural practices, for their homozygosity guaranteed they would always react the same way in the same given environment.[26] They promised the end of the variable and unreliable world of traditional landraces, the local varieties used and produced by farmers, replacing it with a set of standardized genetic products with predictable fixed behavior. More than that, while landraces acquired properties (e.g., the
Using pedigree selection, Strampelli followed two parallel strategies. He began planting several highly productive imported varieties of wheat in a rented experimental plot in the most humid area of the valley, hoping to select those able to resist its highly adverse conditions. At the same time, he made selections of the traditional
Since selection was not enough, Strampelli complemented it with hybridization in order to combine characters from different varieties. Like the Vilmorins, Strampelli began his hybridization work before he had heard of the rediscovery of Mendel’s experiments by de Vries, Correns, and Tschermack.[28] Nevertheless, as early as 1905 he became acquainted with Mendel’s laws, which offered him a quantification of his own observations of disjunctions in the second generation. After that he would consider himself a devoted follower of the mythic founding father of genetics, and would even named one of his wheat strains