Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

By 1907, as a first result of his hybridization work, Strampelli had produced a table of 22 antagonist characters (dominant/recessive) present in wheat: red spike / white spike; brittle root / sturdy root; multiple fiber strands / few fiber strands; rough leaves / smooth leaves; rust susceptibility / rust resistance, and so on. According to Strampelli’s table, two crucial properties, resistance to lodging and susceptibility to rust, behaved like Mendelian characters, prone to be combined and controlled at the geneticist’s will. It is reasonable to suppose that, as in the case of Johannsen, who talked of pure lines as chemical elements, Strampelli’s earlier work with soil chemistry contributed to his Promethean vision of creating new strains by combining hereditary elements as if they were chemical ones.[31] And, as Strampelli’s table shows, chemistry was not the only discipline he considered relevant. The physiological trait that served in his table as a proxy for resistance to lodging was the number of fiber strands present in the stem. It was the microscopic study of this property that allowed Strampelli to present his hybridization work as suitable for publication in the proceedings of the prestigious Accademia dei Lincei.[32] In other words, any good hybridizer should also be a proficient plant physiologist, familiar with the methods of analyzing a plant’s physiological properties, in order to consider the proper options when selecting offspring.

This ability to reduce the complexities of heredity to the duality of dominant/recessive characters has been identified with the possibility of the commodification of life.[33] By instituting a hard genetic identity of the living organism independent of place and environment, formed by immutable genes or the equally immutable pure lines, geneticists opened the field to the mass production of stable life forms, able to “circulate without alterations through extending ‘space of flows,” by their inter-laboratory networks or larger scientific / economic / medical / cultural hybrid networks.”[34] Nonetheless the connections between the hardening of heredity at the turn of the century and the circulation of living objects (the immutable mobiles, to use Bruno Latour’s terminology) have been more affirmed than thoroughly explored. As Christophe Bonneuil suggests, we still need better accounts on how purity is produced and maintained, better narratives on the material practices of breeders and geneticists, in order to understand the conditions for the emergence of a genetic rationality at the beginning of the twentieth century.[35] Here I explore how this emergence was intertwined with a revolution in food production and the building of new political regimes. The work of Nazareno Strampelli allows us to follow the trajectories of the geneticists’ artifacts through their different networks and to perceive their role in the general fabric of, in this case, a fascist society.

Let us, then, take a close look at Strampelli’s practices at his Royal Experiment Station of Wheat Cultivation in Rieti.[36] To cross two different wheat varieties, he began by sowing individual plants in pots, which he then would place in his “hybridization laboratory.” In spring the pots with late varieties would be placed in the sunniest part of the greenhouse, turned south; the ones containing early wheat would be placed in the shadier areas of the laboratory or even in a controlled cold atmosphere. The two varieties would then flower at approximately the same time. The modest hybridization laboratory was thus an ingenious device designed to homogenize time. It was in this lab that Strampelli and his wife, Carlotta, would undertake the painstaking process of artificial pollination. After choosing two or three spikes from a pot, he or she opened the glumes with a scalpel and removed the anthers, taking care not to touch the ovary or the stigma. The spikes were protected from accidental pollination by wind or insects by translucent paper tubes sealed with cotton, allowing for airflow but hindering the fall of undesired pollen on the spike. When female organs were ready to be fertilized, and after cautiously preparing pollen from the chosen variety to avoid any contaminations, Strampelli or his wife would remove the paper tube, open the glume, place pollen on each stigma, and replace the tube. Each spike always held a card registering castration and hybridization date, as well as the composition of the hybrid. Both the registration procedure and the delicate artificial pollination were crucial for guaranteeing the purity of the new genetic product.