Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Potato wart had arrived to all the major European potato-producing countries at the turn of the century as a result of the importing of South American varieties to overcome the late blight attacks that had led to the Irish potato famine.[26] The wart fungus traveled with potatoes from Chile or Peru, infecting European soils cultivated with non-resistant varieties. Though infected potato plants did not appear damaged above the ground, the tip of the stolon (where the tuber is formed) developed a gall instead of a tuber. A severe wart infestation might destroy an entire crop by preventing tuber growth. Soon after the arrival of wart disease in England, some commercial varieties were spotted as being immune to the fungus. In 1909 the English Ministry of Agriculture was supporting field trials that would demonstrate that the immunity of potato varieties didn’t change with changing environments, identifying it as a single Mendelian trait that could be transmitted to other varieties.[27] This work would have important consequences for potato breeding in subsequent years, with breeders aiming at developing varieties resistant to the multiple diseases affecting the potato crop and overcoming the generalized view that disease resistance and high yield couldn’t be combined in the same variety.[28]

^{Figure 3.3 The main Building of the Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft in Berlin-Dahlem, 1936.}

^{(Die Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land und Forstwirtschaft in Berlin-Dahlem, Paul Parey, 1936)}

Wart disease was first detected in Germany in 1908 in Westphalia. By 1927 it was present in every region of the country.[29] In 1915, during World War I, the first field trials for wart resistance in German commercial varieties were undertaken in Münster, Cronenberg, and Lübeck.[30] Only seven varieties among the 169 tested in the years 1915–1918 had the desired immunity. The main problem in conducting such trials was how to efficiently test in the field the huge number of varieties produced by commercial breeders. At least a year was required to raise the necessary tubers, after which susceptibility might be evident in the next season. Immunity could not be proved in less than two or three years of repeated exposure to an infected soil. This was not a suitable method in the years after World War I, when German farmers were growing about 1,500 varieties of potatoes.[31] The BRA, under Appel’s leadership, would strive to solve both problems. Not only would the BRA develop laboratory methods to quickly try a much larger number of varieties as alternative to time-consuming field methods; it also would try to bring order to the seed market by drastically reducing the number of potato varieties available to German farmers. The double strategy of transforming potatoes into laboratory objects and establishing a list of proper varieties to be cultivated would become the hallmark of the work undertaken at the BRA.

Crucially, the difficulties experienced in inducing germination of even a small percentage of sporangia of Synchytrium endobiotiocum—the fungus responsible for wart—undermined any in vitro tests.[32] It was not possible to follow the traditional chemical approach to plant pathology of first identifying the conditions that bring the death of the sporangium in vitro and then transferring such conditions to the field by soil sterilization through chemical fungicides. The control of wart disease was to be achieved by the breeding of immune varieties of potatoes and not by the use of chemical pesticides.

The success of such breeding program relied heavily on the ability to quickly identify immune varieties. Spieckermann and Kotthoff, at the Münster Haupstelle für Pflanzenschutz, were the first ones to develop, in 1925, a simple method of inoculation to test the susceptibility of potatoes to wart disease. They cut potatoes of various varieties into pieces, placed them in a box side by side over a layer of humid sand with the eyes turned up, and covered them with Krebscompost, a compost rich in winter sporangia prepared from warted material.[33] In non-resistant varieties, the infection spread through the eyes and was soon made manifest by the formation of a gall.