Free She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer Page B

good. They were also smooth, large, and white; they stored well over the following winter. Burbank brought them to the 1874 Lunenburg town fair, where people were stunned at whathe had created. The following year, Burbank sold the potato to James Gregory, a seed merchant, for $150.
    The “Burbank Seedling,” as Gregory generously named it, quickly became one of the best-known crops in the United States. A descendant of that variety, the Russet Burbank, carpets much of the state of Idaho. They are the only potatoes that McDonald’s, the biggest purchaser of potatoes in the United States, will accept for its french fries.
    Burbank’s success with his potatoes convinced him that Darwin could guide him to riches. He sold his farm inventory, paid off his small mortgage, and left the stony soils of Massachusetts for California. Later, Burbank would look back in surprise at his rash move. He put it down to some impulsive streak in his ancestry. “In short I was a product of all my heredity,” he wrote.
    Perhaps it was likewise “an inherited sensitiveness about money,” as Burbank liked to call his frugality, that made him decide not to pay for a sleeping berth on the westbound train. He spent nine days curled up on a seat. Looking out at the prairies, he ate sandwiches out of a basket prepared by his mother. Burbank made his way to Santa Rosa, where one of his brothers had settled.
    The plants of California overwhelmed him. The pears were so big that he couldn’t finish eating a single one. Yet Burbank struggled to survive even amidst all that plenty. He threshed wheat in the summer and looked for construction work in the winter. Sometimes he found jobs at nurseries. In 1876, Burbank came down with a fever and was bedridden for days in a tiny cabin, where he survived on milk a neighbor provided him from her cow. “These were indeed dark days,” Burbank later said.
    The following year things improved. Burbank had brought ten of his potato seedlings to California, and his brother let him plant a patch on his land. Burbank put an ad in local newspapers for “this already famous Potato” and found some buyers. His mother and sister moved to Santa Rosa and bought four acres of land, which Burbank began to farm. In his free time, he would hike into the hills, discovering wild plants that botanists had yet to name. Seed companies would pay him for intriguing new species.
    After six years in California, Burbank finally got his big break in 1881. A Petaluma banker named Warren Dutton wanted to get into the prune business and was ready to pay a small fortune for twenty thousand plum trees that would be ready to be planted in the fall. It was an absurd demand, but Burbank figured out how to meet it. He bought almonds and planted them on rented land in the spring. The almonds quickly sprouted into seedlings, whereupon Burbank and a hired crew of laborers grafted twenty thousand plum buds onto them. The buds took hold and grew. When their branches became big enough, Burbank cut the almond branches back. Burbank delivered the trees on time, and Dutton proclaimed him a wizard to anyone who would listen. It was the first time someone described Burbank that way, but it wouldn’t be the last.
    Dutton’s praise helped Burbank’s business explode. But unlike other nurserymen who prospered in California, Burbank rolled much of his profit into experiments. Following Darwin’s guidance, he crossed different varieties to produce new combinations of traits. For his crosses, Burbank used the native California plants that he was becoming familiar with. He also developed a network of contacts in other countries, who supplied him with exotic plants—plums from Japan, blackberries from Armenia—that he could also combine. When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.
    “Something must happen to ‘stir up their heredities,’ as I am fond of saying—to excite in them the variability that normally lies dormant,”