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

full-page ad for Budweiser, Burbank stands in his garden, holding out a rose for a mailman to smell. Both Budweiser and Burbank’s varieties, the ad declared, were “great contributions to good taste.”
    In the picture, Burbank has a grandfatherly smile, a shock of gray hair, a starched collar, and a black tie. The image belonged to an earlier chapter in the history of heredity, when breeders could use their intuitions to produce new fruits and flowers, becoming masters of forces they didn’t understand. By the 1940s, when the beer ad appeared, heredity meant something very different. It was now a precise molecular science in the hands of some, and a monstrous rationale for oppression and genocide in the hands of others. Even the plants and yeast that went into Budweiser beer in the 1940s had become products of scientific breeding, rather than of Burbank’s old wizardry.
    There is another picture created after Burbank’s death that still feels fresh.The painter Frida Kahlo paid a visit to Burbank’s garden in 1930. She had moved from Mexico to San Francisco a few months earlier. Her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, had accepted a commission to paint murals for American patrons, the first of which would capture the spirit of California. Kahlo and Rivera took the short drive from San Francisco to Santa Rosa to visit the home of a hero of the state. Burbank’s widow, Elizabeth, gave the couple a tour around the grounds, showed them the cedar underwhich Burbank was buried, told them stories about her late husband, and gave them some photographs of him to take with them.
    Kahlo painted Burbank on a stark, tan California landscape. High clouds moved across the sky, and behind him grew a pair of trees. One tree was small, with oversize fruits. The other grew clusters of balls in different colors, perhaps patterned after one of Burbank’s mother trees. From the knees up, Burbank looked like he does in many photographs, with a tranquil expression on his face, wearing a dark suit and holding a plant. In this case, he’s holding a philodendron, a vinelike plant with lobed leaves that Kahlo painted to be as big as his chest. Below the knees, Burbank was transformed by Kahlo’s powerful imagination. His legs disappeared into the stump of a tree. Kahlo cut away the earth to reveal the tree’s roots, which pierced the head, the heart, the stomach, and the legs of a corpse.
    Burbank had no children of his own who could carry his hereditary particles after his death. His fame eventually faded. But many of the varieties that he developed continued to grow, to make seeds of their own, and to be replaced by their offspring. Some, like the Burbank potato, bear his name. Others grow namelessly, Burbank’s handiwork having been long forgotten. He had found an immortality here on Earth, his work and his plants extending their existence in intimate replication.
    A few months before he died, a reporter paid Burbank a visit to ask him about religion. Burbank was such a familiar figure in the United States that reporters would ask his opinion about everything from jazz to crime. At one point in the interview, Burbank said that Jesus had been “a wonderful psychologist,” and an infidel to boot. “Just as he was an infidel then, I am an infidel today.”
    Now the river of letters that poured into Burbank’s house turned furious. Prayer groups formed to beseech God to help Burbank see the light. To respond to the attacks, Burbank arranged to give a speech—a sermon, really—at the First Congregational Church of San Francisco on the last Sunday of January 1926. More than 2,500 people crammed the pews.
    The seventy-six-year-old Burbank told them that he was no atheist. He subscribed to what he hoped would someday become a religion of humanity,worshiping a God “as revealed to us gradually, step by step, by the demonstrable truths of our savior, science,” he said to his audience. Burbank didn’t see the point of wasting time pondering