Luther Burbank quotes
“Every child should have mud pies,
grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild
strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies,
woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields,
pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any
child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of
education.”
― Luther Burbank
― Luther Burbank
“Flowers always make people better,
happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.”
― Luther Burbank
― Luther Burbank
“Listen patiently, quietly and reverently
to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on
that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know.”
― Luther Burbank
― Luther Burbank
“It is well for people who think, to
change their minds ocasionally in order to keep them clean. ”
― Luther Burbank
― Luther Burbank
“We must learn that any person who will
not accept what he knows to be truth for the very love of truth alone is very
definitely undermining his mental integrity... you have not been a close
observer of such men if you have not seen them shrivel, become commonplace,
mean without influence, without friends, and without the enthusiasm of youth
and growth, like a tree covered with fungus, the foliage deceased, the life
gone out of the heart with dry rot and indelibly marked for destruction ---
dead, but not yet handed over to the undertaker.”
― Luther Burbank
― Luther Burbank
Luther Burbank, was born on March 7, 1849 in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
Burbank was the thirteenth of fifteen children in his family. He was educated
at the Lancaster Academy in Massachusetts, where he received the equivalent of
a high school education. He began breeding plants and conducting genetics
research in 1870. In 1871 he produced the Burbank potato which was a blight
resistant species used in Ireland to combat the potato epidemic which had
effected that nation's potato crops and which had results in the emigration of
half of that nation's people. With the money he gained by selling his rights to
the potato, he moved to Santa Rosa, California.
Burbank held the belief that inheritance
was determined by acquired characteristics, which support Lamarch's theory of
genetic variation. The works of Gregor Mendel were unknown to Burbank in his
early career. Burbank's work focused on hybridization and grafting of plant
tissues from one plant to another. Burbank's research focused on making
multiple crosses between native plants and introduced new strains of existing
plants. Later in his career, Burbank lectured on evolution at Stanford
University.
During his years in Santa Rosa, Burbank
developed more than sixty varieties of plums and ten new commercial varieties
of berries. He also developed new species of pineapples, walnuts, and almonds. While
truck crops were Burbank's primary interest, he also worked at developing new
flowering plants. Burbank is given credit for developing the Fire poppy,
Ostrichplume clematis, Shasta daisy, Burbank rose, new varieties of lilies and
ornamental shrubs. Luther Burbank's discoveries of new varieties of plants were
based on careful and time consuming experiments. His development of the white
blackberry required 65,000 unsuccessful crosses before he obtained the desired
result. Burbank
died in 1926 at the age of 77.
References
Asimov, I. (1964). Asimov's
Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: The Living Stories of More
than 1000 Great Scientists from the Age of Greece to the Space Age
Chronologically Arranged. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Howard, A.V. (1951). Chamber's
Dictionary of Scientists. London: Chambers.
Pearson, W., & Bechtel, H.K. (1989). Blacks,
Science, and American Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Sammons, V.O. (1990). Blacks in
Science and Medicine. New York: Hemisphere.
Source:biologie.uni-hamburg.de
Luther Burbank
