ABSTRACT
Humans began to domesticate plants and animals, and thus began to live with agriculture, around 10,000 years ago (Lee and DeVore 1968). It is only within the last 160 years, following the publication of naturalist Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859 and the subsequent rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance around 1900, following his earlier reports of experiments with hybridizing peas (published 1866), that humankind has been able to move into its present manner of existence with modern agriculture and industrialized societies. The dawn of plant breeding as a science is recorded by Biffen (1905), who describes the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century beginnings of wheat breeding, whereby various traits were introgressed into new varieties by means of hybridization and selection. N.I. Vavilov, in his studies of the origin and geography of cultivated plants (Vavilov 1926) and agroecographical surveys of the main field crops (Vavilov 1957), identified patterns of linkages between adaptive traits in plants and the environment where they were endemic along with the need to start with the right material in the hybridization and selection breeding processes. Despite these 140advances and related knowledge being readily available, the investment in developing effective and efficient ways to identify parental material (possessing the novel alleles so necessary to breeding programs) appears miniscule in contrast to that invested in the collection, acquisition, and subsequent conservation of plant genetic resources (PGR) during the second half of the twentieth century. While calamities such as the Irish potato famine of the eighteenth century and the 1969–1970 epidemic of Southern corn leaf blight in North America vindicated the need for investing in PGR acquisition and conservation, there was still the need to ensure effective methods of discovery to be developed.
