ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relationship between Joe Hin Tjio and Enrique Sanchez-Monge as part of the early history of genetics, paying special attention to the exchange of laboratory practices and experimental materials between cereal and human cytogenetics. At the conjunction of cereal and human research, a major role was played by the chemical substance colchicine, a product extracted from the meadow saffron and a centuries-old therapy for gout. Colchicine has the ability to arrest mitotic cell division at metaphase. The station's 'agricultural programme', as a Spanish reporter called it in 1919, created a huge collection of seeds and a variety of systematic procedures for evaluating seeds and cultivars on the experimental land surrounding the station's building. By the late 1940s, Albert Levan and Tjio had worked together on the fragmentation of plant chromosomes by the action of phenols and some other chemical substances.
