Exceptions may exist: general relativity, developed in near solitude by Albert Einstein, could be one of them, though some writers have argued that the mathematician Hermann Minkowski would have found relativity first if he had not died young. More typical was the experience of the physicist William Thomson, who would become the British physicist Lord Kelvin (an important scientist despite his wildly erroneous predictions about coal supply, which I described earlier). As an eighteen-year-old freshman, proud of his precocious originality, he wrote a paper for the Cambridge Mathematical Journal—only to discover that its conclusions had been, according to Kelvin’s son and biographer, “anticipated by M. Chasles, the eminent French geometrician.” Later Kelvin learned to his chagrin that exactly the same mathematical ideas also had been “stated and proved by [Carl Friedrich] Gauss,” the great German mathematician, and, later still, “that these theorems had been discovered and fully published more than ten years previously by [the British mathematician George] Green.”
Newton and Leibniz, each separately working to develop the calculus, then fighting covertly over priority; Benjamin Franklin, marveling that the freethinking philosopher Claude Helvétius had so often had precisely the same ideas, “even though we had been born and brought up in the opposite parts of the world”; Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, one on an English country estate, one in a malarial bog in the Malay Archipelago, formulating independently the theory of natural selection; Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and (probably) Ernst Stueckelberg, all without knowledge of the others, all managing to tame the unruly infinities of quantum electrodynamics—the list of multiples is distinguished and long, and it contains Norman Borlaug and M. S. Swaminathan.
Imperfect Double
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan—“Swami,” Borlaug called him—became Borlaug’s friend and partner, but one can easily imagine an alternate history in which Swaminathan would have played the leading role. He led the introduction to India of the Green Revolution “package”: the combination of agricultural chemicals (fertilizer and pesticides), carefully managed watering (usually by irrigation), and high-yielding seeds that could respond to both. Pioneered in Mexico in the 1950s, the package would have its greatest impact in Asia, and especially South Asia, where restructured wheat would meet similarly restructured rice. Hundreds of millions of lives would be changed. The predictions of imminent disaster made by Vogt and his disciples would fail to come true, though only at the price of social convulsion. Swaminathan himself would remain little known, especially in the West, although his work had direct impact on more people than Borlaug’s work. Later he sometimes criticized the Green Revolution he had helped to establish. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet, or almost.
He was born in 1925 in what was then the Madras Presidency, an administrative subdivision of British India that encompassed most of what is now southeast India. Mankombu, Swaminathan’s first name, was his family’s ancestral village; Sambasivan was his father’s name; Swaminathan was his personal name. He grew up around his father’s medical clinic and, during school holidays, his grandfather’s rice farm. The family had owned the farm for generations—the land had been given to a long-ago ancestor by the local rajah in recognition of his knowledge of Hindu scriptures.
Swaminathan’s father trained as a surgeon and set up his practice four hundred miles away from Mankombu, in a village, also in the Madras Presidency, which then had no qualified doctor. Cholera, plague, malaria, and other infectious ailments were rampant. Swaminathan’s father set out to combat filariasis, a mosquito-transmitted disease that leads to grotesque swelling of the limbs. (It is also called elephantiasis.) He mobilized schoolchildren to identify mosquito breeding grounds, then asked their parents to fill in stagnant pools and move garbage dumps and disinfect drains and sewers. New cases of the disease ceased to occur—a lesson, Swaminathan said later, in the power of collective action.
It was the time of the Indian independence movement. Swaminathan’s parents, ardent nationalists, hosted the movement’s leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, several times in their travels around India. To show their support for the cause of freeing India from British rule, the family wore homespun clothing and boycotted British goods. Following Gandhi’s precepts, Swaminathan’s father treated everyone who came to the clinic, no matter what their position in society, no matter whether they were able to pay. The British didn’t jail him for his anti-colonial opinions—he was the only trained doctor for two hundred miles.
Pancreatitis struck him suddenly when Swaminathan was eleven. There was no other doctor in the area to treat him. He died on the train to Madras, the nearest city with a hospital. He was not given a Hindu funeral because he had been excommunicated for treating “untouchables,” people from the lower orders. Swaminathan and his siblings were taken in by his father’s brothers. At the age of fifteen he graduated from a Catholic high school and went to college, intending to become a surgeon like his father.
The Second World War disrupted Swaminathan’s plan to study medicine, as did the Bengal famine, among the century’s worst disasters. Bengal was in the northeastern section of British India. The famine began in 1942, when Japan seized Burma (now Myanmar), India’s eastern neighbor and another British colony. Burma had exported rice to Bengal; the conquest put an end to that. By chance, Bengal rice paddies were hit by a fungal disease at the same time. For the colonial government the resultant harvest shortfall was inconveniently timed. Kolkata (then called Calcutta), the Bengal capital, was a supply center for British forces. London had imported a million workers from elsewhere in India to the city to produce uniforms, shoes, containers, ammunition, and other military necessities. To feed this army of laborers, the colonial government requisitioned grain from the countryside. Nobody in power wanted to hear that there wasn’t enough grain to do this. Even as famine mounted, waves of denial rippled through the bureaucracy. After months of insisting that the crisis was due to hoarding—Indian farmers’ purported “tendency to withhold foodgrains from the market” to get better prices—Secretary of State for India Leo Amery reversed course and in November 1943 begged Prime Minister Winston Churchill to send food to Bengal. Churchill ignored the request with a quip about “Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us to do nothing about the war.” No food shipments occurred. About 3 million people starved to death.
Taking his pre-medical courses in southern India, Swaminathan was not directly affected by the famine 1,500 miles away. But the images of the emaciated and dying in Bengal had a powerful impact. He decided to study agriculture, rather than stay in the more prestigious discipline of medicine. Initially his family was dismayed, but Swaminathan held firm. The struggle against British rule was reaching its height, he believed, and the famine had shown that the new nation would need food even more than it needed medicine. India had thousands of medical students but only 160 students seeking advanced degrees in agriculture. He agreed to finish his degree in zoology but afterward enrolled immediately in an agricultural college. Graduating at the top of his class, he won almost every award the school could give, then signed up for post-graduate research at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi.
India became independent on August 15, 1947, two months after his graduation. In a horrific convulsion, the nation immediately split, with two large, separate chunks of what had been northeastern and northwestern India hiving off to form Pakistan. India was largely Hindu; Pakistan was largely Muslim. Spasms of religious violence led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and perhaps 15 million refugees. (After a brutal war in 1971, the eastern half of Pakistan became today’s nation of Bangladesh.) Traveling to Delhi a month after partition, twenty-two-year-old Swaminathan was shaken to see the aftermath—refugee mobs in the train stations, bodies in the streets.
The sprawling green campus of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute was a refuge. Its striking red stone buildings, gathered around a big library wi
th a clock tower, housed the nation’s most advanced botanical laboratories. There Swaminathan’s advisers directed him to work on the Solanaceae, a botanical family that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, tobacco, and both chili and bell peppers. At the same time, he concentrated on learning Dutch—a prerequisite for a UNESCO fellowship to study at Wageningen University, the Dutch national agricultural school. Swaminathan won the scholarship and took ship for Europe in December 1949.
The Netherlands was just recovering from the war; famine in the Hongerwinter (“hunger winter”) of 1944–45 was a fresh memory. The university laboratories lacked heat and sometimes electricity. Swaminathan was asked to switch from eggplants, his focus in Delhi, to potatoes, a Dutch staple. Dutch potato fields were aswarm with parasitic nematodes. Wageningen was trying to fight them by breeding domesticated potatoes to wild, nematode-resistant relatives. But the wild and domesticated species had different numbers of chromosomes, which usually makes successful breeding impossible. Swaminathan figured out a workaround. The discovery was valuable enough to bring him to Cambridge University, in England, where he finished his Ph.D.
It was a propitious time to be a young geneticist at Cambridge. Swaminathan arrived in the fall of 1951, a few months after Francis Crick, a physicist turned molecular biologist at Cambridge, had begun to collaborate with James D. Watson, a U.S. post-doctoral fellow eleven years his junior. Soon they would publish the structure of DNA. Swaminathan’s doctoral research on the genetics of Solanaceae fit neatly into the suddenly created field of molecular biology. Cambridge offered him a position after he finished his dissertation, but he took another offer, as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin.
M. S. Swaminathan in his laboratory in the mid-1950s Credit 85
Again, Swaminathan flourished. Quick, affable, crisply logical, able to juggle multiple lines of inquiry at once, he had a knack for splitting difficult problems into manageable chunks that were each susceptible to the knives of scientific inquiry. As scientists say, Swaminathan had Fingerspitzengefühl—“knowledge of the fingertips”—an intuitive flair for making balky lab equipment and recalcitrant plants do his bidding. His experiments just worked. Articles issued from Swaminathan’s typewriter in an orderly flow and appeared in major journals. Believing that he was destined for a brilliant career, Wisconsin offered him a position as a professor. He turned down the offer, returning to India in 1954 to help his new country.
Although Swaminathan didn’t know it, he was moving into rough terrain. For obvious reasons, Jawaharlal Nehru, the independence-movement leader who became India’s first prime minister, wanted his nation to become strong, prosperous, democratic, egalitarian, and free of foreign domination. In the mode of the times he saw industrialization—the hard path, in energy terms—as the route to this goal. Steel, chemicals, coal, electricity, highways, machine tools—that was what India needed! Huge, busy factories and power plants! India would have had all of these already, Nehru believed, if it had not been stifled by British rule.
Where would the money come from to build up Indian heavy industry? Borrowing large sums from abroad was out of the question—India didn’t have the stores of foreign exchange that would be necessary to repay the loans. Funds for industrialization therefore had to come from India itself. At the time, almost all of the nation’s capital came from agriculture, because about nine out of every ten Indians were small farmers. Creating an industrial economy thus implied skimming off the profits from rural peasants and using that money to build steel mills, power plants, and highways in urban areas. Like Gandhi, Nehru was sympathetic to the plight of poor farmers. Nonetheless, his ideas about development unavoidably led him to drain the agricultural countryside to benefit the industrial cities.
Nehru promised that his new nation would forge its own, uniquely Indian path to development, but he was as much a devotee of science and technology as Truman and Warren Weaver. With the physicist Homi J. Bhabha, Nehru laid out a Wizardly manifesto that echoed every aspect of Truman’s Point Four that had dismayed Vogt and Huxley. “The key to national prosperity, apart from the spirit of the people, lies, in the modern age, in the effective combination of three factors, technology, raw materials and capital, of which the first is perhaps the most important,” Nehru’s statement began. Industrialization can occur “only through the scientific approach and method and the use of scientific knowledge”—the physics, chemistry, and engineering that had created electric grids and radio networks and high-speed railroads. Called a “scientific policy resolution,” the declaration was approved by the Indian parliament, made its way into the Indian constitution, and laid the groundwork for the nation’s large network of technical schools.
But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.
As much as Nehru, Swaminathan wanted India to become a modern, secular nation in which everyone, regardless of origin, had a chance to prosper. At the same time, though, Swaminathan and his colleagues were focused on agricultural research, which implicitly endorsed the idea of investing in the farm sector—an idea supported by the conservative elites who opposed Nehru’s plans for land and caste reform. In response, the Nehru government carefully examined every rupee allocated to farm research, to see whether it should instead be spent on promoting industry. Paradoxically, the research money was scrutinized even more when drought reduced Indian grain harvests in 1956 and 1957, and India began to import wheat from the United States through a special program of what amounted to subsidies. Although the food imports were effectively free, they were a painful demonstration of India’s weakness. Because Nehru believed that India’s freedom would ultimately derive from industrial might, the immediate effect of the agricultural shortfall was for the government to redouble its efforts to build up industry.
After his return, Swaminathan took a position in the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, in the east Indian state of Odisha. Created by Britain just before independence, it was seen as a kind of tacit apology for the colonial government’s failures in the Bengal famine. In its newly constructed laboratories Swaminathan was asked to investigate the possibility of crossing sticky, short-grained japonica rice, the kind of rice eaten in Japan, with fluffy, long-grained indica rice, the type favored in India. Partly because of intensive breeding programs in Japan, japonica was higher-yielding than indica—its spikelets burgeoned with short grain. The idea was to create rice that produced like japonica but looked and tasted like indica. As a result, Swaminathan began thinking systematically about what distinguished high-yielding and low-yielding varieties. After a few months he won a better position at his old base, Delhi’s Indian Agricultural Research Institute. In his new
job at IARI he continued thinking about high-yielding grain, though he turned his attention to wheat.
Wheat has been grown in India for at least four thousand years—archaeologists have found traces of it in Stone Age communities in the Indus Valley. Indian farmers had been working with wheat ever since, gradually creating varieties that were suited to the nation’s climate and its culinary preference for the kind of amber-colored, hard-grain wheat that makes the thin, light-colored, puffy flatbread called chapati or roti. Like their Mexican counterparts, Indian farmers grew a scatter of different varieties in their fields, planting them sparsely to deter rust. At IARI, Swaminathan quickly discovered that these varieties responded to fertilizer so heartily that they lodged—the same problem faced by Borlaug a few years before.
Like Borlaug, Swaminathan decided that the answer was to breed wheat with shorter, stronger straw. Like Borlaug, he searched for short-straw varieties in India’s botanical collections. Although these were much smaller than the massive storehouses in the United States, he found a few short varieties and planted them in test beds at IARI. He discovered, as had Borlaug, that these varieties’ short straw led to small spikelets with little grain. Without access to huge numbers of different varieties, he was unlikely to find the genes he wanted. He kept on crossbreeding. But he also decided to try and make new genes himself.
In 1955 Swaminathan and his IARI collaborators began taking wheat grain to a small particle accelerator at the Tata Institute, a think tank in Mumbai. The accelerator sprayed out a beam of neutrons, which slammed into a target and produced gamma rays: ultra-high-energy photons. The researchers blasted wheat kernels with gamma rays for several hours, hoping that the gamma rays would tear into the DNA in the seeds and induce favorable mutations. In twenty-first-century terms, this was like trying to perform surgery with a chainsaw—a hopelessly crude procedure. In mid-twentieth-century terms, it was the most advanced method available. Most of the resultant plants failed to germinate or died quickly—the gamma rays had smashed up their DNA like wrecking balls. A few showed interesting characteristics, but none were short-strawed, at least that first year. Or the second. Or the third. Because Swaminathan couldn’t get enough financial backing to irradiate and grow seeds in large numbers, the odds of success were especially poor. Like Borlaug in Mexico, he was throwing darts at moving targets. Unlike Borlaug, he could throw only a few darts at a time. Still, he saw no other way to proceed.
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