Nuala Caomhánach (Genf)

Ort: Deutsches Museum, Seminarraum Forschung I

Zeit:  Montag, 06.07.26, 16-18 Uhr s.t.

Deep Green: Rewriting the Evolutionary and Environmental History of Plants

 In 1992, over lunch at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Brent Mishler, an American professor of botany, reflected on the “poisonous atmosphere” of plant systematics to his fellow
botanists. Systematics is the field of biology that classifies species into groups and organizes those groups into relational systems—such as an evolutionary one.

The “dog-eat-dog” culture of working alone on secret plant projects with the hope, even for some labs with the the aim, of scooping other labs seemed not just problematic, but anti-scientific. Here was a field
already in the death throes of irrelevancy in the increasingly technologically driven trend within other sciences. Mishler and his fellow botanists began to hatch a plan to use the tactics of “Big Science” to jumpstart a field “stuck in a laissez faire mode.” The project was simple, the task enormous. If botanists worked together to merge existing morphological data with molecular and fossil data they could build an entire family tree, or phylogeny, of all green plants.This lunchtime decision to collaborate led to the creation of the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group, known as “Deep Green.”

“Deep Green” was the first international and multi-institutional biological collaboration to construct a comprehensive ‘tree of life’ for green plants by analyzing molecular and genetic data. The molecularization of plant collections reinvigorated the dying craft of plant taxonomy into a biotechnologically and computationally driven cutting-edge modern science. Using oral interviews and archival material, this seminar paper will historicize the “Deep Green” project (1970’s-1992). This ‘Big Science’ project, a precursor to the more widely known Human Genome Project, sits at a critical historical and environmental juncture when on the one hand plant taxonomy and systematics was “modernized,” and on the other, intergovernmental environmental agencies were debating ‘best practices’ for tracking and protecting flora and fauna on the international trade market. In aiming to answer new ecological and evolutionary questions, “Deep Green” would rewrite the history of plants through genetic motifs. I argue that the molecularization of the plant world fundamentally altered the relationship between biology and the natural world as it began to decontextualize biological diversity from its local environment by transforming material specimens into digital code that could be shared, studied, and manipulated outside the ecosystems in which they live.

Vortrag im Rahmen des Oberseminars "Perspektiven der Wissenschaftsgeschichte".