Wheat rust can cause catastrophic crop failures. The Green Revolution succeeded in part thanks to the deployment of wheat with genetic resistance to stem rust. The appearance of a new strain of stem rust in Uganda (Ug99), first detected in 1998, raised the threat of global stem rust epidemics beyond its prevalence in Africa and the Middle East. Despite over twenty years of awareness campaigns, research, and breeding programmes, much of the wheat cultivated today still lacks resistance to Ug99, while races of the stripe and leaf rust present equal challenges to meeting market demands. Our article contributes a new assessment of ethical issues that emerge in our fight against stem rust. Specifically, the article explores how efforts to combat stem rust we employ today may threaten genetic diversity in wheat or impose a further bottleneck on choice of cultivars, thus directly impacting the ability of future generations to fight stem rust and also to find the genetic diversity needed to develop new varieties of wheat that are adapted to changes in climate.

In the nineteenth century, farmers, doctors, and the wider public shared a family of questions and anxieties concerning heredity. Questions over whether injuries, mutilations, and bad habits could be transmitted to offspring had existed for centuries, but found renewed urgency in the popular and practical scientific press from the 1820s onwards. Sometimes referred to as "Lamarckism" or "the inheritance of acquired characteristics," the potential for transmitting both desirable and disastrous traits to offspring was one of the most pressing scientific questions of the nineteenth century. As I argue in this paper, Carpenter's religious commitments to abolition and the temperance movement shaped his understanding of heredity. But this also committed him to a body of evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was coming under criticism for being untrustworthy. Carpenter used his popular treatises on physiology to promote these older, familiar ideas about heredity because they provided vital means of arguing for the unity of mankind and the hereditary dangers of intemperance. While early nineteenth century physiology has been seen by some historians as a challenge to religious authority, given its potentially materialist accounts of the body and the actions of the soul, this paper demonstrates how the missionary and institutional activities of the Unitarian church were ideologically supported by Carpenter's publications.

Collecting seeds and specimens was an integral aspect of botany and natural history in the eighteenth century. Historians have until recently paid less attention to the importance of collecting, trading and compiling knowledge of their cultivation, but knowing how to grow and maintain plants free from disease was crucial to agricultural and botanical projects. This is particularly true in the case of food security. At the close of the eighteenth century, European diets (particularly among the poor) began shifting from wheat- to potato-dependence. In Britain and Ireland during these decades, extensive crop damage was caused by diseases like ‘curl’ and ‘dry rot’ – leading many agriculturists and journal editors to begin collecting data on potato cultivation in order to answer practical questions about the causes of disease and methods that might mitigate or even eliminate their appearance. Citizens not only produced the bulk of these data, but also used agricultural print culture and participation in surveys to shape and direct the interpretation of these data. This article explores this forgotten scientific ambition to harness agricultural citizen science in order to bring stability and renewed vitality to the potato plant and its cultivation. I argue that while many agriculturists did recognize that reliance upon the potato brought with it unique threats to the food supplies of Britain and Ireland, their views on this threat were wholly determined by the belief that the diseases attacking potato plants in Europe had largely been produced or encouraged by erroneous cultivation methods.

Climate change and the failure of crops are significant but overlooked events in the history of heredity. Bad weather and dangerously low harvests provided momentum and urgency for answers to questions about how best to improve and acclimatize staple varieties. In the 1790s, a series of crop failures in Britain led to the popularization of and widespread debate over Thomas Andrew Knight's suggestion that poor weather was in fact largely unconnected to the bad harvests. Rather, Knight argued, Britain's older varieties-particularly its fruit trees-were coming to the natural end of their lifespans. At a period when Britain was trying to maximize its agricultural land usage, Knight campaigned that his fellow farmers ought to set aside land and resources in order to cultivate new varieties-an expensive and time-consuming procedure-in order to avoid disaster. In this paper, I argue that Knight's lifelong commitment to his position demonstrates the role played by changes in climate and weather on popular understandings of plant heredity. Further, drawing upon the historiography of Britain's climate and agriculture, I show that despite reliable weather and good harvests, Knight's campaign survived for several decades before the continued health of Britain's trees was finally treated as sufficient evidence to dispense with Knight's warnings. This case provides a means of thinking about the history of heredity as it is shaped and impacted by changes in climate and local conditions.