Science: Red Burbank

Last week one of Soviet Russia’s unpredictable trains clacked out of Moscow, headed southeast for Michurinsk, 300 miles away. On board was a crowd of scientists and officials. When the train discharged its passengers safely in the little town, other scientists converging from other parts of U. S. S. R. swelled the throng to nearly 600. All were there to pay high honor to the wrinkled old man for whom the town once called Koslov was renamed, Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, “the Burbank of Russia.” With pomp and ceremony the title of Honored Scientist of the Republic was conferred upon Comrade Michurin of Michurinsk.

There are legends about Ivan Michurin. One is that he has never left the town where he was born 74 years ago. Another is that when he was a stripling in high school he met the principal on the street one day, kept his hat on his head because the day was cold, was expelled for rudeness. Young Ivan got a job as an office clerk, rented twelve good acres of black soil, started experimenting with plants.

Michurin and his works are not well known to U. S. botanists. He is not listed in international botanical encyclopedias. But the Russians say he has developed a palatable blend of apple and cherry which is grown in Siberia, apricots that bloom on snow-covered trees just south of the Arctic Circle, a fruitless lemon tree whose branches yield lemon extract when pressed, frost-resisting grapes that flourish in Moscow and the Ural uplands. Undoubtedly he has produced fruits that yield more abundantly, stand shipment better and grow farther north than the older varieties. To bring out ever new mutations, he shocks with electricity the seeds of apples, watermelons, almonds, squash, plums. Oranges and grapefruit developed by him are grown in the “Soviet Florida” on the Black Sea. Tireless in his old age, he works now on tobacco to be grown on the lower Volga.

The Tsarist Government paid no attention to Michurin. But Lenin encouraged him and the Soviet Commissariat gave him 20,000 acres which had belonged to a monastery, conferred on him the orders of Lenin and of the Red Banner. Comrade Michurin never bothered about money, reputedly refused a fat offer to work in the U. S. Last fortnight he wrote to Dictator Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin, thanked him for raising “a lone experimenter, unrecognized and ridiculed, to the position of a leader and organizer.”