Food for Thought Lecture - Daniel J. Kevles, Yale University
"The Apples of Our Eyes: Innovation, Art, and Ownership in American Fruits"
Thursday, April 10, 2008 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Innovation in fruits turned from a pastime of gentlemanly amateurs into a commercial business by the middle of the nineteenth century. The innovators grew eager to obtain what they increasingly
termed the rights of “originators,” or what we can recognize as intellectual property protection (IP), for their new fruits. Yet how could the innovators uniquely identify their inventions? Special
names were inadequate, since nothing prevented a thief from selling a fruit under a different name, and verbal descriptions were inevitably inexact. A number of innovators thus tried to protect their
fruits more precisely in colored lithographs and watercolors. The practice gave rise to an industry of fruit illustrations that soon comprised an abundant and often exquisite body of commercial and,
in connection with a kind of registration system, federal art. However, registered illustration proved ineffective for IP protection in fruits, and horticultural innovators resorted to alternative
arrangements that included pricing, contracts, legislation, and in our own day, patents on genes.
Daniel J. Kevles, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, teaches and writes about issues in science and society past and present. He is currently writing a book on the history
of innovation and ownership in the stuff of life. His previous works include The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character; In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of
Human Heredity; and The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. He has also published numerous articles, essays, and reviews in scholarly and popular
journals such as The New York Times, the New York Review of Books,The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Kevles has received various honors, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a Page One Award, the Watson Davis Prize, and the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal for career achievement.
