Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: Plants first patented
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (862) · May 23rd, 2011 · Add a Comment
Today in History – May 23, 1930 – U.S. Plant Patent Act of the Hawley-Smot Trariff allows plants to be patented. This new U.S. Plant Patent Act provided, for the first time, patent protection for new and distinct varieties of asexually reproduced plants. Plant breeders now had a financial incentive to perform plant breeding experiments and exercise control over their discoveries. The new law was motivated by the work of Luther Burbank, who had performed over 100,000 horticultural experiments and developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants during his 50 years of dedication to plant improvement. After selling his rights to the Russet Burbank potato in 1871 he moved to California and established a nursery garden, a greenhouse and experimental farms in Santa Rosa that one can visit today as a park and museum.
Thomas Edison testified before Congress in support of the 1930 Plant Patent Act saying: This [bill] will, I feel sure, give us many Burbanks.
Luther Burbank died in 1926, but he was granted 16 patents posthumously. He set the precedent for plant breeding in agricultural engineering and bioengineering.
The Engineering Pathway has a number of resources on Luther Burbank. For more educational resources, see our agricultural engineering education community site. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.
Tags: Biological Systems and Agricultural Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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