Word: agronomist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Joseph Stalin's favorite scientist, and it's easy to see why. Lysenko was a peasant-born agronomist and Marxist ideologue who rejected Mendel's ideas because they contradicted the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He offered instead to solve the Soviet Union's chronic crop failures through a process he called vernalization, by which he would "train" spring wheat to be winter wheat and thus increase the number of annual harvests. Lysenko believed all living organisms passed on to succeeding generations characteristics acquired in their lifetime. This untested theory was at odds with what Lysenko scathingly called "alien bourgeois" genetics...
Born in 1936, Henson grew up in the small town of Leland, Miss., where his father worked as an agronomist for the Federal Government. When Henson was in fifth grade, his father took a job in Washington, and the family moved to a suburb in Maryland. There, in high school, Henson became fascinated by television. "I loved the idea," he once said, "that what you saw was taking place somewhere else at the same time." In the summer of 1954, just before he entered the University of Maryland, he learned that a local station needed someone to perform with puppets...
...four months, there was no grass for cattle. Farmers tramped their dusty fields watching their dwarfed grain shrivel and perish. A baking sun raised temperatures to 90[degrees], to 100[degrees]. And still no rain fell. Water was carted for miles for livestock. In Nebraska the State University agronomist gloomily predicted that many fields would not yield over 5 bu. of wheat per acre (normal average: 15 to 20 bu.). In Minnesota they mocked Washington's crop predictions as gross overestimates. Farmers planting corn raised clouds of dust like columns of marching troops...
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI: Receiving the presidential sash from predecessor Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Belgian-educated agronomist and former Haitian Prime Minister Rene Preval completed Haiti's first peaceful exchange of democratic power since it broke from France in 1804. Because Preval has little independent political support within the country, he is nagged by the notion that he is warming the presidential chair for a glorious return four years from now by Aristide, who may not succeed himself under Haiti's constitution, but can run again later. The problems of the western hemisphere's poorest nation will not wait...
...snapper in the Gulf of Mexico; and sardines and anchovies in the Pacific. The United Nations and World Bank sponsored the Tropical Forestry Action Plan to sustain forests, but instead the plan spurred further deforestation. When asked by an environmentalist what he meant by sustainable, a World Bank agronomist replied, "Fifty years of timber production." Even the rubber tappers of Brazil's Amazon rain forest, who along with their martyred leader, Chico Mendes, became symbols of the sustainable use of tropical forests, overexploit their ecosystem. Writing in the journal BioScience, John Browder notes that in search of food and sources...