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By Root 1010 0

and mud. These katcha, or “crude earth,” houses were decorated with geometric designs drawn in rice paste to attract prosperity, just as they were in the villages of Orissa. These houses gave this area of concentration-camplike congestion an unexpected rural charm. The former peasants who had taken refuge there were not marginalized people. In their exile they had managed to reconstruct their village life. They had built a small temple out of bamboo and baked mud to house an image of the god Jagannath. Next to it, they had planted a sacred tulsi, a variety of arborescent basil with the power to repel reptiles, especially cobras with their deadly venomous bite. The neighborhood women were particularly devoted to Jagannath: those suffering from sterility would make offerings to him in the hope to be cured. Here, as elsewhere in India, faith manifested itself in an uninterrupted succession of ritual festivities. A boy’s first tooth, his first hair cut; a girl’s first period, engagement, marriage, mourning; Diwali, the festival of lights, the Muslims’ Eid and even Christmas—all of life’s events, all festivals secular or religious, were publicly marked. For all their lack of education and material poverty, the Adivasis of Orya Bustee had managed to maintain the rites and expressions of the social and religious life that made up the rich and varied texture of their homeland.

4

A Visionary Billionaire to the Rescue of Humanity’s Food

The crime committed by the infamous aphids in the Mudilapa fields would not go unpunished. All over the world armies of scientists and researchers were working relentlessly to destroy the miniature monsters. One of the chief temples dedicated to the crusade against the insects was an agronomical research center in Yonkers, a residential suburb of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. It was called the Boyce Thompson Institute.

The man who founded this institute was a billionaire with a messianic desire to commit his wealth to some great humanitarian cause. William Boyce Thompson (1869–1930) had amassed a huge fortune from copper mining in the mountains of Montana. In October 1917 the American Red Cross had made him a colonel and placed him in charge of an aid mission to Russia, then in the throes of the Bolshevik revolution. The generous industrialist had swapped his bow tie and top hat for a military uniform, and added a million dollars of his own money to the funds produced by the American government for the victims of the Russian famine. He came back from his journey convinced that world peace depended on the equitable distribution of food, a conviction that was reinforced by his ardent faith in science and which led to the formulation of a spectacular philanthropic project. Because population growth was going to increase the need for food, it was vitally urgent to understand “why and how plants grow, why they flourish or decline, how their diseases can be stemmed, how their development can be stimulated by better control of the elements that enable them to live.” The study of plants, so the generous patron claimed, could make a decisive contribution to humanity’s well-being.

Out of this conviction was born, in 1924, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, an ultramodern agronomical research center, built on several acres of land less than an hour from downtown New York City. Endowed by its founder with $10 million—a considerable sum at the time—the institute incorporated chemistry and biology laboratories, experimental greenhouses and insect vivaria.

It was on the front line of the battle against plant-eating species that the Boyce Thompson Institute researchers achieved their first significant victories: they eradicated the beetles killing Californian pines by inventing a subtle, sweet-smelling substance that lured the destructive little creatures into fatal traps.

At the beginning of the 1950s the Aphis fabae wrought havoc on the farmlands of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America. Found also in Malaysia, Japan and southern Europe, the Aphis