Experimental bioclimatology and prospects of agricultural modernization at the CNRS phytotron, France, 1953-1988

Built in Gif-sur-Yvette in the 1950s, the phytotron of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique provided plant physiologists with a set of enclosed growth rooms in which several climatic constituents of the environment could be simultaneously and separately controlled. This article examines the polyvalence of the French phytotron to explore the economic and political entanglements of experimental reasoning in mid-twentieth-century plant physiology. As Gif scientists embraced phytotrons as a means for developing an 'experimental bioclimatology', not only did they introduce into the laboratory an understanding of climate as a complex of agents likely to affect plant life, but also they sought to map scientific findings on productive pursuits during a period of intense agricultural modernization. The horticultural and agronomic applications envisaged were aimed at the timing of climate-sensitive biological events, but also at the expansion of productive areas within and outside metropolitan France, particularly in the context of late colonial and international dry-land development agendas. This case study of phytotronists' agricultural imagination highlights a techno-scientific conception of climate steeped in biology, tied to the limits and potential of plant life in time and space, and regarded as either a deficiency to be corrected or a resource to be harnessed.