The Garden of Invention
Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants
Penguin Press, 2009

Jane S. Smith grew up in New York, went to school in Boston and New Haven, and now lives in Chicago, where she works in a very small room with a very large window.

She writes about the intersection of science, taste, and popular culture in the United States. Her history of the first successful polio vaccine, Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in the High Style was nominated for the National Book Critic's Circle Award and remains the definitive biography of the pioneer decorator who transformed taste from an attitude into an industry. Her novel Fool's Gold won the Adult Fiction Award from the Society of Midland Authors.

Jane's book, The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants (Penguin Press, 2008), follows the work of the world's most famous creator of new plants in the expansive years from the 1870s to the 1920s--a time when inventors were heroes, the science of genetics was in its infancy, and patent protection had not yet entered the garden.