This Is How Scientists Solved The Mystery Of The Irish Famine

It's estimated that there are more than five times as many people in the United States who identify themselves as Irish as there are people who actually live in Ireland. That's in large part because of the countless Irish immigrants who fled to America during the Great Potato Famine of the 19th century.

And it took more than 160 years for scientists to figure out what caused the Famine in the first place.

It's a dark and terrible chapter in Irish history. Beginning in 1845, a disease swept across Ireland. It didn't directly affect humans; instead, it hit their crops, and hard. According to History, an organism spread around the country, killing half the potato crop that year and about three-quarters of the produce of the next seven years.

It became known as the Great Potato Famine, or The Great Hunger. As the Irish heavily relied on potatoes for food, losing so much of their crops meant many people starved. And tenant farmers were often forced to turn over what few healthy crops they had to their landlords, who frequently exported the potatoes to other countries.

It's estimated that over a million people in Ireland died from starvation between 1845 and 1852, all while the island's rulers in England turned a blind eye to the devastation - and even encouraged it for political or religious reasons.

Millions more had to flee to America and beyond to find any hope of survival, so many that even now it's believed that Ireland's population still hasn't returned to the level it was before the famine in the 1840's.

Despite this, though, it wasn't until 2013 that scientists finally isolated the fungus-like organism that caused the famine: phytophthora infestans.

One factor that made the potato plague so deadly is that Irish farmers at the time only planted one type of potato: the Irish limper. When exposed to phytophthora infestans, the potato turned into rotting mushy slime before infecting other nearby potatoes. According to a paper from the University of California-Berkeley, the lack of biodiversity heavily contributed to the spread of the famine, as other types of potatoes are more resistant; a mix of potato strains would have made passing the infection along much more difficult.

According to Irish Central, researchers were able to sequence the gene responsible using 11 historical samples of the potato from Ireland, the United Kingdom, North America, and Europe, samples that were more than 100 years old. Many of these potatoes still had traces of DNA that were good. Ironically, it only took the scientists a few weeks to fully complete their research - the main part of the delay is the fact that it took over a century for the DNA testing technology to be developed in the first place!

Once the scientists were able to compare the strain they found against modern strains of Phytophthora infestans, they finally figured out what caused the famine: a particularly deadly strain they named HERB-1.

Before finding HERB-1, some hypothesized it was a different, more prevalent strain, called US-1, that was the culprit, but this was disproven.

HERB-1 originated in the Americas, most likely in Mexico's Toluca Valley, in the early 16th century; according to History, it was responsible not just for the Great Potato Famine, but for other historic food shortages as well. It traveled to European ports by the 19th century and spread across Ireland, causing the famine.

Improvements in farming by the 20th century led to the development of a potato variety that's resistant to HERB-1, though, and scientists believe HERB-1 is now extinct, thanks in part to the fact that farmers began planting more diverse types of potato to guard against disease.

The Great Potato Famine was a turning point for the Irish people. Not only did it almost devastate their population, but it also became one of the catalysts to call for Irish independence, as ill will against the British for exploiting the suffering of the Irish people led eventually to the movement that led to the Republic of Ireland gaining independence. It also led to the Irish diaspora, as immigrants from Ireland spread across the world.

And all of this because of the simple potato.

#Ireland #Famine #Potatoes

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