Category Archives: Science

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Have PhD, will travel . . . for half a century

Friday 12 December 1975. Fifty years ago today!

Harold Wilson had almost reached the end of his second term as Prime Minister. Queen were No. 1 in the UK chart with Bohemian Rhapsody, and would remain there for several weeks.

And, at The University of Birmingham, as the clock on Old Joe (actually the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower) struck 12 noon, so the Chancellor’s Procession made its way (to a musical accompaniment played by the University Organist) from the rear of the Great Hall to the stage.

Thus began a degree congregation (aka commencement in US parlance) to confer graduate and undergraduate degrees in the physical sciences (excluding physics and chemistry), biological and medical sciences, and in medicine and dentistry. All the graduands and their guests remained seated.

And I was among those graduands, about to have my PhD conferred by the Chancellor and renowned naturalist Sir Peter Scott (right).

Here are some photos taken during the ceremony as I received my degree, in the procession leaving the Great Hall, and with my parents afterwards.

I’d completed my thesis on the biosystematics of South American potatoes, The Evolutionary Significance of the Triploid Cultivated Potato, Solanum x chaucha Juz. et Buk., at the end of September, just meeting the deadline to have the degree conferred (subject to a successful examination) at the December congregation.

Native potato varieties from the Andes of South America.

My thesis defence (an oral examination or viva voce to give its complete title) was held around the third week of October if my memory serves me right. Fortunately I didn’t have to make any significant corrections to the text, and the examiners’ reports were duly submitted and the degree confirmed by the university [1].

Among the university staff who attended the degree congregation were Professor JG ‘Jack’ Hawkes, Mason Professor of Botany and head of the Department of Botany (later Plant Biology) in the School of Biological Sciences, and Dr J Trevor Williams, Course Tutor for the MSc degree course Conservation and Utilisation of Plant Genetic Resources in the same department.

Jack was a world-renowned expert on the taxonomy of potatoes and a pioneer in the field of genetic resources conservation, who founded the MSc course in 1969. He supervised my PhD research. Trevor had supervised my MSc dissertation on lentils, Studies in the Genus Lens Miller with Special Reference to Lens culinaris Medik., in 1971 when I first came to Birmingham to join the plant genetic resources course.

Here I am with Jack (on my right) and Trevor just after the congregation. Click on the image to view an abridged version of the congregation program.

At the same congregation several other graduates from the Department of Botany received their MSc degrees in genetic resources or PhD.

L-R: Pamela Haigh, Brenig Garrett, me, Trevor Williams, Jack Hawkes, Jean Hanson, Margaret Yarwood, Jane Toll, and Stephen Smith

When I began my MSc studies in genetic resources conservation and use at Birmingham in September 1970 I had no clear idea how to forge a career in this fascinating field. The other four students in my cohort came from positions in their own countries, to which they would return after graduating.

My future was much less certain, until one day in February 1971 when Jack Hawkes returned to Birmingham from an expedition to collect wild potatoes in Bolivia. He told me about a one-year vacancy from September that same year at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru, and asked if I’d be interested. Not half! And as the saying goes, The rest is history.

Jack’s expedition had been supported, in part, by CIP’s Director General, Dr Richard Sawyer, who told Jack that he wanted to send a young Peruvian scientist, Zósimo Huaman, to attend the MSc course at Birmingham from September 1971. He was looking for someone to fill that vacancy and did he know of anyone who fitted the bill. Knowing of my interest of working in South America if the opportunity arose, Jack told Sawyer about me. I met him some months later in Birmingham.

Well, things didn’t proceed smoothly, even though Zósimo came to Birmingham as scheduled. Because of funding delays at the UK’s Overseas Development Administration, ODA (which became the Department for International Development or DfID before it was absorbed into the Foreign Office), I wasn’t able to join CIP until January 1973.

In the interim, Jack persuaded ODA to support me at Birmingham until I could move to CIP, and he registered me for a PhD program. He just told me: I think we should work on the triploids. And I was left to my own devices to figure out just what that might mean, searching the literature, growing some plants at Birmingham to get a feel for potatoes, even making a stab (rather unsuccessfully) at learning Spanish.

Despite his relaxed view about what my PhD research might encompass, Jack was incredibly supportive, and we spent time in the field together on both occasions he visited CIP while I was there.

With Jack Hawkes in the CIP potato germplasm collection field, in Huancayo, central Peru (alt. 3100 masl) in January 1974.

I was also extremely fortunate that I had, as my local supervisor at CIP, the head of the Department of Breeding & Genetics, Dr P Roger Rowe, originally a maize geneticist, who joined CIP in mid-1973 from the USDA potato collection in Wisconsin where he was the curator. Roger and I have remained friends ever since, and Steph and I met him and his wife Norma in 2023 during our annual visit to the USA (where our elder daughter lives).

Roger and Norma Rowe, Steph and me beside the mighty Mississippi in La Crosse, Wisconsin in June 2023.

On joining CIP, Roger thoroughly evaluated—and approved—my research plans, while I also had some general responsibilities to collect potatoes in Peru, which I have written about in these two posts.

My research involved frequent trips between December and May each year to the CIP field station in Huancayo, to complete a crossing program between potato varieties with different chromosome numbers and evaluating their progeny. In CIP headquarters labs in Lima, I set about describing and classifying different potato varieties, and comparing them using a number of morphological and biochemical criteria. And I made field studies to understand how farmers grow their mixed fields of potato varieties in different regions of Peru.

With eminent Peruvian potato taxonomist, Carlos Ochoa
Solanum x chaucha varoeties, and pollinating potatoes in Huancayo.
Collecting potatoes in the south of Peru.
Off to farmers’ fields.
Collecting potatoes in Cajamarca, northern Peru in May 1974.
Collecting potato flower buds for chromosome counts, from a farmer’s field near Cuzco, in February 1974.
Sampling potato flower buds for chromosome studies, near Cuzco, 1974
Harvest time in Cajamarca.
Hydroponic potatoes on Lake Titicaca..

At the beginning of April 1975, Steph and I returned to Birmingham so that I could write my thesis. But we didn’t fly directly home. Richard Sawyer had promised me a postdoctoral position with CIP—subject to successful completion of my PhD—with a posting in the Outreach Program (then to become the Regional Research and Training Program) based in Central America. So we spent time visiting Costa Rica and Mexico before heading for New York and a flight back to Manchester. And all the while keeping a very close eye on my briefcase that contained all my raw research data. Had that gone astray I’m not sure what I would have done. No such thing in 1975 as personal computers, cloud storage and the like. So, you can imagine my relief when we eventually settled into life again in Birmingham, and I could get on with the task in hand: writing my thesis and submitting it before the 1 October deadline.

I still had some small activities to complete, and I didn’t start drafting my thesis in earnest until July. It took me just six weeks to write, and then I spent time during September preparing all the figures. Jack’s technician, Dave Langley, typed my thesis on a manual typewriter!

Of course each chapter had to be approved by Jack. And he insisted that I handed over each chapter complete, with the promise that he’d read it that same evening and return the draft to me with corrections and suggestions by the next day, or a couple of days at most. That was a supervision model I took on board when I became a university lecturer in 1981 and had graduate students of my own.

Looking back, my thesis was no great shakes. It was, I believe, a competent piece of research that met the university criteria for the award of a PhD: that it should comprise original research carried out under supervision, and of a publishable standard.

I did publish three papers from my thesis, which have been cited consistently in the scientific literature over the years by other researchers.

So, PhD under my belt so-to-speak, Steph and I returned to Lima just before New Year 1976. Later in April that year, we moved to Costa Rica where I did research on a serious bacterial disease of potatoes, seed potato production, and co-founded a pioneer regional cooperative program on potato research and development. We remained in Costa Rica for almost five years before returning to Lima, and from there to The University of Birmingham.

I taught at Birmingham for a decade before becoming Head of the Genetic Resources Center (with the world’s largest and most important rice genebank) at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines from July 1991. Then in May 2001, I gave up any direct involvement in research and joined IRRI’s senior management team as Director for Program Planning and Communications. I retired in 2010 and returned to the UK.

50 years later

Since retiring, I’ve co-edited—in 2013—a major text on climate change and genetic resources, and led an important review, in 2016-2017, of the management of a network of international genebanks.

Without a PhD none of this would have been possible. Indeed continued employment at CIP in 1976 was contingent upon successful completion of my PhD.

I was extremely fortunate that, as a graduate student (from MSc to PhD) I had excellent mentors: Trevor, Jack, and Roger. I learned much from them and throughout my career tried (successfully I hope) to emulate their approach with my colleagues, staff who reported to me, and students. I’ve also held to the idea that one is never too old to have mentors.

[1] I completed my PhD in four years (September 1971 to September 1975. Back in the day, PhD candidates were allowed eight years from first registration to carry out their research and submit their thesis for examination. Because of concern about submission rates among PhD students in the 1980s, The University of Birmingham (and other universities) reduced the time limit to five years then to four. So nowadays, a PhD program in the UK comprises three years of research plus one year to write and submit the thesis, to be counted as an on-time submission.

 

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From Wylam, Northumberland . . . to the world

Rail transport was one of the most important technological advances of the 19th century, a key component of the so-called Industrial Revolution (approximately 1760-1840) that marked a transformative period characterized by mechanization, urbanization, and significant social changes.

And today, 27 September 2025, is the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first public railway to use steam locomotives, and which is considered the beginning of the Railway Age. One man, George Stephenson (right, 1781-1848), is inextricably linked with the birth of the railways, having surveyed the Stockton and Darlington line and constructed (with his son Robert, 1803-1859) the first locomotive, Locomotion No.1, to haul passengers. But they built upon the ingenuity of great engineers before them, like the pioneering Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick who actually developed the world’s first steam locomotive in 1804.

For this, and other inventions and innovations such as surveying lines, the standard gauge (at 4 feet 8½ inches) that was more or less adopted worldwide, and design of steam locos, George Stephenson is often referred to as the Father of the Railways, and rightly so. Although perhaps that’s an accolade that should be shared with son Robert (right).

Steam locomotives and the birth of the railways are part of the proud historic and heritage fabric of the northeast of England where the history of the railways is synonymous with the expansion of the coal mines. Coal had been transported since the late 17th century from the pits along waggonways to wharves or staiths along the River Tyne where it could be loaded on boats for export, most often to London.

Waggons were initially hauled by horses on rails made from wood. Later, stationary steam engines were built to pull the waggons, and wooden rails were replaced by cast iron ones. The design and development of steam locomotives to bring coal from the pits to the River Tyne was the driving force that brought about the birth of the railways. It was a major step forward, and dramatically reduced the cost of coal.

While working at Killingworth Colliery, northeast of Newcastle upon Tyne, Stephenson had a workshop where he constructed his first steam locomotive, Blücher in 1814, establishing his reputation as an engineer. Remarkable for a man who was illiterate until the age of 18.

And while Locomotion No 1 was a major step forward in the development of the railways in 1825, it was Rocket built by George and son Robert in 1829 for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (which opened on 15 September 1830) that included design innovations (explained in the video below) seen in steam engines over the next century and a half. Although Stephenson did not design flanged wheels (that was done by William Jessop in 1788), he did use them on Rocket, a significant advance in railway technology.

Just imagine how sophisticated some steam locomotives became. Take Union Pacific Big Boy, a 4-8-8-4 locomotive in the USA, the world’s largest and most powerful locomotive ever built. What a beauty!

It’s also remarkable just how quickly railways expanded in and after the 1840s in the UK and around the world. By 1870, the network in the UK comprised around 16,000 miles of track. A year earlier, in May 1869, the the transcontinental rail line in the USA was completed, when the two construction companies met in Utah, north of Salt Lake City. The rail network had been important during the American Civil War (1861-1865) for the movement of troops and materiel, perhaps the first time that railways had taken on such a significant role.

For most railway buffs, I guess there’s no finer sight than a steam locomotive at top speed. Poetry in motion! Today, that’s something you’ll only ever witness here in the UK when special excursions are run on the mainline. And that speed capability came about because of the design innovations in Rocket, and subsequent improvements that engineers made, of course.

The last standard gauge mainline service in this country ran on 11 August 1968 from Liverpool to Carlisle. The focus thereafter was on diesel power and the expansion of electrification.

However, steam locomotives can still be seen in action on the many heritage lines around the UK such as the Severn Valley Railway, a 16-mile line between Kidderminster and Bridgnorth close to our former home in Worcestershire which we rode in 2008. However, trains on heritage lines are restricted to a 25 mph speed limit.

The days of steam power on the railways were always numbered, even as soon as 60 years after the opening of the first steam-only railway. Steam locos were already being replaced in some cities as early as the 1880s, and Switzerland for example, had achieved 50% electrification of its network by 1928.

George Stephenson was born in a cottage, known formerly as High Street House, in the colliery village of Wylam in Northumberland, which is about nine miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne, beside the River Tyne.

George Stephenson’s birthplace in Wylam, Northumberland.

His father Robert was a fireman for the Wylam Colliery pumping engine and, being poor, could not pay for George’s education. It’s remarkable, therefore, that George achieved so much, and having become wealthy through his own engineering prowess, ensured that his son Robert benefitted from a better education, and becoming one of the greatest engineers of the Victorian Age.

A week ago (on 21 September) Steph and I had the opportunity of visiting George Stephenson’s birthplace, which is owned by the National Trust and opened on a limited ticketed basis on just a few days each year.

Father Robert, his wife Mabel, and their five children occupied just one ground floor room (to the left of the front door) in this cottage, each of the other rooms also housing a single family. Can you imagine a family of seven living in one room, just 12 x 12 feet approximately? He lived there until he was eight.

The Wylam waggonway ran by the front door, so young George would have, from an early age, seen just what rail systems could achieve.

Then, during the tour of the cottage, and in subsequent reading, I discovered that George Stephenson lived, from 1805 to 1823 (after he had become engineer at Killingworth Colliery) in a cottage (known as Dial Cottage for the dial that he and son Robert made and placed over the front door) just 1.80 miles as the crow flies from our home in North Tyneside.

From such humble origins to fame and fortune, and perhaps even greater for son Robert who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Neither accepted a knighthood.

And one final point. George Stephenson invented a mining safety lamp, the Geordie lamp, resulting in a lifelong controversy with Cornish aristocratic chemist Humphry Davy who accused Stephenson of stealing his design for a similar device.

By the mid-1860s, natives of Newcastle became known as Geordies, and it’s commonly believed that the name of the lamp attached to the pit men who worked in the numerous mines across Tyneside.

 

 

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One man saved more lives than anyone else in history . . .

A billion lives, it is said.

Official portrait of Norman Borlaug for his Nobel Peace Prize.

And that man was Dr Norman Ernest Borlaug (1914-2009), an agricultural scientist from northeast Iowa, whose research to develop short-strawed and high-yielding varieties staved off predicted widespread famines in the 1960s.

It was the beginning of an international effort to enhance agricultural productivity that endures to this day through the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research or CGIAR, one of which is CIMMYT¹ (the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement in Mexico) where Borlaug spent many years as Director of the International Wheat Improvement Program (now the Global Wheat Program).

Dr Borlaug was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to promote global food supply, an act that contributes greatly to peace. And for having given a well-founded hope – the green revolution.

The expression “the green revolution” is permanently linked to Norman Borlaug’s name. He obtained a PhD in plant protection [from the University of Minnesota] at the age of 27, and worked in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s to make the country self-sufficient in grain. Borlaug recommended improved methods of cultivation, and developed a robust strain of wheat – dwarf wheat – that was adapted to Mexican conditions. By 1956 the country had become self-sufficient in wheat.

Success in Mexico made Borlaug a much sought-after adviser to countries whose food production was not keeping pace with their population growth. In the mid-1960s, he introduced dwarf wheat into India and Pakistan, and production increased enormously. The expression “the green revolution” made Borlaug’s name known beyond scientific circles, but he always emphasized that he himself was only part of a team. (Source: www.nobelprize.org).

You can read his Nobel Prize lecture here.

Almost thirty years later, Borlaug returned to Oslo and reflected (in this lecture) on the progress that had been made since his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

He received many other awards in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977) and the Congressional Gold Medal (2006), one of only seven individuals worldwide to receive all three awards².

His is one of two Iowa statues in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall, unveiled in 2014 and replacing one of the state’s existing statues. It was sculpted by Benjamin Victor. A duplicate stands on the University of Minnesota campus in St Paul, outside the building named in his honour.

He founded the World Food Prize in 1986, a prestigious, international award given each year to honor the work of great agricultural scientists working to end hunger and improve the food supply.

It was initially sponsored and formed by businessman and philanthropist John Ruan Sr with support from the Governor and State Legislature of Iowa. Since 1987, there have been 55 laureates from 21 countries.

On 9 June 2017, Steph and I were on the last day of a 10 day road trip that had taken us from Atlanta, Georgia down to the coast at Savannah, then up through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and back to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Almost 2800 miles.

We’d spent our last night in a suburb of Iowa City before setting off north to St Paul the following morning. In a little under 3 hours, we found ourselves in Cresco, the county seat of Howard County (just south of the state line with Minnesota) in the lovely Bluff Country that encompasses northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and southwest Wisconsin.

On the eastern outskirts of Cresco we came across this large billboard beside the road.

Anyway, as I stopped to take a photograph, I recalled having caught a glimpse—some miles south of Cresco—of a signpost to the ‘Borlaug Birthplace Farm’. Well, being somewhat pressed for time (and having another 180 miles to complete our journey to St Paul), we didn’t turn round and explore.

So it was just a vague hope that someday I might return, since I had met Dr Borlaug in April 1999 when he visited the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, another of the CGIAR centers) in the Philippines where I was working at the time. It was a hope recently fulfilled.

Explaining how rice seeds are stored in the International Rice Genebank to Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug

Earlier this year, I had contacted Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa asking if Steph and I could have a ‘behind-the-scenes’ visit during our vacation in the USA, a vacation we have just returned from. It was then I discovered that Cresco was just a short drive west from Decorah, and I contemplated whether a tour of the Borlaug Birthplace and Boyhood Farms might be feasible.

So I contacted the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation (NBHF, set up in 2000) and very quickly received a reply that NBHF board members would be delighted to arrange a tour.

And that’s what we did on 3 June, setting off from Decorah in time to meet up with board members Tom Spindler (Tours) and Gary Gassett (Co-Treasurer) at the Borlaug Boyhood Farm.

NBHF board members Gary Gassett (L) and Tom Spindler (R) in the old school room on the Borlaug boyhood farm site.

Norman Borlaug came from humble beginnings, the great-grandson of Norwegian immigrants in the late 19th century.

Norman’s grandparents, Emma and Nels (and others of the Borlaug clan) settled in the Cresco area. They had three sons: Oscar, Henry (Norman’s father, second from left), and Ned.

Henry married Clara Vaala, and after Norman was born on 25 March 1914 in his grandparents house, the family lived there for several years. Norman had three younger sisters, Palma Lilian, Charlotte, and Helen (who was born and died in 1921).

The house is currently not open for visitors, as several parts are undergoing extensive repair and renovation.

Henry and Clara bought a small plot of land (around 200 acres) less than a mile from their parent’s farm, but until he was 8, Norman continued to live with his grandparents. By then, in 1922, Henry and Clara had built their own home, ordered from Sears, Roebuck of Chicago. The original flatpack!

Life must have been hard on the Borlaug farm, the winters tough. Heating for the house came solely from the stove in the kitchen with warm(er) air rising to the four bedrooms bedrooms upstairs through a metal grill in the ceiling. There was an outhouse privy some 15 m or so from the back porch.

Besides the kitchen, with its hand pump to deliver water for washing, the other room on the ground floor was a combined parlour cum dining room.

Norman’s bedroom
The view over the farm from Norman’s bedroom

On the front of the house there is a set of steps leading to a porch along the width of the house. Mature pine trees now surround the house, with a row to the front of the house planted by Norman when he was studying for his BS in forestry at the University of Minnesota (only later did he turn to plant pathology for his graduate studies).

On the farm, Henry eventually built a barn in 1929 to house their livestock There is a long chicken coop, beside which is a bronze statue of Norman as a boy feeding the chickens. It was created by Dr Bill Faller and donated to the NBHF, as was another nearby depicting Norman’s work around the world.

In one outhouse there’s a nice memento of Norman’s boyhood here: his initials inscribed on a wall.

It’s said that Norman was an average student. From an early age, until Grade 8, he joined his classmates (of both Lutheran Norwegian and Catholic Czech descent – Czechs had settled in the area of Protivin and Spillville west of the Borlaug farms) in a one room schoolroom (built in 1865) that was originally located about a mile away from the farm. Norwegian children on one side of the room, the Czechs on the other.

At that time, most pupils reaching Grade 8 would leave full-time education and return to working on the family farm. But Norman’s teacher at the time, his cousin Sina Borlaug (right), encouraged both parents and grandparents to permit Norman to attend high school in Cresco. Which he did, boarding with a family there Monday to Friday, returning home each weekend to take on his fair share of the farm chores.

And the rest is history, so to speak. He eventually made it to the University of Minnesota in St Paul to study forestry, spending some time working in that field before completing (in 1942) his PhD on variation and variability in the pathogen that causes flax wilt, Fusarium lini (now F. oxysporum f.sp. lini).

He joined a small group of scientists on a Rockefeller Foundation funded project in Mexico in 1944, and remained in Mexico until he retired. Among these colleagues was potato pathologist, Dr John Niederhauser, who became a colleague of mine as we developed a regional potato program (PRECODEPA) in the late 1970s.

Borlaug and Niederhauser were very keen baseball fans, and they introduced Little League Baseball to Mexico. That achievement is mentioned in one of the posters (below) in the Borlaug home, and our two NBHF guides, Tom and Garry, were surprised to learn that not only had I met Borlaug, but had worked with Niederhauser as well.

Active to the end of his life, Dr Borlaug passed away in Texas on 12 September 2009. His ashes were scattered at several places, including the Iowa farms.

To the end of his life he was passionate about the need for technology to enhance agricultural productivity. And one point of view remained as strong as ever: peace and the eradication of human misery were underpinned by food security.

It was a fascinating tour of the Borlaug Birthplace and Boyhood Farms, and Steph and I are grateful to Tom and Garry for taking the time (over 2.5 hours) to give us a personal tour.

The NBHF has several programs, including internships and one designed especially for schoolchildren to make them aware of Borlaug’s legacy, and why it is important. You can find much more information on the Foundation website.

¹ Many of Dr Borlaug’s day-to-day belongings (including his typewriter) are displayed in the office suite he occupied at CIMMYT. The photos are courtesy of two former IRRI colleagues, plant breeder Dr Mark Nas and Finance Manager Remy Labuguen who now work at CIMMYT.

Dr Borlaug stepped down as head of CIMMYT’s wheat program around 1982, but he remained as active as ever. He especially enjoyed spending time with trainees, passing on his wealth of knowledge about wheat improvement to the next generation of breeders and agronomists.

In this photo, he is showing trainees how to select viable seeds at CIMMYT’s Obregon Wheat Research Station in the spring of 1992.

One of my colleagues at IRRI, Gene Hettel, was the communications specialist in the wheat program at CIMMYT between 1986 and 1995.

Gene told me that Borlaug’s office was directly above mine—that made it handy for when he had editorial chores for me. Sometimes he would call me up to his office if he had a really big job—maybe a major book chapter to edit. Other times he dropped by my office with a grin on his face: “Are you busy?”

Here they are together in the wheat plots just outside their offices to get away from all the paperwork and just “talk” to the plants!

² The other six are: Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Martin Luther King Jr (USA), Mother Teresa (Albania-India), Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh), Elie Wiesel (USA), and Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar). Mohammad Yunus (currently Chief Advisor of the interim government of Bangladesh) was a member of IRRI’s Board of Trustees (1989 to 1994) when I joined the institute in 1991.

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Saving seeds, linking generations . . .

If you’ve never been to Seed Savers Exchange near Decorah in the lovely Bluff Country of northeast Iowa, then you should. Especially as it is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

Founded in 1975 (originally as True Seed Exchange) by Kent and Diane Ott Whealy in Missouri, Seed Savers Exchange is a tax-exempt 501(c)3 non-profit that conserves and promotes America’s culturally diverse but endangered garden and food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants.

In this video, Diane Ott Whealy describes how it all began.

Seed Savers Exchange moved to Decorah in 1987, when the Whealys bought a parcel of land, which became Heritage Farm.

Over five decades, Seed Savers Exchange has built an impressive community (in reality a movement) of gardeners and seed stewards, sharing and swapping unique varieties you might not find anywhere else, combining in situ conservation in home gardens and ex situ in the seedbank at Decorah.

Varieties such as these (of the many thousands in the Exchange network and collection):

  • Cherokee Trail of Tears, a snap bean carried by the Cherokee over the Trail of Tears, the infamous death march from the Smoky Mountains to Oklahoma in 1838-39);
  • Bull Nose Bell, a sweet pepper introduced into North America in the 1700s, and grown by elder statesman and third POTUS, Thomas Jefferson, in his garden at Monticello in 1812);
  • or the tomato variety German Pink (one of two varieties that started it all – the other being Grandpa Ott’s, a morning glory) introduced into the USA from Bavaria in the late 19th century. Both are featured on the covers of The Exchange 2025 Yearbook and The 2025 Seed Catalog.

There’s lots to see and do at Seed Savers Exchange (click on the image below – and others with a red border – to open a larger version) and visitors are encouraged to hike the trails, and explore the 890 acre farm.

When the apples are ripe in the Historic Orchard, visitors may pick their own. Local cider producers make a beeline to harvest and collect windfalls.

But Seed Savers Exchange is not all plants. The Ancient White Park cattle were introduced into the USA from the UK during WWII as a safeguard against loss of this ancient breed. Several herds were established, two ending up in Decorah. Coincidentally, not far from where we are now living in the northeast of England, there is a completely feral (but enclosed) herd of these beautiful cattle at Chillingham.

During our recent trip to the USA, Steph and I enjoyed a day-long visit to Seed Savers Exchange, staying a couple of nights in Decorah. It was an easy drive south from St Paul, MN (just under 160 miles, and about 3.5 hours on a sunny Sunday afternoon).

A visit to Seed Savers Exchange was first mooted in May 2024, but having just made a long road trip across Utah and Colorado, I really didn’t want to get behind the wheel again. However, we had no epic road trip plans this year, so I decided to contact Executive Director, Mike Bollinger (right) last February to set up a visit.

Regular readers of my blog will know that Steph and I first became part of the germplasm conservation movement in the early 1970s. I spent much of my career in international agricultural research and academia, collecting farmer varieties of potatoes across the Andes of Peru, and in the Philippines managing the world’s largest genebank for rice at the International Rice Research Institute.

So I asked Mike if we could have a ‘behind-the-scenes’ visit (not open to regular visitors), to learn about the organization in detail, and the management of such a large and diverse collection of plant species. He quickly agreed, and asked Director of Preservation, Michael Washburn (right) to set up a program for us.

In this post I’m not going to describe how Seed Savers Exchange works with its members, and how they share seeds among the community or from the seedbank. That information is available in detail on this section of its website.

Incidentally, Seed Savers Exchange also has a commercial arm (which supports its non-profit mission), selling seeds through an annual catalog of around 600 or so varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers, some of which come from the collection.

Michael introduced us to the preservation team (see below), and we spent time with each as well as having a very informative round table discussion where we shared our different perspectives and experiences in seed conservation.

Let me highlight some fundamental differences between managing (as I did) the rice collection at IRRI and the collection at Seed Savers Exchange.

IRRI’s collection of rice has its own complexities due to its size and the origin of the germplasm from many countries, with conservation and exchange subject to the rules of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

On the other hand, Seed Savers Exchange is a voluntary non-profit, operating within the USA, and not subject to the same bureaucratic constraints. However, its complexity lies with the number of species conserved (and their conservation needs), as well as catering to the needs of the many members in the Exchange network.

Standing (L-R): Heidi Betz (seed bank inventory technician), Maddison MacDonald (potato tissue culture lab manager), Briana Smorstad ( seed bank manager), Jamie Hanson (orchard manager), Sara Straate (seed historian), Natalie Aird (seed bank inventory coordinator), and Michael Washburn. Kneeling: Eduardo Fernandez (assistant seed historian). Seated (L-R): me, Josie Flatgrad (membership and exchange coordinator), and Steph.

Seed bank manager Briana Smorstad explained that the Seed Savers Exchange Collection has around 20,000 accessions (although the database lists many more that are no longer available). About 6000 (about 30% of the collection) are distributable accessions.

This is the scope of the collection, as defined in its 2013 Accessions Policy (updated in 2020):

As with any genebank, this one has its issues with ‘duplicate’ varieties (some with the same name but not necessarily the same variety, and others with different names) currently estimated at around 21% of the collection. Fortunately, and as we all agreed in our round table, Seed Savers Exchange does have a comprehensive database (developed in Microsoft Access) that keeps track of all the germplasm, its status, and where it actually sits in the cold stores (so can be quickly accessed). In the past year, some 4922 varieties were offered through the Exchange. However, if one of the members is listing any variety the Decorah team don’t list these for distribution.

In the ‘active collection’ with seed bank manager Briana Smorstad.

Natalie Aird, the seed bank inventory coordinator (who showed us the database) handles the seed quality assessments, running routine germination tests according to well-established protocols. And these important data guide how and when seeds become available for distribution.

Natalie demonstrating the seed germination test for bean seeds, and the incubator for the tests.

We were especially privileged to be shown the base collection cold store (at around -18°C).

A recent initiative was launched, known as the L-to-D Project (Legacy to Distribution) which has moved 70 varieties in the collection into the Exchange.

The collection has Distributable or D varieties with sufficient seeds to meet regular requests through the Exchange. To have enough seeds means regeneration and multiplication on the Heritage Farm, which is time-, space, and labor-intensive. However, a whole series of seed packets or Legacy (L) accessions were identified in the collection, which were tested for quality and germination, and if reaching the desired standard were moved on to the D list, as was the case with the 70 varieties mentioned above. The project is described in more detail here.

And to safeguard the collection decades into the future, Seed Savers Exchange has sent seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault every year since the vault was first opened in 2008. Here’s a brief report from a Crop Trust news article in early June.

Here are the seedbank team (L-R, Natalie, Heidi, and Briana) preparing to send seeds to Svalbard earlier this year.

Seed Savers Exchange faces particular challenges with two components of its collection, namely the potato varieties, and the apple trees in the Heritage Orchard, which are maintained vegetatively.

In the case of potatoes, curated by Maddison MacDonald, there are 18 US heirloom varieties, 72 historic heirloom varieties, 10 exchange heirlooms. But the number of accessions is much higher. All maintained a virus-free tissue cultures. Potato varieties are distributed as tissue cultures, illustrated below.

One of the collection advisers (and former head of the genebank at the International Potato Center) Dr David Ellis has identified a group of 53 varieties (a core, so-to-speak) that represent the genetic diversity of the whole potato collection. But there is almost no overlap with the heirloom varieties mentioned earlier. The heirloom varieties meet the strict acquisition criteria for the collection and therefore have the highest priority. Managing a smaller number of priority varieties would permit greater focus on those. And, quite independently from David Ellis, I did suggest that Maddison should consider converting many of the other varieties to true potato seed, and in this way conserving the genetic diversity of the collection if not the individual clones.

The collection has an apple orchard with 1042 trees, consisting of 337 unique named varieties, managed by Jamie Hanson (below) and an assistant.

But there are duplicate trees, and these have been identified by DNA fingerprinting through Washington State University’s MyFruitTree initiative (at a cost of just $50 per sample). For example, fingerprinting has identified seven Bethel trees in the orchard, which will permit, in the future, removal of duplicate trees as part of orchard management. Jamie also curates a legacy grape breeding collection from the University of Minnesota.

I was particularly impressed by the outreach program involved in distributing apple varieties, whereby online tuition in grafting is given and the necessary tools also sent with the rootstocks and scions.

Besides conserving the seeds and vegetatively-propagated species at Seed Savers Exchange, there is also coordination of the membership and Exchange (the gardener-to-gardener seed swap) a role that falls to Josie Flatgrad (right).

Each year the Yearbook is published, a comprehensive tome of 474 pages! What a treasure trove of germplasm detail.

It has all the listings of varieties (this link explains how to read the listings) available from members, Seed Savers Exchange, details of the person offering seeds (some of whom have been listing seeds for more than 30 years), as well as a description of each variety. And to illustrate, here is the listing for Cherokee Trail of Tears (and also its catalog description) offered by members in California, Missouri, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

Following a lively round-table discussion with everyone who we met, Steph and I toured the Lillian Goldman Visitors Center (named after the philanthropist whose daughter Amy Goldman Fowler is a Special Advisor to Seed Savers Exchange Board of Directors), and the Iowa heritage barn (beside which Grandpa Ott’s morning glory were just beginning to climb), and the lovely garden in front that Diane Ott Whealy designed and looks after.

We are extremely grateful to Mike Bollinger and the whole Seed Savers Exchange team for their hospitality, their collegiality, and open discussions. We thoroughly enjoyed our six hours at Seed Savers Exchange, and hope to visit again in the future. And even though I spent most of my career in genetic conservation and use, I learned much that was new to me on this visit. It was an experience I shall cherish.

But let me finish this post by pointing you to this page on the Seed Savers Exchange website where there are numerous stories about a range of heirloom varieties and some of the stewards who make conservation of these varieties possible.

Inspirational indeed!

 

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Morons, philistines, iconoclasts . . . or just plain stupid?

Vindictive and vengeful, certainly.

Emboldened by Donald Trump, ‘Department of Government Efficiency‘ or DOGE lead, Elon Musk – the world’s richest man – has taken a chainsaw (his words) to the departments, institutions, and agencies of the US federal government in a cruel and callous not to say careless way over the past few weeks since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.

Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on 20 February 2025 in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

That’s not to deny that inefficiencies can be found and budgetary savings made in any government, and I’m sure the US federal government is no different from any other. But to proceed, as Musk and his acolytes have, is causing possibly irreparable damage on a daily basis, thousands of federal employees are losing their jobs, and this ‘downsizing’ has been effected in, it seems, an indiscriminate way. Last in, first out, and hang the consequences.

As billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban posted on Bluesky (@mcuban.bsky.social) a few hours ago:

Ready Aim Fire is a lousy way to govern.

Has it only been five weeks? It feels more like five years. And already the harm is being done, supported by some of probably the most incompetent and least qualified departmental secretaries (RFK Jr at Health and Pete Hegseth at Defense come immediately to mind, but there are many others, although yesterday Musk declared that Trump’s Cabinet was the most qualified of all time).

Certainly it looks like Musk is on some sort of ego trip. Or perhaps an over-enthusiastic substance-fuelled trip, as Musk has himself acknowledged his use of the same.

I’m not going to comment of the long list of agencies that DOGE has gone after, and having done the damage has had to roll back some of his actions, not entirely with success.

But I would like to comment on two areas that I do have some experience in, and have had contact over the years, directly and indirectly.

It’s beyond comprehension that, seemingly on a whim, DOGE abolished the world’s biggest (although not meeting the UN target of 0.7% of Gross National Income or GNI) and perhaps most important development agency, the United States Agency for International Development or USAid (now subsumed into the State Department).

Here’s how USAid compared to other foreign government development aid agencies:

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government. Both men say USAid projects advance a liberal agenda and are a waste of money. (The Guardian, 27 February 2025).

Seems like charity begins at home. Except that the savings won’t be passed on to Mr and Mrs Average American. Wait for the tax cuts for the already rich.

Those cuts at USAid immediately affected humanitarian, health, and agricultural support programs around the world, as personnel were recalled to the US (I have a number of close friends who worked for USAid in the US or abroad), and an immediate ban on further program expenditures implemented. But it’s not just overseas that USAid’s demise will be felt. USAid was a huge purchaser of home-grown grains for donation to the World Food Program or directly to nations suffering food shortages. US farmers will reap the harvest of Musk’s misguided ‘efficiencies’.

For almost 30 years I worked at two (of 14) centers—the International Potato Center (CIP) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)—of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research or CGIAR.

For 2025, the CGIAR had a proposed budget of around USD1 billion, funded through a consortium of donor agencies, and various funding mechanisms. In the past, USAid was one of the largest and most important supporters of the CGIAR. Termination of its funding, if indeed this is what is about to happen, will severely impact how the research centers can continue to operate effectively, and I fear that programs will be cut, and staff let go [1].

The other area of concern with regard to the Trump/Musk attack on federal agencies relates to the long-term safety of the nation’s genetic resources collections managed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In this recent article in Science (just click on the headline below to open) the range of cuts is described and the pushback from agribusiness.

Plant breeder Neha Kothari (right) was hired in October 2024 to streamline and improve the department’s vast collections of seeds and living crops that are key to developing improved varieties. But on 13 February she, like tens of thousands of other recent hires across the government still in probationary status, was dismissed from her job. [2]

The entire gene bank network felt the chainsaw wielded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. About 30 employees—10% of its total staff—were terminated, according to an informal survey by some retired USDA scientists. An additional 10 vacant positions have been frozen or rescinded, and a similar number took Musk’s offer last month to resign immediately but remain on the federal payroll through September.

When I started my career in genetic resources conservation 55 years ago, there was a vision and hope that one day the global system of genebanks would be properly funded. Now, with funding from the Crop Trust, that vision is being realised. And just as the genebank system is being stabilised, DOGE’s attack on the USDA’s germplasm system is unprecedented as well as a totally misguided action by incompetent DOGE staff who, it seems across a wide range of sectors, simply do not have the knowledge, expertise, or experience to make the sorts of ‘chainsaw’ decisions they are inflicting on the federal government.

Which brings me on to a final point. There’s something particularly obscene that the world’s richest man is holding sway over the lives of hundreds of thousands of federal employees (and the nation at large) even while his own companies receive federal grants and contracts reported to be in excess of USD13 billion. I wonder if he’s going after those agencies from which he receives such business largesse? Talk about conflict of interest.

I came across this list of questions about Musk and his wealth which someone posted on Bluesky recently:

Says so much. Just to put Musk’s wealth into perspective. If he was to give away USD1 million a day, it would take over 1000 years to disburse the lot! As far as anyone can tell, Musk has not engaged in any (or very little – I stand to be corrected) philanthropic endeavours.

With his wealth, he could fund the Crop Trust and global genebank activities in perpetuity with just a USD1 billion donation. Loose change for him.

Click here to read the Crop Trust Annual Report for 2023 which explains just how its funding is used to preserve and use the world’s crop genetic heritage.

Not all billionaires are like Musk. At least two billionaires, Bill Gates (with ex-wife Melinda) and Warren Buffet put their money where their mouths are in setting up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now the Gates Foundation) that has funded many humanitarian efforts globally, at USD7.7 billion in 2023. While the GF has come in for criticism on several levels, there’s no doubt that its programs have brought about or facilitated real change. Where does Musk stand in this respect? Invisible!

[1] In a news conference a couple of days ago, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced an increase in the nation’s defence budget – at the expense of the overseas aid and development budget. That had already been cut under the previous Conservative government in 2021 from the UN target of 0.7% of GNI (enshrined in law in 2015). The aid budget has been slashed to 0.3% of GNI. The UK is an important donor to the CGIAR, and this reduction is a double whammy (along with USAid) for future CGIAR prospects.

[2] Update from Science, 24 February, 5:35 pm: Science has learned that USDA is reinstating Neha Kothari as leader of the department’s national program on plant genetic resources. Kothari joins several other top-tier government scientists whose firings have been reversed, but so far there is no indication that USDA has reinstated other fired germplasm system staff. Academic leaders and representatives from the agricultural industry had criticized Kothari’s dismissal.

 

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The Commonwealth Potato Collection – it really is a treasure trove (revised and updated)*

I originally wrote this story in August 2021 after a friend and former colleague, Dr Glenn Bryan¹ posted a link on his Facebook page to a story—Treasure trove could hold secrets to potato problems—that had just appeared in the online edition of Dundee’s The Courier.

It was about the Commonwealth Potato Collection (CPC) that is held at The James Hutton Institute (JHI) at Invergowrie, just west of Dundee.

Until a couple of years ago (when he retired) Glenn led the Potato Genetics and Breeding Group at JHI, with Gaynor McKenzie as the CPC curator, a position she still occupies.

Glenn Bryan and Gaynor McKenzie at the James Hutton Institute in Invergowrie, where wild potato species in the Commonwealth Potato Collection are conserved.

The Commonwealth Potato Collection has a long and distinguished history, going back more than 80 years. It is one of a handful of potato germplasm collections around the world in which breeders have identified disease and pest resistance genes to enhance the productivity of cultivated varieties. The CPC is particularly important from a plant quarantine perspective because the collection has been routinely tested and cleaned for various pathogens, particularly seed-borne pathogens.

Jack Hawkes

It is a collection with which Steph and I have both a personal and professional connection, from the 1970s and 80s. It’s also the legacy of one man, Professor Jack Hawkes (1915-2007) with whom I had the privilege of studying for both my MSc and PhD degrees.

Let me tell that story.

In December 1938, a young botanist—just 23 years old the previous June—set off from Liverpool, headed to Lima, Peru to join the British Empire Potato Collecting Expedition to South America, the adventure of a lifetime.

Jack in Bolivia in 1939

John ‘Jack’ Gregory Hawkes, a Christ’s College, Cambridge graduate, was destined to become one of the world’s leading potato experts and a champion of the conservation and use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.

He was the taxonomic botanist on the 1939 expedition, which was led by experienced plant collector Edwards Kent Balls (1892-1984). Medical doctor and amateur botanist William ‘Bill’ Balfour Gourlay (1879-1966) was the third member of the expedition. Balls and Gourlay had been collecting plants in Mexico (including some potatoes) in 1938 before moving on to Peru for the ‘Empire’ expedition.

The expedition had originally been scheduled to start in 1937, but had to be delayed because of ill health of the original expedition leader, Dr PS Hudson, Director of the Empire Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics in Cambridge. Jack had been hired as his assistant.

Whilst waiting for the expedition to get underway, Jack took the opportunity—in August 1938—to visit Leningrad to pick the brains of Russian botanists, Drs SM Bukasov, VS Juzepczuk, and VS Lechnovicz who had already collected potatoes in South America. Jack openly acknowledged that ‘as a raw recently graduated student, [he] knew very little about potatoes’.

Nikolai Vavilov

Not only did Jack receive useful advice from these knowledgeable botanists, but he also met with the great geneticist and ‘Father of Plant Genetic Resources’ Nikolai Vavilov on several occasions during his visit to Leningrad and Moscow, ‘an experience that changed [his] life in many ways’. Vavilov had a profound effect on Jack’s subsequent career as an academic botanist and genetic resources pioneer. Alas there do not appear to be any surviving photos of Jack with Vavilov.

‘Solanum vavilovii’ growing at an experiment station near Leningrad in 1938

In Leningrad, Jack took this photo (right) of a wild potato species that had been described as Solanum vavilovii by Juzepczuk and Bukasov in 1937. Sadly that name is no longer taxonomically valid, and vavilovii is now considered simply as a variant of the species Solanum wittmackii that had been described by the German botanist Friedrich August Georg Bitter in 1913.

The Empire expedition lasted eight months from January 1939, covering northern Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and ending in Colombia (a country where Jack was to reside for three years from 1948 when he was seconded to establish a national potato research station near Bogota).

Route taken by the Empire Potato Collecting Expedition

More than 1150 samples of cultivated and wild potatoes were collected in these five countries as well as a further 46 samples collected by Balls and Gourlay in Mexico in 1938.

Here is a small selection of photographs taken during the expedition (and a link to an album of photos).

By the time the expedition ended in early September 1939, war with Germany had already been declared, and Jack’s return to the UK by ship convoy from Halifax, Newfoundland was not as comfortable as the outbound voyage nine months earlier, docking in Liverpool early in November.

Jack published an official expedition report in March 1941. Then, in 2003, he published an interesting and lengthy memoir of the expedition, Hunting the Wild Potato in the South American Andes.

In December 2021, my friend Dr Abigail Amey and I published a website (with permission of the Hawkes family) about Jack’s experiences of the 1938-39 expedition, as well as others to the USA, Mexico, and Central America in 1958, and Bolivia in 1971. Just click on the red box below (and others) to open the links.

The website also has several of Jack’s original 16mm films (which we were able to digitise through a special grant from the Crop Wild Relatives Project at Kew and the Crop Trust).

Redcliffe N Salaman

Potato tubers (and presumably seeds) were shipped back to the UK, and after a quarantine inspection, were planted out in a glasshouse at the Potato Virus Research Station, Cambridge whose director was the renowned botanist (and originally a medical doctor) Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, author of the seminal work on potatoes, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, first published in 1949 and reprinted with a new introduction by Hawkes in 1985. I jealously guard the signed copy that Jack gave me.

On his return to the UK in 1939 Jack began to study the collected germplasm, describing several new species, and completing his PhD thesis (supervised by Salaman) at the University of Cambridge in 1941.

South American potato species in the Cambridge glasshouse in the summer of 1940

Among the species identified in the course of Jack’s dissertation research was Solanum ballsii from northern Argentina, which he dedicated to EK Balls in a formal description in 1944. However, in his 1963 revised taxonomy of the tuber-bearing Solanums (potatoes), Jack (with his Danish colleague Jens Peter Hjerting, 1917-2012) recognized Solanum ballsii simply as a subspecies of Solanum vernei, a species which has since provided many important sources of resistance to the potato cyst nematode.

Jack Hawkes in the glasshouse of the Empire Potato Collection at Cambridge in July 1947.

The 1939 germplasm was the foundation of the Empire Potato Collection. When the collection curator Dr Kenneth S Dodds was appointed Director of the John Innes Institute in Bayfordbury in 1954, the collection moved with him, and was renamed the Commonwealth Potato Collection.

By the end of the decade (or early 1960s) the CPC was on the move again. This time to the Scottish Plant Breeding Station (SPBS) at Pentlandfield just south of Edinburgh when Dr Norman W Simmonds moved there in 1959. He rose through the ranks to become the station’s Director.

Dodds and his colleague Dr GJ Paxman traveled through South America during 1959-60, and their research on the genetics of diploid potatoes was based on some of the material collected. Dodds and Simmonds also collected potatoes in early 1963.

Dodds with Peruvian botanist Cesar Vargas
Dodds with Bolivian botanist Martin Cardenas in Cochabamba

But that was not the end of the CPC’s peripatetic existence. It remained at the SPBS until the early 1980s, when the SPBS amalgamated with the Scottish Horticultural Research Institute (which became the Scottish Crop Research Institute or SCRI, and now known as the James Hutton Institute), and the collection moved to its present site near Dundee.

Today, the CPC comprises some 1500 samples or accessions of about 80 wild and cultivated potato species. And over two-thirds were collected by Hawkes himself. Another 9% of the collection were collected by Dodds and his colleagues, as mentioned earlier. The remainder represent donations over the years from various individuals and institutions.

I am not sure how much the CPC grew in the intervening years, but there was a significant boost to the size and importance of the collection around 1987. Let me explain.

As I already mentioned, Jack spent three years in Colombia from 1948, returning to the UK in 1951 when he was appointed Lecturer in Taxonomy in the Department of Botany at the University of Birmingham. He was given a personal chair as Professor of Taxonomic Botany in April 1961, and became Head of Department and Mason Professor of Botany in July 1967. He remained at Birmingham until retirement in September 1982.

It was during his Birmingham years that Jack’s work on the tuber-bearing Solanums expanded significantly with several important monographs and taxonomic revisions published, based on his own field work over the years and experimental studies back at Birmingham on the potato samples he brought back to the UK and which formed an important collection in its own right. Because of the quarantine threat from these seeds (particularly of sexually-transmitted pathogens or new variants of potato viruses already present in the UK), Jack had a special quarantine licence from the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF, now DEFRA) to maintain his collection at Birmingham.

In 1958, with Peter Hjerting and young research assistant Richard Lester (who later joined the Department of Botany as a Lecturer), Jack made a six month expedition to the USA , Mexico, and Central America.

Here is another account of that trip from the University of Birmingham Gazette. Besides potatoes, many other species were made for other institutions and botanic gardens.

Collecting a sample of Solanum agrimonifolium (No. 1854) in Guatemala. L: Jack Hawkes, Peter Hjerting, and Morse (driver?); R: Richard Lester

Just three months after I arrived at Birmingham in September 1970 to enrol on the MSc course on plant genetic resources, Jack was off on his travels once again, this time to Bolivia accompanied by Peter Hjerting once again, his research assistant Phil Cribb and, in South America by Zósimo Huamán from the International Potato Center (CIP) and Moisés Zavaleta and others from Bolivia.

This is the official trip report. Here are some images from the 1971 expedition, courtesy of Phil Cribb.

Jack and Peter made another trip to Bolivia in 1974 (with research assistant Dave Astley), and another in 1980. They published their monograph of The Potatoes of Bolivia in 1989.

In September 1971, Zósimo Huamán and Moisés Zavaleta came to Birmingham to study on the genetic resources MSc course. In that same cohort was a young botanist, Stephanie Tribble, recently graduated from the University of Wales – Swansea (now Swansea University). During the summer of 1972, Steph and I became ‘an item’, so-to-speak. However, by then I was already making plans to leave the UK and join CIP in Lima by January 1973, and on graduation, Steph was keen to find a position to use the experiences and skills she had gained on the course.

Just at that time, a Scientific Officer position opened at the SPBS, as assistant to Dalton Glendinning who was the curator of the CPC. Steph duly applied and was appointed from about October that year. Jack must have supported her application. Coincidentally, the MSc course external examiner was no other that Norman Simmonds who met Steph during his course assessment.

I moved to Peru in January 1973, and within a few days discovered that Jack had mentioned Steph to CIP’s Director General, Richard Sawyer. Well, to cut a long story short, Steph was offered a position as Assistant Geneticist at CIP, to support management of CIP’s large potato collection, similar to the role she’d had at Pentlandfield. She resigned from the SPBS and joined me in Lima in July that year. We married there in October, remaining with CIP in Peru and Central America for another eight years.

Steph working in one of CIP’s screen-houses at La Molina on the eastern outskirts of Lima in 1974.

In April 1981 I was appointed Lecturer in Plant Biology at Birmingham, 18 months before Jack’s retirement, the aim being that I would assume Jack’s teaching commitments on the MSc course. When I also took over the Hawkes potato collection in 1982, I had high hopes of identifying funding for biosystematics and pre-breeding research, and continuing the Birmingham focus on potatoes.

Dave Downing was the glasshouse technician who carefully managed the Hawkes collection at Birmingham for many years.

That was not the case, and as the collection needed a dedicated glasshouse and technician I could not justify (nor financially support) holding on to such valuable research space. And, in any case, continuing with the Hawkes collection was actually blocking the opportunities for other potato research because of the MAFF-imposed restrictions.

So, with some regret but also acknowledging that Jack’s collection would be better placed elsewhere, I contacted my colleagues at the CPC to see if they would be interested to receive it—lock, stock, and barrel. And that indeed was what happened. I’m sure many new potato lines were added to the CPC. The germplasm was placed in quarantine in the first instance, and has passed through various stages of testing before being added officially to the CPC. Throughout the 80s and 90s Jack would visit the CPC from time-to-time, and look through the materials, helping with the correct identification of species and the like.

Jack’s interest in and contributions to potato science remained with him almost up to his death in 2007. By then he had become increasingly frail, and had moved into a care home, his wife Barbara having passed away some years previously. By then, Jack’s reputation and legacy was sealed. Not only has his scientific output contributed to the conservation and use of potato genetic resources worldwide, embodied in the CPC that he helped establish all those decades earlier, but through the MSc course that he founded in 1969, hundreds of professionals worldwide have continued to carry the genetic conservation torch. A fine legacy, indeed!

¹ Glenn and I go back almost 30 years when, as a young scientist at the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich, he was a member of a rice research project, funded by the British government, that brought together staff at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines where I was Head of the Genetic Resources Center, the University of Birmingham (where I had been a faculty member for a decade from 1981), and the JIC to use molecular markers to study IRRI’s large and globally-important germplasm collection conserved in its International Rice Genebank.

L-R: me, Glenn, and John Newbury (who later became professor at the University of Worcester) during a spot of sight-seeing near IRRI in 1993.

  • Originally published on 24 August 2021.
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Reflections of a 1990s genebanker

Since I started this blog in February 2012, I have written a number of stories about rice genetic resources and their conservation at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, one of the centers of the Consultative Group on Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Written over several years, there is inevitably some overlap between the posts. I have now brought them together. Just click on the red boxes below to read each one or expand an image.

I was privileged to manage the International Rice Genebank at IRRI (the IRG, formerly known as the International Rice Germplasm Center or IGRC until 1995) for a decade from July 1991, as Head of the Genetic Resources Center (GRC) [1].

The IRRI campus at Los Baños, 70 km south of Manila. The Brady Laboratory (second from left) houses the genebank cold stores.

There are twelve CGIAR genebanks, and IRRI’s is one of the largest. It’s certainly the oldest. In April, IRRI will celebrate its 65th anniversary [2]. For almost six and a half decades, IRRI has successfully managed the world’s largest collection of rice genetic resources (farmer or landrace varieties, improved varieties, wild rice species, genetic stocks, and the like).

There’s perhaps no crop more important than rice. It’s the staple food of half the world’s population on a daily basis. The genebank is a crucial resource for plant breeders who use the germplasm to sustain and increase agricultural productivity, with the aim of reducing hunger among the world’s poor.

IRRI released the first of the semi-dwarf varieties in the 1960s; many others have followed over the decades, with increasingly more complex pedigrees.

Pedigree of rice variety IR72 showing 22 landraces (boxes with bold lines) and one wild species, Oryza nivara. In contrast, IR8, the first of the widely-grown modern semi-dwarf varieties (indicated by the arrow) had only three landraces in its pedigree.

When I joined IRRI, there were just over 70,000 seed samples (or accessions as they are known in genebank parlance) in the genebank.

During the 1990s, the collection grew by about 30% to a little over 100,000 accessions. This was quite remarkable in itself, given that the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) had come into effect in 1992, and for for at least a decade or more thereafter, many countries were reluctant to share their national germplasm until benefit-sharing mechanisms had been worked out. It says a lot about the mutual respect between national programs (particularly in Asia) and IRRI that we were able to mount a significant program to collect rice varieties and wild species. But more on that later.

Today the collection is approaching 135,000 accessions, safely duplicated in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV, under the auspices of the Government of Norway and the Crop Trust). Prior to 1991, and for at least the next decade or more, duplicates samples were also held in so-called ‘black box’ storage at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. I’m not sure whether IRRI has continued its arrangement with Fort Collins now that the SGSV is open.

When the SGSV vault was opened in 2008, IRRI deposited more than 70,000 accessions, the first to be registered in the Vault. Since then, IRRI has made six more deposits, for a total of 133,707 accessions, almost the entire collection.

Given the amount of publicity that the SGSV has received, one could be forgiven for not knowing that there are many more genebanks around the world.

Inevitably there has been some misguided (as far as I’m concerned) criticism of the SGSV that I attempted to rebut in the next post.

The IRRI genebank became the first genebank of the CGIAR system to be identified by the Crop Trust for in-perpetuity funding that will ensure the availability of the conserved germplasm decades into the future.

The fact that IRRI was able to deposit so many accessions in the SGSV and receive in-perpetuity funding is due—in no small part—to the many changes we made to the management of the genebank and its collection during the 1990s. And which pre-emptively prepared it for the changes that all the CGIAR genebanks would eventually have to make.

But I’m getting ahead of myself just a little.

Although I had been involved with the conservation and use of plant genetic resources since 1970 (when I arrived at the University of Birmingham to attend the one-year MSc course on genetic conservation), I’d never worked on rice nor managed a genebank when I joined IRRI in 1991. All my experience to date had been with potatoes in South and Central America, and several grain legumes while teaching at Birmingham during the 1980s.

1991 was a fortuitous time to join IRRI. I was recruited by Director General Klaus Lampe (right), who had been appointed by the institute’s Board of Trustees in 1998 to revive the institute’s fortunes and refurbish its ageing infrastructure.

Lampe was very supportive of the genetic resources program, and it helped that I had a senior position as a department head, so was able to meet with him directly on a regular basis to discuss my plans for the genebank.

Before 1991 quite a number of staff retired, including the previous and first head of the IRGC, Dr Te-Tzu Chang (known universally simple as ‘TT’). TT and I had very different management styles, and I was determined to involve my genebank staff in the changes that I believed should be made. I spent six months determining how the genebank operations could be significantly enhanced.

As I said, Klaus Lampe was supportive, approving recruitment of junior staff to help with the considerable backlog of seed samples for cleaning and registering in the genebank, as well as including the genebank in the institute’s program of infrastructure refurbishment and equipment upgrades.

These two posts describe many of the changes we made, and include a video about the genebank that I made in 2010 just before I left IRRI.

I was fortunate to inherit a great group of staff, totally dedicated to the genetic conservation cause, and much more knowledgeable about rice than I ever became [3].

I quickly identified Ms Flora ‘Pola’ de Guzman (all Filipinos have a nickname) as a potential genebank manager, and she continued in that role until her retirement a couple of years back. When the in-perpetuity agreement was signed in 2018, Pola was given a special award, recognising her 40 years service to the conservation of rice genetic resources.

Inside the International Rice Genebank Active Collection, with genebank manager Pola de Guzman

I asked Renato ‘Ato’ Reaño to manage all the genebank’s field operations. Ato has also now retired.

One of the key aspects that had to be addressed was data management. As you can imagine, for a collection of 70,000+ accessions that I inherited in 1991, there was a mountain of data about provenance, as well data on morphological characters and response to biotic and abiotic stresses, across the cultivated rices (two different species) and 20+ wild species of Oryza. Essentially there were three databases that couldn’t effectively talk to each other. Big changes had to be made, which I described in this post.

It took almost two years, but when completed we had developed the International Rice Genebank Collection Information System (IRGCIS) to manage all the operations of the genebank. It has now been superseded by an international system based on the US-developed germplasm information network, GRIN.

That information situation also reminds of another information ‘bee in my bonnet’, which I wrote about here.

In my interviews at IRRI in January 1991, I stressed the need for the genebank to carry out research, something that had not been contemplated when the GRC position was advertised the previous year. In fact, I made it a condition of accepting a job offer that the genebank should conduct germplasm-relevant research, such as studies of seed survival, rice taxonomy, and the management of the collection.

I had concerns that we had insufficient information about the longevity of seeds in storage, or how the environment at Los Baños affected the quality of rice seeds grown there. We developed new seed production protocols, and post-harvest management in terms of seed drying. We installed a bespoke seed drying room with a capacity of over 1 tonne of seeds. In the 2000s (after I had moved from GRC to a senior management position at IRRI), seed physiologist Fiona Hay was recruited who improved on the seed handling protocols that we developed and which had already shown to be effective in increasing seed quality for long-term conservation.

Early in the decade, and with funding from the British government, we set up a collaborative project with my former colleagues at the University of Birmingham as well as at the John Innes Centre to study how molecular markers could be used to study the diversity in the rice collection and its management.

In 1994, we received a large grant (>USD 2.3 million) from the Swiss government:

  • to collect rice varieties and wild species throughout Asia, Africa, and parts of South America (essentially to try and complete the collecting of germplasm that had been little explored);
  • to conduct research about on-farm management of rice genetic resources; and
  • to train personnel from national germplasm programs in collecting, conservation techniques, and data management.

During the 1990s, IRRI had a special rice project with the Government of Laos, and a staff member based in Vientiane. Since little rice germplasm had been collected in that country, we recruited Dr Seepana Appa Rao to collect rice varieties there.

Appa Rao (right) and his Lao counterpart, Dr Chay Bounphanousay (left) sampling a rice variety from a Lao farmer.

Over a five year period he and his Lao colleagues collected more than 13,000 samples, now safely conserved in the International Rice Genebank. We also built a small genebank near Vientiane to house the germplasm locally.

My colleagues and I were quite productive in terms of research and publications. This post lists all the publications on which I was author/co-author, and there are links therein to PDF copies of many of them.

Every year, IRRI receives thousands of visitors, and when I first arrived at IRRI, it seemed as if anyone and everyone who wanted to visit the genebank was allowed to do so. On more than one occasion—until I put a stop to it—I’d find our colleagues from Visitor Services taking a large party of visitors, hordes of schoolchildren even, into the cold stores. With such large numbers it was not possible to keep all the doors closed, disrupting the carefully controlled temperature and humidity environment in the genebank and its laboratories.

I had to limit the number of visitors inside the genebank significantly, and ask my staff to take some of the load of attending to visitors. Nevertheless, I do understand the need to explain the importance of genetic resources and the role of the genebank to visitors, and build a constituency who can support the genebank and what it aims to achieve.

But it was a joy to meet with visitors such as wheat breeder, ‘Father of the Green Revolution’, and 1970 Nobel Peace Laureate, Dr Norman Borlaug.

With Dr Norman Borlaug in the IRG Active Collection in the early 1990s, before we transferred the germplasm to aluminum pouches.

Finally, let me say something about IRRI’s genetic conservation role in the context of the CGIAR.

In the early 1990s, the heads of the CGIAR genebanks would meet each year as the Inter-Center Working Group on Genetic Resources (ICWG-GR). I attended my first meeting in January 1993 in Addis Ababa at the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA, now part of the International Livestock Research Institute or ILRI). I was elected chair for three years, and during my tenure the System-wide Genetic Resources Program (SGRP) was launched with the ICWG-GR as its steering committee.

Earlier I mentioned the CBD. There’s no doubt that during the 1990s the whole realm of genetic resources became highly politicized, with the CGIAR centers contributing to CBD discussions as they related to agricultural biodiversity, and through the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

The organization of the genebanks in the CGIAR has undergone several iterations since I moved away from this area in May 2001 (when I joined IRRI’s senior management team as Director for Program Planning and Communications). My successor Dr Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton enthusiastically took on the role of representing the institute in the discussions on the formulation and implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). The Treaty aims to guarantee food security through the conservation, exchange, and sustainable use of the world’s plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. It also focuses on fair and equitable benefit sharing and recognition of farmers’ rights.

In 2016-17, I led a review of the Genebanks CRP (CGIAR Research Program). Since then, the Genebanks CRP evolved into the Genebank Platform, and is now the CGIAR Initiative on Genebanks.

What I can say is that all the CGIAR genebanks have raised their game with respect to the crops they conserve. Working with the Crop Trust, standards have increased, and genebanks held to account more rigorously in terms of how they are being managed. Nevertheless, I think that we can say that the CGIAR continues to play one of the major roles in genetic resources conservation worldwide.

[1] GRC comprised two units: the genebank (my day-to-day responsibility), and the International Network for the Genetic Evaluation of Rice or INGER, which was managed basis by one of my colleagues.

[2] It seems like only yesterday that I was organizing the institute’s Golden Jubilee in 2010, after which I retired and returned to the UK.

[3] Three key staff, Ms Eves Loresto, Tom Clemeno, and Ms. Amita ‘Amy’ Juliano sadly passed away, as have several other junior staff.

 

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Two Bs, two Ps, seven Us, and nine Ds

Education is a wonderful thing, and my family and I have taken advantage of the opportunities a good education opens up.

As I read an email a few days ago from the University of Birmingham, announcing its 125th anniversary celebrations later this year, my mind wandered back to 1975.

That was when the university celebrated the centennial of laying of the foundation stone of the Mason Science College in 1875, itself a successor of Queen’s College, founded in 1825 as a medical college. HM The Queen visited the university in 1975 to celebrate that centennial, seen in this photo with the university Chancellor, Sir Peter Scott (on the right) and the Vice-Chancellor, Dr Robert Hunter (later Baron Hunter of Newington, on the left). I was in the crowd there, somewhere.

I was back at Birmingham for a few months (from the International Potato Center or CIP in Lima, Peru where I was working as an Associate Taxonomist) to complete the residency requirements for my PhD, and to submit my dissertation. I successfully defended that in late October, and the degree was conferred by Sir Peter Scott at a congregation on 12 December. In the photo below, my PhD supervisor and Mason Professor of Botany, Jack Hawkes is on my right, and Dr Trevor Williams on my left.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

My first experience of Birmingham was in the late Spring of 1967, when I sat the Joint Matriculation Board Advanced or ‘A’ Level biology practical exam in the First Year Lab in the School of Biological Sciences. Many high schools took advantage of that arrangement if they had insufficient facilities in their own premises to hold the exam.

Going into my ‘A’ level exams I had ambitions to attend university. Not that I’d applied to Birmingham. That honour went to the University of Southampton where I had been accepted to study for a BSc degree in environmental botany and geography.

As ‘baby boomers’ my elder brother Edgar and I were the first in our family and among all our cousins to attend university. Once Edgar had persuaded our parents that he wanted to go to university (1964-1967) it was easier for me to follow that same path three years later.

I enjoyed my three years at Southampton. Although I’d registered for a combined degree in environmental botany and geography, my interests shifted significantly towards botany by my third and final year.

However, graduating in July 1970 and with just a BSc under my belt, I knew I’d have to pursue graduate studies to achieve my ambition of working overseas. And it was at the beginning of my final year at Southampton that a one year taught MSc course on the Conservation and Utilisation of Plant Genetic Resources was launched at Birmingham, under the leadership of Jack Hawkes. One of the lecturers at Southampton, geneticist Dr Joe Smartt, suggested that I should apply.

Which I duly did, and after an interview at Birmingham was offered a place for the following September, subject to funding being available for a maintenance grant and tuition fees. It was not until the course was about to commence that Professor Hawkes could confirm the financial support. By mid-September I headed to Birmingham, and the beginning of an association with the university that lasted several decades, as both student and member of staff.

I was awarded the MSc degree in December 1971. During that year, Hawkes (a world-renowned potato expert) had arranged for me to join CIP in Lima for just a year (which later extended to more than eight years) to help conserve its important collection of native potato varieties. An opportunity I jumped at. However, funding from the British government was not confirmed until late 1972. Instead of kicking my heels waiting for that funding to be confirmed, and concerned I might find a position elsewhere, Hawkes raised a small grant to allow me to begin a PhD project under his supervision, and that I would continue after arriving  in Peru.

A third cohort of students arrived in Birmingham in September 1971, among them Stephanie Tribble from Southend-on-Sea who had just graduated from the University College of Swansea (now Swansea University) with a degree in botany. By the summer of 1972 Steph and I had become an item.

In November 1972 she joined the Scottish Plant Breeding Station (SPBS) at Pentlandfield, south of Edinburgh, as assistant curator of the Commonwealth Potato Collection. She returned to Birmingham in December for the MSc degree congregation, just three weeks before I was due to fly out to Peru at the beginning of January 1973.

Well, things have a habit of turning out for the best. Once I was in Peru, I asked Steph to marry me and join me in Lima where I knew there would be a position for her at CIP. Resigning from the SPBS, she arrived in early July and we were married in the local registry office in Lima in October.

So that’s two botanists, three universities (Southampton, Swansea, and Birmingham), and five degrees (2xBSc, 2xMSc, 1xPhD) between us.

After another fruitful five years with CIP based in Costa Rica after I’d completed my PhD (during which our elder daughter Hannah was born), a lectureship opened in the Department of Plant Biology at Birmingham, so I applied. I flew back from Peru for an interview, and having been offered the position, I joined the university on 1 April 1981.

Much of my teaching focused on the genetic resources MSc course that was accepting ever more numbers of students from around the world. I remained at Birmingham for a decade, before deciding that I wasn’t really cut out for academia and, in any case, a more exciting opportunity had presented itself at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. I joined IRRI as head of the Genetic Resources Center in July 1991, remaining in that position for almost a decade. In May 2001, I was appointed Director for Program Planning and Communications (DPPC), joining the institute’s senior management team, until my retirement in April 2010.

During the 1990s, I had an excellent research collaboration with my former colleagues in the School of Biological Sciences at Birmingham, and each year when I returned to the UK on home leave, I’d spend time in the university discussing our research as well as delivering several lectures to the MSc students, for which the university appointed me an Honorary Senior Lecturer.

As I mentioned before, Hannah was born in 1978 when we were living in Costa Rica. Once back in the UK her younger sister Philippa was born in 1982 in the small market town of Bromsgrove, about 13 miles south of the University of Birmingham in north Worcestershire.

Both girls thrived in Bromsgrove, enjoyed school, and each had a good circle of friends.

We upended their world when I took the position at IRRI and they moved to the Philippines with Steph just after Christmas 1991. Even more challenging was their enrolment in the International School Manila, which had a US-based curriculum, and eventually an academic stream based on the International Baccalaureate (IB). There’s no doubt that the first year was tough. Not only was it challenging academically, but living 70 km south of Manila, IRRI students were bussed into school each day departing around 04:30 to begin classes at 07:30, and returning by 16:30, or later if there were holdups on the highway, as was often the case.

Despite the bumpy start, Hannah and Phil rose to the challenge and achieved outstanding scores on the IB in 1995 and 1999 respectively.

From the outset, attending university had been part of our plan for them, and an ambition they readily embraced. Both took a gap year between high school and university. Hannah was drawn towards Psychology, with a minor in Anthropology. And she discovered that this combination was offered at few universities in the UK, opting to attend Swansea University in 1996. And although she was on course to excel academically, half way through her second year she asked if she could transfer to Macalester College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota, USA.

Macalester graduation in May 2000, with Hannah and Michael facing the camera.

Graduating Summa cum laude in May 2000 from Macalester, with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Anthropology, Hannah was then accepted into a graduate program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities.

She was awarded her PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2006 with a thesis that assessed the behaviour and ethical misconduct of senior leaders in the workplace.

Hannah (right) with her peers in Industrial & organizational Psychology

That’s one psychologist, another two universities (Macalester and Minnesota), and two more degrees (BA, PhD).

Remaining in Minnesota, she married Michael (also a Macalester graduate) in 2006, became a US citizen, and has a senior position focused on talent management and performance with one of the largest international conglomerates. They have two children: Callum (14) and Zoë (12).

After a gap year, Philippa began her studies in Psychology at Durham University in 2000, graduating with a 2:i BSc degree three years later. Uncertain what path then to follow, she moved to Vancouver for a year, before having to return to the UK at short notice after the Canadian government refused to renew her work visa.

Post-graduation, outside Durham Cathedral.

She spent six months looking for a job, finally landing a research assistantship in the Brain, Performance and Nutrition Research Centre in the Department of Psychology at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. After a couple of years she began her own PhD studies investigating the effects of bioactive lipids such as omega-3 fatty acids on cognition and brain health. She was awarded her PhD in December 2010.

Post-graduation with Steph and me, and Andi.

She’s the second psychologist in the family, with two more universities and two degrees (BSc, PhD) under her belt.

Philippa is now Director of the Brain, Performance and Nutrition Research Centre, and Associate Professor in Biological Psychology at Northumbria.

She married Andi in September 2010 (taking themselves off to New York to get married), and have two sons: Elvis (13) and Felix (11).

Two botanists and two psychologists. Who’d have thought it? Neither Hannah nor Philippa showed any interest in pursuing biology at degree level. Having two psychologists in the family we do wonder, from time-to-time, if we went wrong somewhere along the line.

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Then there was rice . . .

For 20 years before I joined the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines in July 1991, as head of the Genetic Resources Center (GRC), my career in international agricultural research at the International Potato Center (CIP, 1973-1981) in Peru and academia (at The University of Birmingham, 1981-1991) focused on potatoes and legume species. Although I remained at IRRI until 2010 (when I retired), I was head of GRC for just a decade, after which I moved to a senior management position.

I’d travelled in Asia only twice before. And one of those trips had been to IRRI in January 1991 for interview. The other, in 1985, was to attend a genetic resources conference in Jakarta, Indonesia.

IRRI research center in Los Baños. GRC is housed in the Brady Building on the extreme right. Other buildings have been added since the photo was taken.

So my experience in Asia was limited to say the least, and non-existent for rice. Joining IRRI was certainly a challenge. Why?

In the experiment field at IRRI research center in 2010, with Mt Makiling in the background. I bought that sombrero in Peru in January 1973, just a few days after I arrived there to begin my career in international agricultural research at CIP. The hat is still going strong 50+ years later – not so sure about the wearer.

At IRRI, I had to learn about rice from scratch, manage one of the world’s most important genebanks (I’d never managed a genebank before), and supervise a group of more than 70 professional and support staff. Furthermore, I had to learn (quickly) to empathise with a very different culture, specifically Filipino but Asian more broadly (very different from that I’d experienced in Latin America). It wasn’t so straightforward, but I was up for the challenge.

In 1991, Klaus Lampe (right, who passed away earlier this year) was IRRI’s Director General, who was appointed in 1988 to revive the institute’s status in the world of international agricultural research. That meant not only refurbishment of IRRI’s laboratories and offices at its Los Baños campus headquarters, but also involved a significant turnover of staff, replacing many (who had been with IRRI for a decade or more, even since the 1960s) with a cohort of younger staff who could bring new ideas,  enthusiasm, and skills to IRRI’s research for development agenda. I was part of that recruitment cohort.

I first heard about the GRC position at IRRI in September 1990. It was advertised as a new department, bringing together the rice genebank (then known as the International Rice Germplasm Center, later renamed the International Rice Genebank) and INGER, a global network for testing rice varieties and breeding lines. While the head would have overall management responsibility for GRC, his/her day-to-day duties would focus on the genebank, while another staff member was the INGER leader.

During my interviews at IRRI over three days I indicated I would only be interested in the position if there was a specific research component and funding to support it, something that had not been envisaged when GRC was established and the position advertised.

I must have been persuasive because I was offered the position, and Lampe approved a research role for GRC. Specifically for research aimed at managing and using the important rice germplasm collection of indigenous varieties, improved lines, genetic stocks, and wild species that, in 1991, totalled around 75,000 seed samples or accessions.

But in July 1991, research per se was not an immediate priority. There were other, more pressing issues to be attended to first—and their outcome equally as important as our many research publications.

I had to quickly familiarise myself with IRRI’s research and management culture as one of the world’s leading agricultural research centers (and oldest among the research centers supported through the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, or CGIAR), build a GRC culture and, specifically, work out just how the genebank could be better managed and the roles of each of the staff.

My predecessor (as head of the International Rice Germplasm Center) was eminent rice geneticist and upland rice breeder, Dr TT Chang. ‘TT’, as he was known, ran the genebank (I quickly discovered) along the lines: ‘Do as I say’, and staff had little or no individual responsibility or leeway to manage their work more effectively.

It didn’t take me long to realise that changes could and should be made to increase efficiency, and eliminate duplication of effort among staff. I needed to assign specific responsibilities (and accountability) to each staff member for seed conservation, germplasm multiplication and rejuvenation, for data management, among others, and also identify individuals who might take on a specific research role.

After six months of asking lots of questions and discussing the genebank operations, I had a genebank strategy and plan ready. And because my staff had been involved in developing the plan, its implementation was fairly plain-sailing from then on.

I’m not going to detail here the sorts of changes that were made. Almost none of the genebank operations in the field or in storage escaped our attention. Job descriptions were rewritten, and positions upgraded to reflect new responsibilities.

Inside the International Rice Genebank, with Pola de Guzman who became the genebank manager.

The genebank was fortunate to be included in the institute’s refurbishment plan, so we upgraded many of its facilities and installed a dedicated seed drying room, a significant addition.

In this post I summarised what it entails to run a genebank for rice. And check out this video I made  about the genebank in 2015 on a return visit to IRRI. Many of the staff who feature in the video have themselves now retired and some have sadly died.

Among the tasks we undertook was revision of the data management system, one of the most important components of genebank operations. For a number of reasons the data system I inherited was not really fit for purpose. It took two years to complete all the changes!

And for the sake of my successor(s), we wrote a genebank operations manual, the first of its kind among the CGIAR genebanks. Publishing the manual was not the only ‘first’ that IRRI achieved.

The fruits of our endeavours were recognised around 1994 when the CGIAR launched an external review of the center genebanks. The reviewers concluded that IRRI’s genebank was ‘a model for others to emulate‘. Our hard work had paid off. But we weren’t complacent, striving to make more improvements which were taken further by my immediate successor, Dr Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton.

The management and status of the International Rice Genebank
Over the decade I was in charge of IRRI’s genebank, we published several papers and book chapters describing the rice collection and its management (and in the wider CGIAR context), how much it cost to run, who had requested germplasm and for what purpose, using biotechnology for conservation, as well as issues related to the management of intellectual property.

During the mid-1990s, and post-Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) there was concern internationally about how germplasm was being conserved in the 11 CGIAR center genebanks.

The CGIAR’s System-wide Genetic Resources Program (SGRP, launched in 1994 and which I chaired for several years, seen in the image below meeting in Rome had members from all CGIAR centers) responded to these concerns by publishing Biodiversity in Trust in 1997.

The chapters described the status and management of each of the crops held in trust in the genebanks. The rice chapter had authors from IRRI, Africa Rice (in Ivory Coast), IITA (in Nigeria), and CIAT (in Colombia), all of which had rice collections, with that at IRRI the largest and most comprehensive.

In the 1990s, there was considerable interest in developing ‘core collections’ (first proposed by genetic resources pioneer, Sir Otto Frankel (right, one of the pioneers of the plant genetic resources conservation movement launched in the 1960s, who I had the pleasure of meeting at that 1985 conference in Jakarta), a subset of the whole collection that encompassed all the diversity—a concept that has been (mis)interpreted in a multiplicity of ways ever since. I’ve never been much of an advocate for core collections, simply because we had so much to achieve to ensure the safety of the whole collection rather concentrate our efforts on a subset. Nevertheless, my colleague Duncan Vaughan (who left IRRI in 1993 to join a research institute in Tsukuba, Japan) and I speculated how a core collection for rice might be assembled.

We published an update in 1999, after we’d had several years of molecular analysis experience.

The IRRI collection has been widely used in plant breeding, and rice research in general. It’s not a museum collection, and access to the germplasm is one justification for its continued financial support.

The long-term security of any genebank collection is dependent upon reliability of long-term funding. Fortunately the Crop Trust now provides a significant level of security to genebanks in perpetuity through its Endowment Fund.

But what does it cost to run a genebank like IRRI’s? In the late 1990s, we didn’t really have a good handle on this. With the help of agricultural economists Bonwoo Koo, Philip Pardey, and Brian Wright, several of the CGIAR genebanks made a stab at a costing exercise – subsequently revised since methodologies have been improved. Here is the original IRRI costing study, published in 2004.

During our research on the breeding relationships of wild and cultivated rices, we used in vitro culture of embryos (on nutrient medium), and over the years adopted various molecular approaches (see below) to study the diversity of the rice collection. Some of these also had implications for intellectual property management, and I addressed some of these issues in this chapter in 1999.

In a later section of this post I describe in more detail how we (with colleagues in the UK) adopted and developed molecular approaches to manage the collection (and study diversity). But here are two general descriptions of what we did.

Post-CBD, and with the coming into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, I (together with an FAO consultant Robert Lettington) was asked to provide FAO with an analysis of some of the current developments affecting access to germplasm, including the effects of the development of access legislation under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), legislation on intellectual property rights (IPRs), and other relevant national legislation.

Now let me turn to GRC research per se, which focused on two main areas:

  • managing the germplasm collection; and
  • understanding the diversity of rice accessions in the collection.

From the outset it was clear to me that we would need external collaborators simply because we did not have the resources (human, laboratory, or financial) to carry out everything by ourselves. And in the account below, I’ll explain how and with whom we developed such collaboration.

Germplasm conservation
The top priority (or should be) for any genebank manager is to ensure that conserved germplasm is safe and will retain its viability for decades.

Since the IRRI collection comprised rice varieties and wild species from across the world, I was concerned that we had insufficient information how to improve the multiplication of diverse seed samples in one location, namely Los Baños (14°N). While there was quite a body of literature about seed multiplication, drying, and storage from a range of other species, not so much was known then about rice.

So I turned to my good friend at the University of Reading, Professor Richard Ellis (right), a leading expert in seed conservation, and together we successfully applied for one of the UK Overseas Development Administration’s (ODA, later to become the Department for International Development or DfID) ‘Holdback’ grants. This was a scheme in which the ODA set aside a small portion of its overseas aid budget to the CGIAR centers to fund collaborative work between British institutions and centers, but with the bulk of the funds spent in the UK.

Our project focused on how the seed production environment and time of harvest affected seed longevity in storage, leading to a couple of publications that guided our practices in the genebank.

The next step was to expand the research in Los Baños itself looking at more rice varieties in a real rice-growing environment.

I recruited Dr N Kameswara Rao (right) from India (who had completed his PhD at Reading) to join GRC on a postdoctoral position for three years.

Kameswara Rao and I published these four papers:

As a result of this project, we made several important changes to germplasm multiplication and rejuvenation, and post-harvest drying and management was enhanced, as I mentioned earlier, with the addition of a dedicated seed drying room (with a capacity of at least 2 tonnes, that allowed seeds to dry slowly) to the genebank.

Seed germination of wild rice species had always been somewhat hit-and-miss, so my staff set up a series of experiments to improve the germination rate, leading to the adoption of different protocols.

Molecular markers – collaboration with the University of Birmingham and the John Innes Centre
Even before I left the university to join IRRI, I had discussed with my colleagues Brian Ford-Lloyd and John Newbury [1] how we might continue to collaborate. Then, like I had with Richard Ellis at Reading, we successfully applied for a UK ‘Holdback’ grant (R5059) jointly with John Innes Centre (JIC, with the late Professor Mike Gale, FRS) in Norwich, to study how molecular markers could be used to reveal the nature of diversity in the germplasm collection and help in its management. Parminder Virk [2], a quantitative geneticist, joined the project in Birmingham, and added his considerable statistical analysis skills to the research. Dr Glenn Bryan [3] was the lead scientist at JIC.

But not without a little controversy at IRRI. Why should that have been? Well, some of my IRRI colleagues argued that the funds should come directly to the institute since there was a laboratory already established to use molecular markers (mainly Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism markers or RFLPs), even though that lab was operating at almost full capacity.

They just couldn’t accept that ‘Holdback Funds’ would never be awarded directly to a center, even though we could allocate some of our expenses in the research to the project. In any case, it was clear to me that we had neither the capacity in house, nor did we have the trained personnel in GRC. With that in mind, I was able eventually to send one of my staff, Amita ‘Amy’ Juliano (who sadly passed away around 2004) for several weeks training (on a travel grant from the British Council) in the Birmingham lab, and on her return she set up her own lab in GRC.

L-R: John Newbury, Faye Hughes (lab technician), Parminder Virk (postdoc), visitor, Amy Juliano (IRRI), visitor, me, Brian Ford-Lloyd in the lab at Birmingham.

Birmingham had responsibility for the molecular screening (and development of techniques and methodologies), using PCR-based markers like Random Amplification of Polymorphic DNA or RAPD markers. What we at IRRI contributed was expertise to phenotype rice varieties in the field.

Compared to what molecular markers are available for research today (and more than a decade before the rice genome was sequenced in 2002), and the developments in genome sequencing that have taken place, our initial focus on RAPD markers was just the beginning of an innovative (pioneering even) molecular study of any germplasm collection. And has led to some molecular firsts.

We showed that RAPD markers were useful for expanding our knowledge of diversity beyond the purely morphological or isozyme data then available.

In a particularly significant development we demonstrated how RAPD markers could be used to predict the behaviour of rice varieties in the field (combining excellent molecular analysis with accurate phenotyping). This was one of the first (if not the first) examples of what came to be known as ‘association genetics’, dismissed at the time by many (including Mike Gale) but now widely verified in other species.

Our colleagues at the JIC also developed work on Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism or AFLP markers to study rice germplasm. A young Chinese scientist, Zhu Jiahui, joined the project and eventually was awarded his PhD for the research.

A couple of PhD students at Birmingham used molecular markers to study material from the collection.

After several years of study we developed a deep appreciation of how molecular markers really did open a window on the diversity of the germplasm collection.

Biosystematics and pre-breeding
Wild species have been used to improve rice varieties, and the genebank collection holds many accessions of the 20 or so wild Oryza species. However, there had been little systematic study in terms of their taxonomy or their breeding relationships with the cultivated species. We decided to rectify that situation and launched a program to study the variation in and relationships of the wild and cultivated rices, Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrima.

In 1994 we recruited Chinese cytogeneticist Dr Lu Bao-Rong (right, now at Fudan University in Shanghai) to lead this biosystematics initiative and to continue the collecting of wild species of his predecessor, Dr Duncan Vaughan. The two Filipino support staff were Amy Juliano and Maria Elizabeth ‘Yvette’ Naredo.

Under our supervision, Amy and Yvette carried out some important work on the AA genome rices (the two cultivated species and their closest wild relatives), establishing crossing and embryo rescue protocols.

In all, the biosystematics research led to these papers:

Yvette completed her MS degree at the University of the Philippines-Los Baños, co-supervised by me and a faculty member from the university, for a study on two distantly related species, Oryza ridleyi and Oryza longiglumis. Some years later she went on to complete her PhD as well.

In 1994, I applied to the Swiss government for funding to:

  • ‘complete’ the collection of rice varieties (and some wild species) throughout Asia, and wild rices in several African countries, and Costa Rica and Brazil in South America;
  • train personnel in national programs the principles and practices of rice germplasm conservation and use (including data management); and
  • evaluate the role for on-farm management of rice varieties as a component of genetic conservation.

We received a grant of USD3.286 million, and the project ran until 2000. I’ve written extensively about the project in this blog post. There you will find links to original project reports – and lots more.

Collecting rice germplasm
But in terms of collecting, one of my former MSc students at the University of Birmingham, Dr Dan Kiambi (a Kenyan national) coordinated collecting efforts in Africa.

In Asia, few collections of rice germplasm had been made in Laos, due to the conflict that had blighted that country over many years. In fact it’s overall capacity for agricultural R&D was quite limited. At the end of the 1980s, and supported with Swiss funding, IRRI opened a country program office in Vientiane (the capital city), headed by the late Dr John Schiller (right), an Australian agronomist who became a good friend.

With funding from the rice biodiversity project, I hired a project scientist based in Vientiane who would work with the Lao national program to collect rice varieties throughout the country (as well as assisting collecting elsewhere if time permitted).

Dr Seepana Appa Rao (right, a germplasm scientist) came to us from a sister center, ICRISAT, in Hyderabad, India and he spent five years in Laos, assembling a comprehensive collection of 13,000 Lao rice samples which were duplicated in the International Rice Genebank. I wrote about this special aspect of the rice biodiversity project here.

Appa was an enthusiastic writer and here are two papers about the collections he made.

But Appa didn’t just collect rice varieties and leave it at that. With his Lao colleagues he studied the germplasm, leading to several interesting papers and book chapters.

The following chapters were all published in the same book.

On-farm management of rice genetic resources
During the 1990s there was a concerted effort among some activist NGOs and the like to downplay the important (and safe) role of ex situ conservation in genebanks, instead promoting an in situ on-farm management (conservation) approach that should be adopted. Whereas there was a considerable body of scientific literature to support the efficacy of ex situ conservation, on-farm management seemed to almost be an ideology with little scientific basis to support its long-term consequences in terms of genetic conservation.

I felt we needed to tackle this situation head on, so I hired a population geneticist, Dr Jean-Louis Pham (on secondment from IRD in France) and a Mexican human ecologist, Dr Mauricio Bellon who together would look into the genetic and societal implications of on-farm management. After Mauricio moved to another institute after a couple of years, we recruited Dr Steve Morin, a social anthropologist from Nebraska.

L-R: Jean-Louis Pham, Mauricio Bellon, and Steve Morin

All in all, quite a productive decade, upgrading the genebank and its collection, and establishing excellent collaborations with scientists in the UK and elsewhere, without whom we could never have achieved so much.

My Filipino staff grew in their roles, and the genebank went from strength to strength. I retired just as IRRI reached its Golden Jubilee.

Although I moved into a program management role after leaving GRC, I retained a keen interest in what my former colleagues were undertaking. And to this day, they keep me posted from time-to-time.

Besides the papers and chapters that I have included above, we presented these papers and posters at conferences. No digital copies are available.

1993
Cabanilla, V.R., M.T. Jackson & T.R. Hargrove, 1993. Tracing the ancestry of rice varieties. Poster presented at the 17th International Congress of Genetics, Birmingham, U.K., August 15-21, 1993. Volume of abstracts, 112-113.

Hunt, E.D., M.T. Jackson, M. Oliva & A. Alcantara, 1993. Employing geographical information systems (GIS) for conserving and using rice germplasm. Poster presented at the 17th International Congress of Genetics, Birmingham, U.K., August 15-21, 1993. Volume of abstracts, 117.

Jackson, M.T., 1993. Biotechnology and the conservation and use of plant genetic resources. Invited paper presented at the Workshop on Biotechnology in Developing Countries, held at the 17th International Congress of Genetics, Birmingham, U.K., August 15-21, 1993.

Jackson, M.T., G.C. Loresto & A.P. Alcantara, 1993. The International Rice Germplasm Center at IRRI. In: The Egyptian Society of Plant Breeding (1993). Crop Genetic Resources in Egypt: Present Status and Future Prospects. Papers of an ESPB Workshop, Giza, Egypt, March 2-3, 1992.

Newbury, H.J., P. Virk, M.T. Jackson, G. Bryan, M. Gale & B.V. Ford-Lloyd, 1993. Molecular markers and the analysis of diversity in rice. Poster presented at the 17th International Congress of Genetics, Birmingham, U.K., August 15-21, 1993. Volume of abstracts, 121-122.

1994
Jackson, M.T., 1994. Care for and use of biodiversity in rice. Invited paper presented at the Symposium on Food Security in Asia, held at the Royal Society, London, November 1, 1994.

Parsons, B.J., B.V. Ford-Lloyd, H.J. Newbury & M.T. Jackson, 1994. Use of PCR-based markers to assess genetic diversity in rice landraces from Bhutan and Bangladesh. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society, held at The University of Birmingham, December 1994.

Virk, P., B.V. Ford-Lloyd, M.T. Jackson & H.J. Newbury, 1994. The use of RAPD analysis for assessing diversity within rice germplasm. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society, held at The University of Birmingham, December 1994.

1995
Dao The Tuan, Nguyen Dang Khoi, Luu Ngoc Trinh, Nguyen Phung Ha, Nguyen Vu Trong, D.A. Vaughan & M.T. Jackson, 1995. INSA-IRRI collaboration on wild rice collection in Vietnam. In: G.L. Denning & Vo-Tong Xuan (eds.), Vietnam and IRRI: A partnership in rice research. International Rice Research Institute, Los Baños, Philippines, and Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry, Hanoi, Vietnam, pp. 85-88.

Jackson, M.T., 1995. The international crop germplasm collections: seeds in the bank! Invited paper presented at the meeting Economic and Policy Research for Genetic Resources Conservation and Use: a Technical Consultation, held at IFPRI, Washington, D.C., June 21-22, 1995

Jackson, M.T., A. Alcantara, E. Guevarra, M. Oliva, M. van den Berg, S. Erguiza, R. Gallego & M. Estor, 1995. Documentation and data management for rice genetic resources at IRRI. Paper presented at the Planning Meeting for the System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources (SINGER), held at CIMMYT, Mexico, October 2-6, 1995.

Jackson, M.T., B.R. Lu, G.C. Loresto & F. de Guzman, 1995. The conservation of rice genetic resources at the International Rice Research Institute. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Research and Utilization of Crop Germplasm Resources held in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, June 1-3, 1995.

Kameswara Rao, N. & M.T. Jackson, 1995. Seed production strategies for conservation of rice genetic resources. Poster presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Seeds, University of Reading, September 11-15, 1995.

Lu, B.R., A. Juliano, E. Naredo & M.T. Jackson, 1995. The conservation and study of wild Oryza species at the International Rice Research Institute. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Research and Utilization of Crop Germplasm Resources held in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, June 1-3, 1995.

Pham, J.L., M.R. Bellon & M.T. Jackson, 1995. A research program on on-farm conservation of rice genetic resources. Poster presented at the Third International Rice Genetics Symposium, Manila, Philippines, October 16-20, 1995.

Reaño, R., M.T. Jackson, F. de Guzman, S. Almazan & G.C. Loresto, 1995. The multiplication and regeneration of rice germplasm at the International Rice Genebank, IRRI. Paper presented at the Discussion Meeting on Regeneration Standards, held at ICRISAT, Hyderabad, India, December 4-7, 1995, sponsored by IPGRI, ICRISAT and FAO.

1996
Appa Rao, S., C. Bounphanousay, V. Phetpaseuth, K. Kanyavong, B. Sengthong, J. M. Schiller, V. Phannourath & M.T. Jackson, 1996. Collection and classification of rice germplasm from the Lao PDR. Part 1. Southern and Central Regions – 1995. Internal report of the National Agricultural Research Center, Dept. of Agriculture and Extension, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Vientiane, Lao PDR, and Genetic Resources Center, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Baños, Philippines.

Jackson, M.T. & G.C. Loresto, 1996. The role of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in supporting national and regional programs. Invited paper presented at the Asia-Pacific Consultation Meeting on Plant Genetic Resources, held in New Delhi, India, November 27-29, 1996.

Jackson, M.T. & R.D. Huggan, 1996. Pflanzenvielfalt als Grundlage der Welternährung. Bulletin—das magazin der Schweizerische Kreditanstalt SKA. March/April 1996, 9-10.

Jackson, M.T., 1996. Intellectual property rights—the approach of the International Rice Research Institute. Invited paper presented at the Satellite Symposium on Biotechnology and Biodiversity: Scientific and Ethical Issues, held in New Delhi, India, November 15-16, 1996.

Jackson, M.T., G.C. Loresto & F. de Guzman, 1996. Partnership for genetic conservation and use: the International Rice Genebank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Poster presented at the Beltsville Symposium XXI on Global Genetic Resources—Access, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Rights, held in Beltsville, Maryland, May 19-22, 1996.

Virk, P.S., H.J. Newbury, Y. Shen, M.T. Jackson & B.V. Ford-Lloyd, 1996. Prediction of agronomic traits in diverse germplasm of rice and beet using molecular markers. Paper presented at the Fourth International Plant Genome Conference, held in San Diego, California, January 14-18, 1996.

1997
Appa Rao, S., C. Bounphanousay, K. Kanyavong, V. Phetpaseuth, B. Sengthong, J.M. Schiller, S. Thirasack & M.T. Jackson, 1997. Collection and classification of rice germplasm from the Lao PDR. Part 2. Northern, Southern and Central Regions. Internal report of the National Agricultural Research Center, Department of Agriculture and Extension, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Vientiane, Lao PDR, and Genetic Resources Center, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Baños, Philippines.

1998
Appa Rao, S., C. Bounphanousay, V. Phetpaseuth, K. Kanyavong, B. Sengthong, J.M. Schiller & M.T. Jackson, 1998. Collection and Classification of Lao Rice Germplasm Part 3. Collecting Period—October 1997 to February 1998. Internal report of the National Agricultural Research Center, National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Vientiane, Lao PDR, and Genetic Resources Center, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Baños, Philippines.

Jackson, M.T., 1998. Intellectual property rights—the approach of the International Rice Research Institute. Invited paper at the Seminar-Workshop on Plant Patents in Asia Pacific, organized by the Asia & Pacific Seed Association (APSA), held in Manila, Philippines, September 21-22, 1998.

Jackson, M.T., 1998. Recent developments in IPR that have implications for the CGIAR. Invited paper presented at the ICLARM Science Day, International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management, Manila, Philippines, September 30, 1998.

Jackson, M.T., 1998. The genetics of genetic conservation. Invited paper presented at the Fifth National Genetics Symposium, held at PhilRice, Nueva Ecija, Philippines, December 10-12, 1998.

Jackson, M.T., 1998. The role of the CGIAR’s System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP) in implementing the GPA. Invited paper presented at the Regional Meeting for Asia and the Pacific to facilitate and promote the implementation of the Global Plan of Action for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, held in Manila, Philippines, December 15-18, 1998.

Lu, B.R., M.E. Naredo, A.B. Juliano & M.T. Jackson, 1998. Biosystematic studies of the AA genome Oryza species (Poaceae). Poster presented at the Second International Conference on the Comparative Biology of the Monocotyledons and Third International Symposium on Grass Systematics and Evolution, Sydney, Australia, September 27-October 2, 1998.

Morin, S.R., J.L. Pham, M. Calibo, G. Abrigo, D. Erasga, M. Garcia, & M.T. Jackson, 1998. On farm conservation research: assessing rice diversity and indigenous technical knowledge. Invited paper presented at the Workshop on Participatory Plant Breeding, held in New Delhi, March 23-24, 1998.

Morin, S.R., J.L. Pham, M. Calibo, M. Garcia & M.T. Jackson, 1998. Catastrophes and genetic diversity: creating a model of interaction between genebanks and farmers. Paper presented at the FAO meeting on the Global Plan of Action on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture for the Asia-Pacific Region, held in Manila, Philippines, December 15-18, 1998.

1999
Alcantara, A.P., E.B. Guevarra & M.T. Jackson, 1999. The International Rice Genebank Collection Information System. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Salt Lake City, October 31-November 4, 1999.

Appa Rao, S., C. Bounphanousay, K. Kanyavong, B. Sengthong, J.M. Schiller & M.T. Jackson, 1999. Collection and classification of Lao rice germplasm, Part 4. Collection Period: September to December 1998. Internal report of the National Agricultural Research Center, National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Vientiane, Lao PDR, and Genetic Resources Center, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Baños, Philippines.

Appa Rao, S., C. Bounphanouxay, J.M. Schiller & M.T. Jackson, 1999. Collecting Rice Genetic Resources in the Lao PDR. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Salt Lake City, October 31-November 4, 1999.

Jackson, M.T., E.L. Javier & C.G. McLaren, 1999. Rice genetic resources for food security. Invited paper at the IRRI Symposium, held at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Salt Lake City, October 31-November 4, 1999.

Jackson, M.T., F.C. de Guzman, R.A. Reaño, M.S.R. Almazan, A.P. Alcantara & E.B. Guevarra, 1999. Managing the world’s largest collection of rice genetic resources. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Salt Lake City, October 31-November 4, 1999.

2000
Jackson, M.T., B.R. Lu, M.S. Almazan, M.E. Naredo & A.B. Juliano, 2000. The wild species of rice: conservation and value for rice improvement. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Minneapolis, November 5-9, 2000.

Naredo, M.E., A.B. Juliano, M.S. Almazan, B.R. Lu & M.T. Jackson, 2000. Morphological and molecular diversity of AA genome species of rice. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Minneapolis, November 5-9, 2000.

Pham J.L., S.R. Morin & M.T. Jackson, 2000. Linking genebanks and participatory conservation and management. Invited paper presented at the International Symposium on The Scientific Basis of Participatory Plant Breeding and Conservation of Genetic Resources, held at Oaxtepec, Morelos, Mexico, October 9-12, 2000.

2001
Jackson, M.T., 2001. Collecting plant genetic resources: partnership or biopiracy. Invited paper presented at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Charlotte, North Carolina, October 21-24, 2001.

Jackson, M.T., 2001. Rice: diversity and livelihood for farmers in Asia. Invited paper presented in the symposium Cultural Heritage and Biodiversity, at the annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, Charlotte, North Carolina, October 21-24, 2001.

2004
Jackson, M.T., 2004. Achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals begins with rice research. Invited paper presented to the Cross Party International Development Group of the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 2, 2004.

[1] Brian was subsequently appointed Professor of Conservation Genetics at Birmingham, and Deputy Head of the School of Biosciences. He retired almost a decade ago.

John moved to the University of Worcester in 2008 as Professor of Bioscience, and head of of the Institute of Science and the Environment. He is now retired.

[2] Parminder later joined IRRI as a rice breeder, and from there, in the early 2000s, joined the CGIAR’s Harvest Plus program. I believe he has now retired.

[3] When the project ended, Glenn moved to the James Hutton Institute near Dundee, Scotland where he was lead of the potato genetics and breeding group, retiring in July 2023.

 

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Let the Force be with you . . .

Since moving to the northeast of England almost four years ago, Steph and I have grabbed every opportunity (weather permitting, of course) to explore Northumberland north of the River Tyne, and the Durham coast south of the river.

What we hadn’t done, until last week, was explore the hills southwest of Newcastle in the North Pennines National Landscape (NPNL, formerly known as the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB). Within the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumbria, and North Yorkshire, the NPNL covers an area of approximately 770 square miles (2000 km2), and the landscape encompasses heather moors, deep valleys or dales, and several of its villages are the legacy of a rich mining history. Click here to explore an interactive map.

Specifically, we were headed to High Force Waterfall in Upper Teesdale, about 55 miles from home on the circuitous (and rather tedious) route that my satnav chose skirting around Durham before heading southwest. Tedious that is until we reached Teesdale itself and a glorious landscape opened up before us, as you can will appreciate from this video (the blue route on the map below).

High Force Waterfall is one of the most impressive in the country, with the River Tees tumbling around 70 ft (>21 m) to a splash pool below.

And the reason for this spectacular waterfall lies in its geology, comprising three different layers (which you can be seen in the image above): two relatively soft (of limestone and sandstone) overlain by the hard volcanic Whin Sill, explained in the next image (click to expand). And like Niagara Falls, High Force is slowly (very slowly) migrating upstream as the Tees erodes the rock millimeter by millimeter.

It certainly is impressive, and for an attraction in the middle of nowhere, remarkably accessible, albeit through privately-owned land with an entrance fee of £3.50 per adult. There’s also a minimum car park fee of £3 for three hours. The Pennine Way footpath follows the south bank of the River Tees, and passes the top of the waterfall with perhaps even more impressive views.

The path from the car park to the waterfall is just under half a mile, gently sloping suitable even for wheelchairs. There’s a return route through the woodland, but there are several very steep sections, which we didn’t attempt. Beside the splash pool, a small viewing platform (down some very steep steps) provides excellent views of the river tumbling over the precipice.

High Force waterfall on the River Tees

I was quite unaware of the waterfall’s existence until fairly recently, when I read a crime novel by Northumberland-born author LJ Ross, in which it featured.

After a picnic lunch back at the car park, we continued our journey to Cow Green Reservoir, and an altitude of around 1600 feet (±500 m) at the car park just above the reservoir.

This area of Upper Teesdale is rather special botanically, and has an assemblage of plant species that are found in few other places in the British Isles. They are relics from the last Ice Age, and some, like the Spring Gentian (Gentiana verna L.) that is featured on the cover of this book by Margaret Bradshaw, are otherwise found for example in the mountains of Central Europe.

The importance of the so-called Teesdale Assemblage (* see footnote image) came to the fore in the 1960s with the proposed construction of a reservoir to meet the increased water demand from heavy industry on Teesside. Despite strong and sustained opposition, Cow Green Reservoir was built, but the area is now one of the country’s largest nature reserves.

Botanist Margaret Bradshaw published her book about the Teesdale flora (after seven decades of study, and often seen out and about on her sturdy pony) when she was 97! She has been a fierce campaigner to save this unique landscape and its rare species. Her book is one of the most comprehensive (and authoritative) monographs that I have come across. A delight for the wealth of detail that she has compiled, and certainly makes us want to visit Upper Teesdale again next year, in the Spring and early Summer when many of these botanical rarities are in flower.

Leaving Cow Green, we headed north and a long and steep descent into Weardale, and from there over the moors towards the valley of the River Tyne. These routes are shown in red and green on the map above, and feature in the next two videos.

What a magnificent day excursion, and one we hope to repeat before too long.

*

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Celebrating the humble spud . . .

Not so humble really. The potato is an incredibly important crop worldwide (the fourth, after maize, rice, and wheat), with a production of 376 million metric tonnes in 2021. China is the leading producer, with 95.5 million metric tonnes, followed by India, Ukraine, Russia, and the USA.

Native to and a staple food in the Andean countries of South America, the potato spread to Spain in the 16th century [1, 2] and the rest of the world afterwards.

It’s no wonder that Peru championed the International Day of the Potato (decreed by the United Nations in December 2023 [3]) which is being celebrated today.

I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to reflect on my own journey with potatoes over 20 years in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fifty years ago (in May 1974) I had just returned to Lima after collecting potatoes for three weeks in the north of Peru (Department of Cajamarca), accompanied by my driver, Octavio.

A farmer in Cajamarca discusses his potato varieties with me, while my driver Octavio writes a collecting number on each tuber and a paper bag with a permanent marker pen.

A few months earlier, at the beginning of February, I’d travelled to Cuyo Cuyo (Department of Puno in southern Peru) to make a study of potato varieties in farmers’ fields on the ancient terraces there (below).

So what was I doing in Peru?

I’d joined the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima the previous year, in January 1973 [4] as an Associate Taxonomist while continuing with my PhD research. And I found myself, a few months later—in May—travelling with with my colleague Zosimo Huamán (right) to the northern departments of Ancash and La Libertad where, over almost a month, we collected many indigenous potato varieties—the real treasure of the Incas— that were added to CIP’s growing germplasm collection. Here are just a few examples of the incredible diversity of Andean potato varieties in that collection. Maybe I collected some of these.

Source: International Potato Center (CIP)

In October 1975, I successfully defended my PhD thesis (The evolutionary significance of the triploid cultivated potato, Solanum x chaucha Juz. et Buk.) at the University of Birmingham, where my co-supervisor, potato taxonomist and germplasm pioneer Professor Jack Hawkes (right) was head of the Department of Botany.

During my time in Lima, Dr Roger Rowe (left, then head of CIP’s Breeding and Genetics Department) was my local supervisor.

Fifty years after I first met Roger in Peru, we had a reunion on the banks of the Mississippi in Wisconsin last year.

After the University of Birmingham congregation on 12 December 1975, with Jack Hawkes on my right, and Professor Trevor Williams (who supervised my MSc dissertation in 1971) on my left.

I published three papers from my thesis. Click on any title image below (and most others throughout this post) to read the full paper.

There’s an interesting story behind the publication of this third paper from my thesis.

I originally sent a manuscript to Economic Botany, probably not long after I’d submitted the others to Euphytica.

I received an acknowledgment from Economic Botany, but then it went very quiet for at least a year.

Anyway, towards the end of 1978 or early 1979 I received—quite out of the blue—a letter from the then editor-in-chief of Euphytica, Professor AC Zeven. He told me he’d read my thesis, a copy of which had been acquired apparently by the Wageningen University library. He liked the chapter I’d written about an ethnobotanical study in Cuyo-Cuyo, and if I hadn’t submitted a paper elsewhere, he would welcome one from me.

It was about that same time I also received a further communication from the incoming editor of Economic Botany, who had found papers submitted to the journal up to 20 years previously and still waiting publication, and was I still interested in continuing with the Economic Botany submission, since he was unable to say when or if my manuscript might be considered for publication. I immediately withdrew the manuscript and, after some small revisions to fit the Euphytica style and focus, sent the manuscript to Professor Zeven. It was published in February 1980.

I returned to Lima just before the New Year 1976, knowing that CIP’s Director General, Dr Richard Sawyer (right), had already approved my transfer to CIP’s Outreach Program (later renamed Regional Research). I relocated to Costa Rica in Central America in April 1976 (living and working at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center, CATIE in Turrialba), establishing a program to adapt potatoes to the warm humid tropics. I became leader of CIP’s regional program (or Regional Representative) in late 1977.

However, the tropical adaptation objective per se didn’t exactly endure. The potato trials were almost immediately attacked by bacterial wilt (caused by Ralstonia solaneacearum, formerly known as Pseudomonas solanacearum) even though no susceptible crops such as tomatoes had been planted on the CATIE experiment station in recent years. We subsequently discovered that the bacterium survived in a number of non-solanaceous weed hosts.

Screening for bacterial wilt resistance in CATIE’s experiment station.

I’ve posted earlier about our research on bacterial wilt and finding tolerance to the disease in a potato clone (not quite a commercial variety) known simply as Cruza 148.

Plant pathologist Professor Luis Carlos Gonzalez (right, from the University of Costa Rica in San José) and I also studied how to control the disease through a combination of tolerant varieties and soil and weed management.

We published these two papers, the first in the international journal Phytopathology, and the second in the Costarrican journal Fitopatologia.

During the late 1970s, CIP launched an initiative aimed at optimising potato productivity, jointly led by Chilean agronomist Dr Primo Accatino and US agricultural economist Dr Doug Horton. Contributing to this initiative in Costa Rica, I worked with potato farmers to reduce the excessive use of fertilizers, and fungicides to control the late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans. It was then (and probably remains) a common misconception among farmers that more input of fertilizer or fungicide, the better would be the outcome in terms of yield or disease control. What a fallacy! Our small project on fertilizer use was published in Agronomía Costarricense.

During the five years I spent in Costa Rica, my colleagues in the Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería (MAG) and I screened germplasm sent to us by CIP breeders in Lima for resistance to late blight, and common potato viruses like PVX, PVY, PLRV.

Ing. Jorge Esquivel (MAG) and me screening potatoes for virus resistance in a field trial on the slopes of the Irazú volcano in Costa Rica, while my assistants Jorge Aguilar and Moisés Pereira check plants nearby.

In 1977, Dr John Niederhauser (right, an eminent plant pathologist who had worked on late blight in Mexico for the Rockefeller Foundation before becoming an international consultant to CIP) and I worked together to develop and implement (from April 1978) a cooperative regional potato program, PRECODEPA, in six countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, SDC (and for the next 25 years or so, and expanded to more countries in the region), the network was a model for regional collaboration, with members contributing research based on their particular scientific strengths.

Clean seed tubers are one of the most important components for successful potato production, and technologies to scale up the multiplication of clean seed were contributed by CIP to PRECODEPA. My colleague from Lima, Jim Bryan (an Idaho-born seed production specialist) joined me in Costa Rica in 1979 for one year, and together we successfully developed several rapid multiplication techniques, including stem cuttings and leaf node cuttings, and producing a technical bulletin (published also in Spanish).

And we showed that it was possible to produce one tonne in a year from a single tuber. Read all about that effort here.

I can’t finish this section about my time at CIP without mentioning Dr Ken Brown (left), who was head of Regional Research.

Ken, a cotton physiologist, joined CIP in January 1976 as head of Regional Research, just at the time Steph and I returned to Lima after I’d completed my PhD. He was one of the best program managers I have worked for, keeping everything on track, but never micro-managing. I learnt a great deal from Ken about managing staff, and getting the best out of them.

At the end of November 1980, I returned to Lima expecting to be posted to the Philippines. Instead, in March 1981, I resigned from CIP and accepted a lectureship in plant biology at the University of Birmingham, continuing potato research there, as well as working on several legume species.

I look back on those formative CIP years with great appreciation: for all that I learned about potatoes and potato production, the incredible scientists from around the world I met and worked with, and the many friendships I made.

Jack Hawkes retired from the university in September 1982, having left behind his large collection of wild potatoes accumulated during several expeditions to the Americas, and a legacy of potato research on which I endeavoured to build.

You can read all about Jack’s many expeditions, view many original photos, and watch several videos dating back to 1939 by clicking on the image below.

I soon realised there were few opportunities to continue research with Jack’s collection. It was almost impossible to secure funding. But I could offer short-term projects for MSc and PhD students.

Dave Downing was the technician managing the potato collection at Birmingham.

One MSc student, Susan Juned, studied the diversity in Solanum chacoense Bitt., a wild potato species from Argentina and Paraguay, in relation to in situ conservation opportunities.

Two MSc students from Uganda, Beatrice Male-Kayiwa and Nelson Wanyera evaluated resistance to potato cyst nematode (Globodera pallida) in wild potatoes from Bolivia. We asked Jack Hawkes to advise on the choice of germplasm to include, since he had made the collections in that country in the 1970s. Beatrice and Nelson worked at Rothamsted Experiment Station (now Rothamsted Research) in Hertfordshire with the late Dr Alan Stone.

Two PhD students, Lynne Woodwards and Ian Gubb, studied the lack of enzymic browning (potatoes turn brown when they are cut) in wild potatoes, Series Longipedicellata Buk., and one tetraploid (2n=4x=48 chromosomes) species from Mexico in particular, Solanum hjertingii Hawkes, and their crossability with cultivated potatoes. Ian’s studentship (co-supervised at Birmingham by Professor Jim Callow) involved a collaboration with the Institute of Food Research (now Quadram Institute Bioscience) in Norwich, where his co-supervisor was Dr JC Hughes.

Gene editing has recently successfully produced non-browning potatoes. Wide crossing is probably no longer needed.

I had two PhD students from Peru, René Chavez and Carlos Arbizu, who carried out their research at CIP (like I had in the early 1970s) and only came back to Birmingham to complete their residency requirements and defend their theses, although I visited them in Lima several times during their research.

René evaluated the breeding potential of wild species of potato for resistance to potato cyst nematodes and tuber moth, publishing three excellent papers from his thesis The use of wide crosses in potato breeding, submitted in 1984.

Carlos submitted his thesis, The use of Solanum acaule as a source of resistance to potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTV) and potato leaf roll virus (PLRV), in 1990. He never published any papers from his research, returning to Lima to work at CIP for a few years on Andean minor tuber crops, before setting himself up as a major avocado producer in Peru.

Denise Clugston (co-supervised by Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd) defended her thesis, Embryo culture and protoplast fusion for the introduction of Mexican wild species germplasm into the cultivated potato in 1988. She left biology almost immediately, and regrettably never did write any papers, although she did present this work at a conference held in Cambridge.

Another PhD student, Elizabeth Newton, worked on sexually-transmitted potato viruses of quarantine significance in the UK, in collaboration with one of my former colleagues at CIP, Dr Roger Jones who had returned to the UK and was working for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) at the Harpenden Laboratory. In 1989 she successfully submitted her thesis, Studies towards the control of viruses transmitted through true potato seed but never published any papers, only presenting this one at a conference in Warwick in 1986.

Because of the quarantine restrictions imposed on the Hawkes collection, I took the decision (with Jack’s blessing) to donate it to the Commonwealth Potato Collection in Dundee. Once the collection was gone, we had other opportunities for potato research at Birmingham.

In the late 1980s, my colleague Brian Ford-Lloyd (right) and I ran a project, funded by KP Agriculture (and managed by my former CIP colleague, Dr John Vessey) to generate somaclonal lines resistant to low temperature sweetening of the crisping var. Record .

My former MSc student Susan Juned (right) was hired as a Research Associate.

We began the project with a batch of 170 Record tubers, uniquely numbering each one and keeping the identity of all somaclones derived from each tuber. And there were some interesting results (and an unexpected response from the media [5]).

Did the project meet its objectives? Well, this is what John later told us:

The project was successful in that it produced Record somaclones with lower reducing sugars in the tubers, but unsuccessful in that none entered commercial production . . . Shortly after the end of the project, Record was replaced by a superior variety, Saturna. 

The project very clearly showed the potential of somaclones but also emphasised that it needs to be combined with conventional breeding . . . Other important aspects were the demonstration that the commercial seed potato lines available were not genetically identical, as previously thought, and that regeneration of clones from single cells had to be as rapid as possible to avoid unwanted somaclonal variation. 

The majority of somaclones were derived from just a few of the 170 tubers, each potentially (and quite unexpectedly) a different Record clone. We suggested that the differential regeneration ability was due to genetic differences between tubers as it was found to be maintained in subsequent tuber generations. Furthermore, this would have major implications for seed potato production specifically and, more generally, for in vitro genetic conservation of vegetatively-propagated species.

Sue completed her PhD, Somaclonal variation in the potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) cultivar Record with particular reference to the reducing sugar variation after cold storage in 1994 after I’d already left Birmingham for the Philippines.

After leaving the university, Sue became a very successful local politician, even running in one General Election as a Liberal Democrat candidate for Parliament. Sue is now Leader of Stratford-on-Avon District Council.

From 1984, I had a project to work on true potato seed (or TPS) in collaboration with CIP, funded by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA, a UK government agency that eventually became the Department for International Development or DfID, but now fully subsumed into the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office).

For many reasons, this project was not a success. Let me explain.

At the end of the 1970s CIP launched a project to use TPS as an alternative production approach to seed potatoes (i.e., tubers). But the use of TPS is not without its challenges.

Potato genetics are complex because most cultivated potatoes are polyploid, actually tetraploid with 48 chromosomes. And although self compatible, and producing copious quantities of TPS through self pollination, the progeny are highly variable. My approach was to produce uniform or homozygous diploid (with 24 chromosomes) inbred lines. The only obstacle being that diploid potatoes are self incompatible. We aimed to overcome that obstacle. There were precedents, albeit from a species in a totally unrelated plant family but with a similar incompatibility genetic base.

One of my colleagues at Birmingham, geneticist Dr Mike Lawrence spent many years working on field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) and, through persistent selfing, had manage to break its strong self incompatibility. We believed that a similar approach using single seed descent might yield dividends in diploid potatoes. Well, at least ODA felt it was worth a try, and the project had CIP’s backing (although not enthusiastically from the leading breeder there at the time). However, in the light of subsequent research, I think we have been vindicated in taking this particular approach.

Because of quarantine restrictions at Birmingham that I already mentioned, we negotiated an agreement with the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge to base the project there, building a bespoke glasshouse for the research. My counterpart at PBI was the head of potato breeding, Dr Alan J Thomson. We hired a postdoc, recently graduated with a PhD from the University of St Andrews, who came with glowing references.

We set out our perspectives on inbreeding at a CIP planning conference in Lima.

I further elaborated on these perspectives in a book chapter (published in 1987) based on a paper I presented at a joint meeting of EAPR and EUCARPIA at King’s College, Cambridge, in December 1985.

Ultimately the project did not meet its main objective. We encountered three problems, even though making progress in the first three years:

  1. By year five, we really did hit a ‘biological brick wall’, and couldn’t break the self incompatibility. We decided to pull the plug, so-to-speak, one year before the end of the project. It was a hard decision to make, but I think we were being honest rather than consuming the remaining financial resources for the sake of completing the project cycle.
  2. We lost momentum in the project after three years when Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised the PBI, and we had to relocate the project to the university campus in Birmingham (having disposed of the wild potato collection to the CPC as I mentioned earlier). And then build new glasshouse facilities to support the project.
  3. As the lead investigator, I was not successful in encouraging our postdoc to communicate more readily and openly. That lack of open communication did not help us make the best strategic decisions. And I take responsibility for that. However, on reflection, I think that her appointment to this pioneering project was not the best decision that Alan and I made.

Looking at the progress in diploid breeding since, it’s quite ironic really because several breeders published a call in 2016 to reinvent the potato as a diploid inbred line-based crop, just as we proposed in the 1980s. Our publications have been consistently overlooked.

Inbreeding in diploids became possible because of the discovery of a self compatibility gene, Sli, in the wild species Solanum chacoense after selfing over seven generations. With that breakthrough, such an inbreeding approach had become a reality. Pity that we were not able to break self incompatibility in cultivated diploid potatoes ourselves. And there’s no doubt that advances in molecular genetics and genomics since the 1980s have significantly opened up and advanced this particular breeding strategy.

Around 1988, I was invited by CIP to join three other team members (a program manager, an agronomist, and an economist) to review a seed production project, funded by the SDC [6], in Peru. I believe Ken Brown had suggested me as the seed production technical expert.

L-R: Peruvian agronomist, me, Cesar Vittorelli (CIP review manager), Swiss economist, and Carlos Valverde (program manager and team leader).

I flew to Lima, and we spent the next three weeks visiting sites in La Molina (next to CIP headquarters), in Huancayo in the central Andes, Cuzco in the south of Peru, and Cajamarca in the north.

That consultancy taught me a lot about program reviews and would stand me in good stead later on in my career. Once we had submitted our report, I returned to the UK, and a couple of weeks later spent a few days in Bern at the headquarters of the SDC for a debriefing session.

We found the project had been remarkably successful, making an impact in its operational areas, and we recommended a second phase, which the SDC accepted. Unfortunately, events in Peru overtook the project, as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla movement was on the ascendancy and it became too dangerous to move around the country.

After Jack Hawkes retired in 1982, he and I would meet up for lunch and a beer at least once a week to chat about our common interests in genetic resources conservation, and potatoes in particular. Out of those discussions came a couple of theoretical papers.

The Endosperm Balance Number (or EBN) hypothesis had been proposed to explain the crossability between tuber-bearing Solanum species (there are over 150 wild species of potato). We wrote this paper to combine the taxonomic classification of the different species and their EBNs.

In 1987, Jack asked me to contribute a paper to a symposium he was organizing with Professor David Harris of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London to celebrate the centenary of one of my scientific heroes, Russian geneticist and acclaimed as the Father of Plant Genetic Resources, Nikolai Vavilov. I conceptualized how Vavilov’s Law of Homologous Series could be applied to potatoes.

By the end of the 1990s, I was already looking for scientific pastures new – in rice! And in early 1991, I accepted a position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and my research focus moved from potatoes to rice.

What surprises me is that some of my potato work endures, and I regularly receive citations of several of my papers, the last of which was published more than 30 years ago.

With the announcement of the International Day of the Potato, it certainly has brought back many memories of the couple of decades I enjoyed working on this fascinating crop.

[1] Hawkes, JG  and J Francisco-Ortega (1992). The potato in Spain during the Late 16th Century. Economic Botany 46: 86-97.

[2] Hawkes, JG and J Francisco-Ortega (1993). The early history of the potato in Europe. Euphytica 70: 1-7.

[3] The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) today welcomed the UN’s decision to designate 30 May as International Day of Potato, an opportunity to raise awareness of a crop regularly consumed by billions of people and of global importance for food security and nutrition.

The annual observance was championed by Peru, which submitted a proposal for adoption to the UN General Assembly based on an FAO Conference Resolution of July 7, 2023. The impetus for the Day, which builds upon the International Year of Potato that was observed in 2008, originates from the need to emphasize the significant role of the potato in tackling prevalent global issues, such as food insecurity, poverty and environmental threats.

[4] Steph joined me in Lima in July 1973 and we were married there in October. John Vessey and his wife Marian were our witnesses.

In November 1972, a couple of months after she had graduated with an MSc in genetic resources conservation from the University of Birmingham (where we met), Steph joined the Scottish Plant Breeding Station in Edinburgh as Assistant Curator of the Commonwealth Potato Collection. At CIP, she was an Associate Geneticist responsible for the day-to-day management of the institute’s potato germplasm collection.

Steph in one of CIP’s screenhouses at La Molina.

[5] In 1987, we wrote a piece about the somaclone project for the University of Birmingham internal research bulletin. This was picked up by several media, including the BBC and I was invited to appear on a breakfast TV show. Until, that is, the producer realised that the project was a serious piece of research.

One of the tabloid newspapers, The Sun, was less forgiving, and ran a brief paragraph on page 3 (Crunch time for boffins) alongside the daily well-endowed young lady. Click on the image to enlarge.

[6] The seed project was my second contact with the SDC (after PRECODEPA). After I joined IRRI in 1991, the SDC funded a five year project from 1995 to rescue rice biodiversity, among other objectives. I have written about that project here.

 

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Before potatoes and rice, there were pulses

Although I spent most of my career working on potatoes and rice, my first interest was pulse crops or grain legumes. In fact the first pulse that I studied was the lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) when I was an MSc student at the University of Birmingham from 1970-1971.

So why the interest in pulses?

It was surely the influence of one of my mentors, Dr Joe Smartt (right) at the University of Southampton where I was awarded my BSc in Environmental Botany and Geography in 1970. A geneticist who had studied groundnuts in Africa and at Southampton was working on Phaseolus beans, Joe taught a second year genetics course, and two in the third or final year, on plant breeding and plant speciation.

He published two seminal texts on pulses in 1976 and 1990.

It was Joe who ignited my interest in plant genetic resources, and encouraged me to apply for a place on the one year MSc course at Birmingham on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources (CUPGR). The course had been launched by the head of the Department of Botany, potato expert, and genetic resources pioneer, Professor Jack Hawkes, with the first intake of students commencing their studies in September 1969. I landed in Birmingham a year later.

My three year undergraduate course at Southampton was a stroll in the park compared to the intensity of that one year MSc course. We had eight months of lectures and practical classes, followed by written examinations at the end of May. Each student also had to complete a piece of independent but supervised research, and present a dissertation for examination in September. In order to take full advantage of the summer months, planning and some initial research began much earlier. First of all for most of us, we had to decide on a topic that was feasible and doable in the allotted time, and assemble the necessary seed samples ready for planting at the most appropriate date.

Almost immediately I decided on three points. First, I wanted to run a project with a taxonomy/natural variation theme. Second, I wanted—if feasible—to work on a pulse species. And finally (which I decided quite quickly after arriving in Birmingham) I wanted to work with Dr Trevor Williams (right) who delivered a brilliant series of lectures on variation in natural populations, among others.

Trevor and I thumbed our way through the Leguminosae (now Fabaceae) section of Flora Europaea, until we came upon the entry for Lens, and the topic for my project leapt off the page: Lens culinaris Medik. Lentil. Origin unknown.

My project had two components:

  • An analysis of variation in the then five species of lentil (one cultivated, the others wild species; the taxonomy has changed subsequently) from herbarium specimens borrowed from several herbaria in Europe. I also spent a week in the Herbarium at Kew Gardens in London taking measurements from their complete set of lentil specimens.
  • A study of variation in Lens culinaris from living plants, with seeds obtained from Russia (the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg), from the (then) East German genebank in Gatersleben, and from the agricultural research institute in Madrid.

With the guidance of another member of the Botany department staff, Dr Herb Kordan, I made chromosome preparations and counts of all the Lens culinaris samples I’d obtained, confirming they were all diploid with 2n=2x=14 chromosomes. In the process, we developed a simple but effective technique for making chromosome squash preparations, and this led to my first ever publication in 1972. Just click on the title below (and others in this post) to read the full text.

In September 1971, I submitted my dissertation, Studies in the genus Lens Miller with special reference to Lens culinaris Medik. (which was examined by Professor Norman Simmonds who was the course External Examiner), and the degree was awarded.

I proposed that the wild progenitor of the cultivated lentil was Lens orientalis (Boiss.) Hand.-Mazz., a conclusion reached independently by Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary in a paper published the following year.

In 1971-1972, Carmen Kilner (née Sánchez) continued with the lentil studies at Birmingham, leading to a publication in SABRAO Journal in 1974. Our paper added further evidence to confirm the status of Lens orientalis.

When I began my lentil project, I had ideas to extend it to a PhD were the funding available. However, in February 1971 Jack Hawkes had just returned from a potato collecting mission to Bolivia, and told me about an exciting opportunity to spend a year in Peru at the newly-founded International Potato Center (CIP), from September that same year. My departure to Peru was delayed until January 1973, so I began a PhD on potatoes with Jack in the meantime. And with that move to potatoes, I assumed that any future work with pulses was more or less ruled out. However, from April 1981 I was appointed Lecturer in Plant Biology at Birmingham, and needed to develop a number of research areas. Would pulses figure in those plans?

While I wanted to continue projects on potatoes at Birmingham, I also decided to return partially to my first interest: pulses. And while I never had major grants in this area, I did supervise graduate students for MSc and PhD degrees who worked on a range of grain and forage legume/pulse species. Here I highlight the work of three students. There may have been more who worked on pulses, but after four decades I can’t remember those details.

Almost immediately after returning to Birmingham, I discovered (by looking through Flora Europaea once again) that the origin of the grasspea, Lathyrus sativus, was unknown. The grasspea is a distant relative of the ornamental sweetpea, Lathyrus odoratus, one of my favorite flowers since I was a small boy. My grandfather used to grow a multitude of sweetpeas in his cottage garden in Derbyshire. Anyway, I set about assembling a large collection of seed samples (or accessions) of grasspea and wild Lathyrus species from agricultural centers and botanic gardens worldwide.

The academic year September 1981-September 1982 was my first full year at Birmingham. Among the CUPGR intake was a Malaysian student, Abdul bin Ghani Yunus (right), who asked me to supervise his MSc research project. I persuaded him to tackle a study of variation in the grasspea and its wild relatives, much along the lines I had approached lentil a decade earlier.

We published this paper in 1984, and I guess it heralded what would become, a several decades later, an international collaborative effort to improve the grasspea and make it safer for human consumption.

Ghani returned to Malaysia, and I didn’t hear from him for several years. Then, in 1987, he contacted me to say he’d secured a Malaysian government grant to study for his PhD and would like to return to Birmingham. But to work on a tropical species, the name of which I cannot remember.

I persuaded him that would not really be feasible in Birmingham as we didn’t have the glasshouse space available, and it would be hit or miss whether we would be able to grow it successfully. I suggested it would be better to carry on his Lathyrus work from where he left off. And that’s what he did, successfully submitting his thesis in 1990 from which these papers were published.

Among the 1986 CUPGR intake was a student from Mexico, José Andrade-Aguilar (right) who was keen to attempt a pre-breeding study in Phaseolus beans, specifically trying to cross the tepary bean, Phaseolus acutifolius A. Gray with the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris L.

José published two papers from his dissertation.

This next paper (for which I no longer have a copy) described how pollinations in Phaseolus species could be made more successful.

Then, in 1987, a student from Spain, Javier Francisco-Ortega (right, actually from Tenerife in the Canary Islands) joined the course, and he and I worked closely on his MSc and PhD projects until I left Birmingham to join IRRI in the Philippines in July 1991.

Javier was an extraordinary student: hard-working, focused, and very productive. After completing his PhD in 1992, he took two postdoctoral fellowships in the USA (at Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin) before joining the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in 1999, where he has been Professor in Plant Molecular Systematics since 2012.

For his 1988 MSc dissertation, Javier studied the variation in Lathyrus pratensis L., using multivariate analysis, and publishing this paper some years later.

Then, having successfully completed his MSc, and being awarded a second Spanish government scholarship, Javier began a PhD project to study the ecogeographical variation in an endemic forage legume from the Canary Islands, Chamaecytisus proliferus (L. fil.) Link., known locally as tagasaste or escobón, depending whether it is cultivated or a purely wild type.

With a special grant from the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR, now Bioversity International) in Rome, Javier returned to the Canary Islands in the summer of 1989 to survey populations and collect seeds from as many provenances as possible across all the islands, and I joined him there for several weeks.

Collecting escobón (Chamaecytisus proliferus) in Tenerife in 1989

After I left Birmingham, my colleague Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd took over supervision of Javier’s research, seeing it through to completion in 1992.

Together we published these papers from his research on tagasaste and escobón.

Once I was in the Philippines, I forgot completely about legume species, apart from contributing to any of the papers that were published after I’d left Birmingham.

One aspect that is particularly gratifying however is seeing the work Ghani Yunus and I did on Lathyrus still being cited in the literature as efforts are scaled up to improve grasspea lines.

 

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Klaus Lampe, IRRI’s fifth Director General, passes away at 92

Dr Klaus J Lampe was the Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, serving one term from 1988 to 1995. He succeeded Professor MS Swaminathan as Director General.

Yesterday we heard the sad news that he had passed away in hospital in Germany on 6 February, aged 92.

Born in Freiburg in 1931, Klaus Lampe grew up in Nazi Germany, and he once described to me the horror of escaping the fire storm following Allied bombing.

He was an agricultural engineer, spending time in Afghanistan from 1965 to 1968, and thereafter he held various agricultural development aid positions back home in West Germany.

His appointment at IRRI in 1988 was the beginning of the institute’s renewal. Just shy of its 30th anniversary the institute was beginning to show its age. Its infrastructure was in dire need of refurbishment and enlargement to allow the institute to address several new research challenges, particularly in the areas of biotechnology and molecular biology.

And with a mandate to revitalise IRRI’s research strategy and program, Klaus adopted a matrix management system (alluded to in this post) with five research programs setting the specific research agenda on one side of the matrix and divisions (the organizational units where research was carried out) on the other.

He encouraged several long-term staff to retire or seek pastures new, and set about recruiting a new (and younger) cohort of staff. I was part of that recruitment, as head of the newly-formed Genetic Resources Center (GRC), with special responsibility for the genebank.

Meeting Dr Lampe and his wife, Annemarie, at an IRRI reception shortly after my arrival at IRRI in July 1991.

In addition to the innovative management that brought focus to IRRI’s research and refurbishment of the institute’s buildings, Klaus’s other achievements included his sincere engagement (not always successful) with suspicious NGOs in the Philippines and more widely across Asia as IRRI developed its biotechnology agenda (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation), and the adoption of new rice breeding objectives, particularly the so-called New Plant Type and hybrid rice. Certainly IRRI began to feel like a re-energised institute.

Klaus Lampe with US Ambassador to the Philippines, Frank G Wisner, Gurdev Khush, principal plant breeder, and agronomist Ken Cassman, discussing the ‘New Plant Type’.

When I interviewed for the GRC position (in January 1991), Klaus and I had a long discussion about the changes that he felt were needed to upgrade the genebank, known then as the International Rice Germplasm Center (IRGC), and how to integrate the operations of the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER) and the Seed Health Unit into GRC. By the time of my arrival in Los Baños, it had been decided to retain the Seed Health Unit as an independent entity outside GRC.

I explained how important research on germplasm conservation and use was, and that I expected, if appointed, to add a research string to the activities of GRC. That had not been envisaged when IRRI advertised the GRC position in September 1990.

Once in post, Klaus supported my research plans for the genebank. I also pushed enthusiastically that the genebank should benefit substantially from the investment being made in the refurbishment around the institute. After all, I chided him, if the genebank was the jewel in IRRI’s crown, so to speak, it was only fair that management and Board of Trustees approved that investment. And he agreed.

We made major changes, adding a bespoke seed drying room, and reconfiguring many of the genebank facilities to increase the efficiency of genebank operations and bring them up to international standards. I was permitted to increase the number of staff to tackle the significant backlog of processing seeds for long-term conservation. And the majority of the staff positions were upgraded to reflect their increased responsibilities.

With Klaus’s support and commitment I was able to significantly enhance the genebank operations such that, in an external review around 1994, the genebank was described as a model for others to emulate. And for that I will remain forever grateful to him.

I had first come across Klaus Lampe in the summer of 1989 (maybe 1990). I was lecturing at the University of Birmingham, and had no intention then (or inkling even) of leaving, or that Klaus would  soon be my boss.

I was visiting Dr Jaap Hardon, head of the Dutch genebank (Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands or CGN) in Wageningen. He invited me to attend a special university seminar one afternoon with guest speakers from two centers of the Consultative Group on International Agriculture or CGIAR: the Director General (I don’t remember his name) of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, and Dr Klaus Lampe from IRRI.

Klaus was not a tall man, but he certainly stood out in a crowd, with his long flowing grey hair. Which reminds me of a story that former Chair of IRRI’s Board of Trustees, Dr Walter ‘Wally’ P Falcon recounted during his last report to the institute’s staff before he stepped down from the Board in the early 1990s.

Klaus and Wally Falcon at a meeting of IRRI’s Board of Trustees.

Although a member of the Board of Trustees when Klaus was appointed as Director General, Wally was not a member of the appointment committee, and did not meet Klaus until the next Board meeting. As Wally told it, he saw this man walking towards him, hair standing out, and he immediately thought, My God, they’ve appointed Beethoven!

Klaus, always supported by Annemarie (who predeceased him a few years back) encouraged visitors to IRRI, especially VIPs, and he was never short of a few words to say at the frequent receptions held at the IRRI Guest House.

Klaus and Annemarie at the despedida for Dr Ernie Nunn, IRRI’s Director for Operations and his wife (next to Annemarie).

One of the first VIP visitors I had to show around the genebank was Princess Sirindhorn of Thailand, in 1991, not long after I arrived in Los Baños.


One of my colleagues, Dr Bob Zeigler, a plant pathologist from CIAT in Colombia was appointed Program Leader for Rainfed Lowland Rice at the end of 1991. Bob became IRRI’s 9th Director General in 2005.

DG5 and DG9 together in 1991.

Klaus was a complex man. Exceedingly kind on the one hand, but he could be quite ruthless, and a number of staff fell foul of his displeasure, me included. So when he left IRRI in 1995, we didn’t exactly part the best of friends, although for much of the time we worked together, I had an excellent relationship with him.

I didn’t meet him again until early 2010 when he returned to IRRI to attend some of the institute’s 50th anniversary celebrations. I can’t say I was particularly keen to meet him again. But we did, and during one reception he approached me, taking me by the arm and steering me to a quiet corner of the room. Whereupon he apologized for how he had behaved towards me 15 years previously. We parted on good terms, and that’s exactly how I will remember him.

My former colleague Gene Hettel interviewed Klaus for his series of Pioneer Interviews, who spoke at length on the challenges he saw IRRI facing. Here’s a snippet from that interview.

Gene has also today published this obituary on the IRRI website.

 

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Memories of Russian geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943)

A recent article brought to mind what I learned about Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (left) when I was a student, and also conversations I had with two eminent scientists who actually met Vavilov in Leningrad more than 80 years ago.

Vavilov was a brilliant geneticist, whose story the whole world deserves to know. The Crop Trust has just launched a new web series, Seed Heroes, with this first story, Nikolai Vavilov: The Father of Genebanks.

Surprisingly, as an undergraduate student studying botany in the late 1960s, I never heard anything about Vavilov or his pioneering work. In retrospect, I’m of the firm opinion that he should be part of every plant sciences or genetics degree curriculum. He was such a colossus, and one of my science heroes, about whom I have written or referred to in many blog posts.

It was only when I began a one-year MSc course on the Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources at the University of Birmingham in September 1970 that I became acquainted with Vavilov and what he achieved to collect and study different varieties of crop plants from more than 100 countries. All with the aim of using the varieties—or genetic resources as we now can describe them—to breed new crops and make Soviet agriculture more resilient. Indeed, Vavilov is often referred to as the father of plant genetic resources, and correctly so, nevermind father of genebanks.

Vavilov was highly respected in the West, and he visited the UK spending time in the early years of the last century at the John Innes Horticultural Institution near London. His study of crop variation also opened new perspectives on the nature and distribution of genetic diversity in crop plants and their wild relatives, and where crops were domesticated thousands of years ago.

What would Vavilov have gone on to achieve had he not fallen foul of Stalin’s Soviet regime and his nemesis, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, dying of starvation in prison in Saratov in 1943 at the age of 55?

So, what was Vavilov like as a man and scientist? Having spoken at length with Professor Jack Hawkes and Dr John Niederhauser about their visits to Russia in the 1930s, and meeting Vavilov, I almost feel that I knew him myself, albeit vicariously.

Jack Hawkes (right, 1915-2007), a potato taxonomist and head of the Department of Botany at the University of Birmingham founded the genetic resources MSc course there in 1969. Jack was also the co-supervisor (with Dr Roger Rowe of the International Potato Center in Peru) of my PhD research and dissertation.

In 1937, having just graduated from the University of Cambridge, Jack applied for an assistant’s position to join Dr PS Hudson, Director of the Imperial Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics in Cambridge, on an expedition to Lake Titicaca in the South American Andes to collect wild and cultivated potatoes. That expedition was delayed, and it wasn’t until early January 1939, under a new expedition leader, that Jack finally found himself in South America. The germplasm that was collected—from Argentina in the south to Venezuela in the north of the continent—became the founding accessions of what is now known as the Commonwealth Potato Collection.

You can read all about the Empire Potato Collecting Expedition to South America on this website (and view films that Jack made more than 80 years ago) based on Jack’s expedition notes and a 2003 memoir of the expedition, which he titled Hunting the Wild Potato in the South American Andes.

In Chapter 1 of that memoir, Jack describes at length the two week visit he made to Russia to meet with potato experts SM Bukasov, VS Juzepczuk, and VS Lechnovicz, to understand more about potato diversity (he’d never worked on potatoes until then), and discuss where and when to collect in South America since the Russians had already made collections there.

Jack writes that the visit to Leningrad was an experience that changed [his] life in many ways. He never forgot the kindness shown to him, a young man of only 23, by Vavilov and his colleagues.

Arriving in Leningrad on 26 August (or thereabouts), he first met Professor Bukasov, and almost immediately that same afternoon he was taken to the Lenin Academy of Sciences to meet Vavilov. Jack was invited to Vavilov’s apartment in Leningrad and his house in Moscow. They visited research stations together, and Vavilov even took Jack to the opera in Leningrad.

They discussed Vavilov’s ideas on the origin of crop plants and his theory of centers of diversity, his ‘Law of Homologous Series’ (which I applied in a paper on potatoes I presented at a Vavilov Centenary Symposium in 1987), the Russian system of potato taxonomy (which Jack initially used but found it over-complicated), and comparisons of British and Soviet agriculture.

They couldn’t avoid discussing Lysenko and his strong rejection of Mendelian genetics. Vavilov acknowledged Lysenko’s good work on wheat vernalization, and did not seem upset at Lysenko’s rejection of [Vavilov’s] results. Inevitably Jack and Lysenko crossed paths. Jack found him a dangerous, bigoted personality, entirely wrapped up in his own ideas. He was a . . . wholly repellent person. He was a politician rather than a scientist, and very much able to ingratiate himself with the communist politicians in Moscow. Here was, they thought, a Soviet man, born an unlettered peasant and now the sort of “first class” scientist that the communist system had created.

By 1938, Lysenko was in the ascendance, and obtaining more money for his work than Vavilov. In 1940, Vavilov was arrested and sent to prison on a trumped-up charge, and died there three years later, apparently of starvation. Ironic really, given that Vavilov had devoted his life to making agriculture more sustainable and increase crop productivity with the aim of defeating famine.

After he retired from Birmingham in 1982 (I had been appointed lecturer in plant biology the year before), Jack and I would often meet for lunch and a beer, and he would tell me all about that visit to Russia and meeting Vavilov. He said it had been  a great experience, and still couldn’t quite believe that Vavilov, a world-famous scientist, had treated him, a young man embarking on his scientific adventure, as an honored guest.

Jack’s lasting impression of Vavilov (who he admired immensely)  more than 60 years later was a large, jovial, hospitable and friendly person, putting [Jack] at ease and talking to [him] as an equal about his work and that of his colleagues.

I first met John Niederhauser (left, 1916-2005) in the early 1970s when I was an Associate Taxonomist at the recently-founded International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru and he was a consultant/advisor to CIP’s Director General, Dr Richard Sawyer.

John was the 1990 World Food Prize Laureate. A plant pathologist, he spent much of his career as a member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s agriculture program in Mexico (where his colleague in the wheat program was Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Laureate in 1970), and researching resistance to the late blight pathogen of potatoes, Phytophthora infestans, the cause of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.

In 1976, I had moved to Costa Rica and by 1977 I had been appointed CIP’s regional representative covering Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. About then, John’s and my paths crossed again, and we worked closely together for a year to design and launch a regional potato program, PRECODEPA, in six countries (later expanded to several more countries, and funded by the Swiss government for at least 25 years).

John and I traveled frequently together to those initial six countries, spending hours in airports and on the various flights, so had ample opportunity to really get to know one another.

He had been brought up on a farm in Washington state, but at the age of 17 in 1934 he bought himself a ticket to travel to Russia (I subsequently learned he had relatives there). So why choose Russia? Well, as John recounted the story, he had gone to a travel agent in San Francisco, and asked how far he could travel on his available funds. A return ticket to Leningrad was the outcome.

It seems that he and Vavilov met quite by chance. John had been visiting a botanical garden in Moscow, when a gentleman stopped and asked (in English) who he was and where he had come from. It was Nikolai Vavilov, of course. Well, the outcome (based apparently in part on John’s self-declared knowledge of tractor mechanics) was that Vavilov offered him a summer job on a state farm in the Ukraine where important germplasm collections were being multiplied. I’ve subsequently learnt that John spent an academic year in Moscow, all at the behest of Vavilov, before moving to Cornell University, where he also obtained his PhD in 1943 (the year of Vavilov’s death).

And like Jack Hawkes, John was full of admiration for Vavilov. He said that meeting him had changed the course of his life.

In the field of conservation and use of plant genetic resources, Vavilov is a giant. His scientific ideas about crop diversity have mainly stood the test of time. The collections he made are still held in the genebank that now bears his name. And his descriptions of crop diversity (I’ll never forget those of the rosaceous tree fruit forests—apples, pears and the like—in the mountain foothills of Kazakhstan), have inspired later generations of germplasm scientists, me in particular. As an MSc student, I wrote a dissertation on the origin of lentils, Lens culinaris. One of the major publications I had to consult was a monograph by Russian scientist Elena Barulina, Vavilov’s second wife.

Again I find myself wondering just what else Vavilov might have achieved had the Soviet regime never persecuted him so cruelly.

 

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More plant blindness?

Tomorrow, 22 October, BBC1 will air Sir David Attenborough‘s next blockbuster 8-part series, Planet Earth III¹, just a year after his last series Frozen Planet II was broadcast.

Planet Earth III? From what I have seen in the trailer for the series, perhaps this should—once again—be titled [Animal] Planet Earth III.

There’s no doubt that the filming is spectacular, the ‘stories’ riveting. As one of the cinematographers has written, [the series] is set to be the most ambitious natural history landmark series ever undertaken by the BBC. It will take audiences to stunning new landscapes, showcase jaw-dropping newly-discovered behaviors, and follow the intense struggles of some of our planet’s most amazing animals (my underlining emphasis).

It’s not very likely that the series will feature plants much, if at all. Are plants being short-changed yet again? Of course there are many programs on television about gardening. But these don’t count, in my opinion, towards any greater understanding of and knowledge about plants and their uses.

That’s not to say that the BBC (or Sir David) have completely ignored plants. In January 2022, his five episode The Green Planet series was broadcast. It was, for me however, a bit like the curate’s egg²: good in parts.

And you have to go way back to 2003 for his The Private Life of Plants series, described as a study of the growth, movement, reproduction and survival of plants.

Before that, I can only think of Geoffrey Smith‘s World of Flowers double series, broadcast on BBC2 in 1983 and 1984, and apparently attracting an audience of over five million.

Who said there was no appetite for programs about plants? These programs weren’t your run-of-the-mill gardening programs. No, in each program Smith highlighted the origin and development of different groups of plant species commonly grown in British gardens.

Furthermore, conservation for many relates to animals. This is something my former Birmingham colleague Brian Ford-Lloyd and I wrote back in 1986.

So what has brought about this latest concern of mine? Well, I first came across the announcement for Planet Earth III‘s imminent broadcast on the same day recently that I subscribed to a new plant-based blog: Plant Cuttings. And there, on the home page, was the blog’s goal for all to see: to reduce plant blindness.

The blog is the creation of Mr P Cuttings (aka Dr Nigel Chaffey, a former senior lecturer in botany at Bath Spa University, and a self proclaimed freelance plant science communicator), and is dedicated to all those who find fascination in plants (and how they are used by people). You can find more about the rationale for and antecedents of Plant Cuttings here. It’s a continuation of the series of articles he published in Annals of Botany, the last one, Check beneath your boots . . ., being published in 2019 (also about ‘plant blindness’).

Unfortunately, plants are often seen as boring, especially by high school students who we need to attract to the plant sciences if the discipline (in all its aspects) is to thrive. Thus this initiative by PlantingScience, a Student-Teacher-Scientist partnership in the USA that was founded in 2005 by the Botanical Society of America.

Let me wish Nigel all the best as he develops this new Plant Cuttings blog. I’m very much in accord with his goals. After all, much of my career in the plant sciences has focused on the origin of the plants that feed us, how they can preserved for posterity in genebanks, and used to increase crop productivity.

So what sparked my interests in plants and human societies? 

While a high school student, I first thought I’d become a zoologist. But I saw the light and my interests turned towards plants, and I took a botany degree (combined with geography) in the late 1960s at the University of Southampton.

One of the books that I read was first published in 1952 (I have the 1969 reprint) by American botanist Edgar Anderson. He wrote it for readers with little technical understanding of plants. After 70 years it has stood the test of time, and I thoroughly recommend anyone who has the slightest interest of the relationships between humans and plants to delve into Plants, Man & Life.

Thus I’ve been fascinated for decades about the beginnings of agriculture and how humans domesticated wild plants, and where, and to what uses they have put the myriad of varieties that were developed. My own expertise in conservation of genetic resources has permitted me to explore the Andes of Peru to find many different varieties of potato, the foundation on which Andean civilizations such as the Incas became successful.

Collecting potatoes from a farmer in northern Peru, May 1974.

A graduate student of mine worked out the probable origin of the grasspea, a famine crop in some parts of the world. And I’ve managed the largest genebank for rice in the world (rice feeding half the world’s population every day), and with my colleagues expanded our knowledge of the relationships of cultivated rices to their wild ancestors. I directed a five year program in the mid-1990s to collect cultivated rices from many countries in Asia and Africa, especially from the Lao PDR.

These are just three examples from all the plants which societies use and depend on. So many more, and so many fascinating stories of how civilization and agriculture developed.

Just recently, on holiday in North Wales, my wife and I came across the site of about 20 hut circles on the northwest tip of Anglesey, dating back to the Iron Age, some 2500 years ago.

Holyhead Mountain Hut Circles
Holyhead Mountain Hut Circles
Holyhead Mountain Hut Circles

What is particularly fascinating for me is that there is good evidence that crops like wheat, barley, and oats among others were being cultivated there 3000 years earlier. That’s about 4500 years after these crops were first domesticated in the Near East in Turkey and along the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the intervening years, these crops were carried across Europe by migrating peoples as they headed west until they became staples on the far west of mainland Britain. The domestication and expansion of these crops is also the story of those societies.

Plants are definitely not boring. Botany opens up a host of career opportunities. Today we need to harness the whole range of plant sciences, from molecule to field, to understand and use all the genetic diversity that is safely conserved in genebanks around the world, and backed up in many cases in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. We now have so many more tools, particularly molecular ones, at our fingertips to study plants.

Be sure to follow Plant Cuttings to find out more about the joy of plants and their value to humankind. I trust many more generations will be proud to say they became botanists (or, at the very least, took up one of the allied plant sciences).

¹I watched the first episode of Planet Earth III on BBC IPlayer catch up. Verdict: stunning photography but boring content, seemingly a rehash of so many nature programs. All animals. However, at 97, Sir David Attenborough is a remarkable presenter.

² A curate’s egg is something described as partly bad and partly good.

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Once in a . . .

. . . blue moon.

A couple of nights ago, on 30 August, we observed an uncommon natural phenomenon. A ‘Super Blue Moon’.

To be honest, neither ‘Super Moon’ or ‘Blue Moon’ had registered with me until then (and I’m approaching my 75th birthday). I’ve never been particularly interested in all things celestial or cosmic. But as the phenomenon had been mentioned on the lunchtime weather forecast, I decided to take a look outside around 9pm to see what all the fuss was about.

And I wasn’t disappointed. There, climbing the horizon to the southeast of my home on the northeast outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne (in NE27 to be precise), was this large, golden orange orb, a ‘Super Blue Moon'(rise).

Moonrise over NE27 at 21:05 on 30 August 2023.

I had to do some background reading. And there’s plenty out there. Because the Moon’s orbit is elliptical, there are times when it is closest to the Earth (at its perigee), and when it’s furthest away, and therefore appears smaller in the sky (at its apogee).

And when a full moon coincides with its perigee, we see a ‘Super Moon’, appearing much brighter and larger in the sky. Although not an ‘official’ astronomical term, ‘Super Moon’ is used to describe a full moon that comes within at least 90 percent of perigee.

Just four days before my 68th birthday in 2016, the Moon was closest to the Earth since January 1948 (I was born in November that year). It must have been a cloudy night because I have no recollection of having observed it. We were very lucky on the 30th; not a cloud in the sky.

And it was also a ‘Blue Moon’, the second full moon in a calendar month. Since the lunar cycle is 28 days, ‘Blue Moons’ are not particularly common: Months with 31 days—January, March, May, July, August, October, and December—have a much better chance of hosting a blue moon because of their length. On average, a blue moon occurs once every 33 months or full moons, 41 times per century, or about seven times every 19 years.

And the ‘Super Blue Moon’ we observed is a rather rare event: about 25% of all full moons are supermoons, but only about 3% of full moons are blue moons, NASA says. The time in between super blue moons is rather irregular, with 10 years the average and 20 years the maximum.

So I was pleased I made the effort to look at last Wednesday’s ‘Super Blue Moon’. We won’t see another until January 2037, when I’ll be approaching (hopefully) my 89th birthday. Now there’s a target to aim for!

 

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Time out in Minnesota: 4. Gems at the University of Minnesota

Actually, that should be GEMS. But more of that shortly.

While in Minnesota, I took the opportunity of looking up an old friend, Phil Pardey, at the University of Minnesota. A native Australian, Phil is Professor of Science and Technology Policy in the Department of Applied Economics.

So how did I, as someone working in genetic resources of rice, meet and become good friends with an agricultural economist?

From 1991-2001, I was head of the Genetic Resources Center at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and between 1993 and 1995, Chair of the CGIAR’s Inter-Center Working Group on Genetic Resources (ICWG-GR). Phil was a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, a sister center of IRRI’s under the aegis of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

The ICWG-GR brought together representatives from all the CGIAR centers with genebanks, and others like Phil from IFPRI who were conducting research on the impact and use of genetic resources. At that particular time, Phil and a couple of colleagues were analysing the economics of conserving crop genetic resources, and developing methodologies to estimate the costs of running genebanks. I contributed to chapter 6 on rice in this book (right) published by CABI in 2004. It was an important publication as the centers were developing ideas on how to fund their germplasm collections in perpetuity and what it would take to set up an endowment fund for that purpose (now managed through the Crop Trust).

Phil left IFPRI in 2002 to move to the U of M, and I retired in 2010. So with a less hectic schedule this year during our visit to the USA (although we haven’t traveled there since 2019 because of the Covid-19 pandemic) I contacted Phil and we arranged to meet for lunch a couple of weeks ago.

Phil and me beside a bust of Dr Norman Borlaug, ‘Father of the Green Revolution’ in the foyer of Borlaug Hall on the University of Minnesota campus, where I presented a seminar in the early 2000s.

Phil had a lot to tell me about a fascinating new initiative that he co-directs at the university.

Which was music to my ears. Let me explain.

GEMS Informatics, launched in 2015, is a unique public-private collaboration that is forging the future of the Data Revolution in agriculture. Minnesota is the birthplace of supercomputing in the early 1960s and has long been home to the world’s leading agri-food companies, making it the natural nexus for data-driven, public-private partnerships that create solutions to the complex challenges facing local and global agri-food systems.

Phil’s co-director is Jim Wilgenbusch, Director of Research Computing at the university.

What is so special about GEMS is that it brings together an impressive team of experts in super-computing, data management, genetics, genomics and bioinformatics, geospatial analysis, life sciences, and economics. Just take a look at the GEMS website to better understand the scope of what this initiative does deliver. And just imagine what such a combination of skills and resources could deliver even more in the future.

One of the areas that intrigued me most was the GEMS applications for multilocation testing of germplasm. Faced with the challenges of global climate change, plant breeders need to be able to better predict where the lines they have developed are successfully adapted and could be deployed to enhance agricultural activity. GEMS is bringing together data (not just numbers) on crop variety performance (yield in particular), weather, soils, and genomics (among others) to better understand the behavior of these across locations, or what we call genotype by environment interaction (GxE).

There’s an interesting account of GEMS applications for wheat variety development, for example.

I’ve had a long interest in multilocation testing. In 1990, I presented a paper¹ at a symposium in Wageningen, the Netherlands about the challenge of global warming, and how plant breeders should collaborate better across Europe to evaluate germplasm.

Then, in a blog post I published in August 2015, I wrote about the International Network for the Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER, managed by IRRI) as it celebrated its 40th anniversary. While recognizing the networks unequivocal and important role in facilitating the sharing of rice varieties and lines globally, I lamented that INGER had lost opportunities to transform itself to permit more critical and predictive testing of germplasm. My criticism was merited, I believe, but unlike GEMS Informatics, we did not have many of its computing and analysis tools. Had we built a database of quality trial data, gathering environmental as well as crop response data, we could go back today, using genomics tools, to ferret out those traits which endow varieties with superiority across environments.

GEMS is already pointing the way. Just look at the case studies that are highlighted on the GEMS website.

With progress like this in just eight years, just imagine where this initiative might take us. No wonder it was music to my ears, even though (being retired) I’m no longer involved in the conservation and use of plant genetic resources.

I really look forward to following future developments of GEMS Informatics. Not only did it take a strong vision to get it up and running, but support from the university and private sector organizations was crucial to implement that vision. Impressive indeed!

As we headed off to lunch, Phil just had to show me a new addition to the university campus, just in front of Borlaug Hall. It was a seven foot bronze statue of Norman Borlaug, who I had the pleasure of meeting at IRRI in the 1990s.

Borlaug was born in Cresco, Iowa in March 1914, where Steph and I passed through at the end of one of our long road trips in 2017.

I now wish we’d taken the time to visit the Borlaug homestead in  Cresco.

Anyway, Borlaug was an alumnus of the U of M, originally in forestry before converting to plant pathology. And the rest is history – the man who saved a billion lives.

The statue on the campus is a duplicate of one sculpted by Idaho resident Benjamin Victor (1979– ) that stands in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The original was given by the state of Iowa to the Collection in 2014 on the centenary of Borlaug’s birth.

In the National Statuary Hall, each state is permitted to display just two statues, so that of former United States Senator, and Secretary of the Interior James Harlan, which the state of Iowa donated to the Collection in 1910, had to make room for Borlaug. And fittingly so.

Other blog posts in this Minnesota series;

¹Jackson, M.T., 1991. Global warming: the case for European cooperation for germplasm conservation and use. In: Th.J.L. van Hintum, L. Frese & P.M. Perret (eds.), Crop Networks. Searching for New Concepts for Collaborative Genetic Resources Management. International Crop Network Series No. 4. International Board for Plant Genetic Resources, Rome, Italy. Papers of the EUCARPIA/IBPGR symposium held in Wageningen, the Netherlands, December 3-6, 1990. pp. 125-131.

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The best job ever?

I was asked recently what was the best job I’d had.

Well, I guess the best job was the one I was occupying at the time. Until it wasn’t.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I had a Saturday job at a local garage, Peppers of Leek, pumping gasoline and helping in the car parts store, for which I earned 15/- (fifteen shillings or 75p in new money), equivalent today of less than £18 for an eight hour shift. What exploitation!

However, discounting that Saturday job, then I’ve held five different positions at three organizations over a fulfilling career lasting 37 years and 4 months. I took early retirement at the end of April 2010, aged 61.

Exploring Peru
My first job was at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru. I first met Richard Sawyer (left), CIP’s Director General when he visited the University of Birmingham after I’d completed my MSc degree in genetic resources conservation and use in September 1971.  He confirmed my appointment at CIP from January 1973. It was my first encounter with an American.

As an Associate Taxonomist at CIP I had two responsibilities: collecting potato varieties in the Andes of Peru, which were added to CIP’s large germplasm collection; and completing the field research for my PhD at the University of Birmingham.

In May 1973, just a few months after I arrived in Peru, I travelled to the north of Peru, specifically to the Departments of Ancash and La Libertad, with my Peruvian colleague Zosimo Huaman (seen in the photo below with two farmers). We explored remote valleys in this region (that has the highest mountains in the country) for almost a month, arriving back in Lima with a handsome collection of potato varieties.

Looking north towards Peru’s highest mountain, Huascaran (6768 m) in the Callejon de Huaylas in Ancash.

Some of the places we visited were so remote we could only access them on foot or on horseback.

In February 1974 I traveled to the south of Peru to carry out a field study of mixed variety potato cultivation as part of my thesis research in the remote valley of Cuyo Cuyo (below) with its fabulous terraces or andenes, northeast of Lake Titicaca.

And then, in May, I explored the Department of Cajamarca in the north of Peru with a driver, Octavio, seen in the photo below marking potato tubers with a collection number while I discussed these samples with the farmer.

Three years passed by in a flash. It had been a fantastic opportunity for a young person like myself. I was just 24 when I headed to Peru in 1973.

Working in CIP’s potato field genebank at Huancayo, 3100 m (>10,000 feet) in the central Andes.

Not many folks enjoy the same level of freedom to pursue a project as I did, or to travel throughout such an awe-inspiring country. I continue to count my blessings.

I also had a fantastic supervisor/head of department in geneticist Dr Roger Rowe (left).

Heading to Central America
I stayed with CIP for another five years, until March 1981. But not in Lima. It would have been fun to remain in the germplasm program, but there wasn’t a position available. The only one was filled by Zosimo. In any case, I was keen to expand my potato horizons and learn more about potato production in the round. So, after completing my PhD in December 1975, I joined CIP’s Outreach Program (that, in the course of time, became the Regional Research Program), not entirely sure what the future held. Costa Rica was mooted as a possible regional location.

In January 1976, Roger Rowe, Ed French (head of plant pathology at CIP), and I made a recce visit to Costa Rica, where we met officials at CATIE in Turrialba and it was agreed that CATIE would host a CIP scientist to work on adaptation of potatoes to warm environments. My wife Steph and I finally made it to Turrialba in April, and I set about setting up my research.

CATIE plant pathologist Raul Moreno (left) explains the center’s research in Turrialba on multiple cropping systems to (L-R) University of Wisconsin professor Luis Sequeira, Ed French, and Roger Rowe.

Quite quickly the focus changed to identify resistance to a disease known as bacterial wilt.

Evaluating potatoes in the field at Turrialba in 1977 (top). Potatoes showing typical asymmetrical wilt symptoms (bottom left) and bacterial exudate in infected tubers (bottom right).

Not only did we test different potatoes varieties for resistance to the bacterium, but we developed different agronomic solutions to control the amount of disease that was surviving from one season to the next.

I also worked closely with colleagues in the Ministry of Agriculture and the University of Costa Rica, and with potato farmers to reduce the high use of fertilizers and pesticides, as well as setting up a potato seed production project.
We developed a major regional project, PRECODEPA, during this time, involving six countries in the region and Caribbean, and funded by the Swiss government.
I was just 27 when we moved to Costa Rica. This was my first taste of program management; I was on my own (although I did receive administrative backup from CATIE, where we lived). My boss in Lima, Dr Ken Brown (left, head of the Regional Research Program) managed all his staff outside Lima on ‘a light rein’: encouraging, supporting, correcting program alignment when necessary. And always with great humor.

We spent five, happy years in Costa Rica. The work was enjoyable. I had a great couple of technical staff, Jorge and Moises, and secretary Leda.

I worked with the CIP team in Toluca, Mexico, and after the regional team leader left for the USA to pursue his PhD, Richard Sawyer asked me to take on the leadership of the program, which I did for over three years.

I learnt to grow a potato crop, and work alongside farmers and various government officials from the region. I learnt a lot about people management, and was all set to continue my career with CIP.

However, by November 1980, I decided that I needed a change. I’d achieved as much as I could in Central America. So we returned to Lima, with the expectation of moving with CIP to Brazil or the Philippines.

Joining academia
But fate stepped in. I was asked to apply for a lectureship at Birmingham, in my old department, now renamed ‘Plant Biology’. In January 1981 I flew back to the UK for interview (at my own expense!) and was offered the position to start in April that year. So, with some regret—but full of anticipation—I resigned from CIP and we returned to the UK in mid-March.

With the forthcoming retirement in September 1982 of Professor Jack Hawkes (right), Mason Professor of Botany and genetic resources MSc course leader (who had supervised my PhD), the university created this new lectureship to ‘fill the teaching gap’ following Jack’s departure, particularly on the MSc course.

I spent the next ten years teaching and carrying out research on potatoes and legume species at Birmingham. I had quite a heavy teaching load, mostly with graduate MSc students studying the theory and practice of the conservation and use of plant genetic resources (the same course that I had attended a decade earlier).

I co-taught a BSc third (final) year module on genetic resources with my close friend and colleague Brian Ford-Lloyd (left), and contributed half the lectures in a second-year module on flowering plant taxonomy with another colleague, Richard Lester. Fortunately I had no first year teaching.

Over a decade I supervised or co-supervised ten PhD students, and perhaps 30 MSc students. I really enjoyed working with these graduates, mostly from overseas.

Around 1988, the four departments (Plant Biology, Zoology and Comparative Physiology, Microbiology, and Genetics) making up the School of Biological Sciences merged, and formed five research groups. I moved to the Plant Genetics Group, and was quite contented working with my new head of group, Professor Mike Kearsey (left above). Much better than the head of Plant Biology, Professor Jim Callow (right above, who was appointed in 1983 to succeed Hawkes as Mason Professor of Botany) who had little understanding of and empathy with my research interests.

By 1990 I still hadn’t hadn’t made Senior Lecturer, but I was on that particular pay scale and hoping for promotion imminently. I was working my way up the academic ladder, or at least I thought so. I took on wider responsibilities in the School of Biological Sciences, where I became Second Year Course Chair, and also as vice-chair of a university-wide initiative known as ‘Environmental Research Management’, set up to ‘market’ the university’s expertise in environmental research.

Nevertheless, I could see the writing on the wall. It was highly unlikely that I’d ever get my research on wild species funded (although I had received a large government grant to continue my potato collaboration with CIP). And with other work pressures, academia was beginning to lose its appeal.

Returning to international agricultural research
In September 1990, I received—quite out of the blue (and anonymously)—information about a new position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, as Head of a newly-created Genetic Resources Center (GRC).

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I threw my proverbial hat in the ring, and was called for interview at the beginning of January 1991. My flight from London-Gatwick to Manila via Hong Kong was delayed more than 12 hours. Instead of arriving in Los Baños a day ahead of the interviews, I arrived in the early hours of the morning and managed about two hours sleep before I had a breakfast meeting with the Director General, Klaus Lampe (right) and his three deputies! The interview sessions lasted more than three days. There were two other candidates, friends of mine who had studied at Birmingham under Jack Hawkes!

To cut a long story short, I was offered the position at the end of January which I accepted once a starting salary had been agreed. However I wasn’t able to join IRRI until 1 July because I still had teaching and examination commitments at the university.

Quite a few of my university colleagues were surprised, concerned even, that I was giving up a tenured position. I’ll admit to some qualms as well. But the die was cast. I flew out to the Philippines on Sunday 30 June. Steph and our daughters Hannah (13) and Philippa (9) joined me at the end of December.

Not long after he joined IRRI in 1988, Klaus Lampe launched a major reorganization of departments and programs. The Genetic Resources Center combined two of the seed conservation and distribution activities of the institute: the International Rice Genebank (the largest and most genetically-diverse of its kind in the world), and the International Network for the Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER). Besides overall responsibility for GRC, I had day-to-day management of the genebank. INGER was led by an Indian geneticist and rice breeder Dr Seshu Durvasula who made it quite clear from the outset that he didn’t take kindly to these new arrangements nor having to report to someone who had never worked on rice. Such inflexible attitudes were not part of Lampe’s plan, and Seshu lasted only about 18 more months more before resigning. That’s yet another story.

I quickly realised that many improvements were needed to enhance the management of the genebank and its important rice germplasm collection. I took six months to familiarize myself fully with the genebank operations, consulting frequently with my staff, before making changes and assigning new responsibilities. Working with the genebank staff was a delight.

I convinced KLaus Lampe and senior management to invest appropriately in improving the genebank’s facilities, and to upgrade the positions of more than 70 staff. Since they constantly claimed that ‘the genebank was the jewel in IRRI’s crown‘, all I asked them was to put the money where their mouths were.

Our efforts paid off. We made the genebank ‘a model for others to emulate’. Not my words but those of external reviewers.

During my time in GRC, I had the privilege of meeting VIPs from around the world: presidents, prime ministers and other government officials, members of the diplomatic corps, and Nobel Prize winners.

In 1995 we initiated a major research and exploration project funded by the Swiss Government, which lasted for five years. We expanded the genebank collection by more than 25% to over 100,000 seed samples or accessions (since when it has grown further), many of them having been collected from farmers’ fields for the first time. This was a great opportunity to collect in more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa, and South and Central America where there were gaps in collections or, as in the case of Laos for example, war and other unrest had prevented any collections being made throughout the country until peace was established. In the photo below, taken in the Lao genebank at Vientiane in 1999, I’m with one of my staff Dr Seepana Appa Rao (center) and two genebank staff. On the left is Dr Chay Bounphanousay, head of the genebank, and now Director of the National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute (NAFRI).

I had international commitments as well, chairing the Inter-Center Working Group on Genetic Resources (ICWG-GR) and establishing the System-wide Genetic Resources Program, the only program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (or CGIAR) involving all fifteen centers. In 1994, the ICWG-GR met in Kenya, and stayed at a hotel in the shadow of Mt Kenya (below). The ICWG-GR was a great group of colleagues to work with, and we worked together with great enthusiasm and collegiality. 

The early 1990s were an important time for genebanks since the Convention on Biological Diversity had come into effect in December 1992, and this began to have an impact on access to and use of genetic resources. However, one consequence was the increased politicization of genetic resources conservation and use. As the decade wore on, these aspects began to take up more and more of my time. Not so much fun for someone who was more interested in the technical and research aspects of genetic conservation.

 

A directorship beckons
Then, quite out of the blue at the beginning of January 2001, Director General Ron Cantrell (right) asked me to stop by his office. He proposed I should leave GRC and join the senior management team as a Director to reorganize and manage the institute’s research portfolio and relationships with the donor community. I said I’d think it over, talk with Steph, and give him my answer in a couple of days.

I turned him down! The  reasons are too complicated to explain here. I was contented in GRC. There were many things I still wanted to achieve there.

After about six weeks, Cantrell sent word he’d like to discuss his proposal once again. This time we came to an understanding, and my last day as head of GRC was 30 April 2001. I became IRRI’s Director for Program Planning and Coordination (later Communications) or DPPC, with line management for Communication and Publications Services (CPS), Library and Documentation Services (LDS), IT Services (ITS), the Development Office (DO), as well as the Program Planning and Communications unit (PPC).

Here I am with (left to right): Gene Hettel (CPS), Mila Ramos (LDS), Marco van den Berg (ITS), Duncan Macintosh (DO), and Corinta Guerta (PPC).

When I set up DPPC I inherited a small number of staff who had managed (not very effectively I’m sad to say) IRRI’s relationships with the donor community. IRRI’s reputation had hit rock bottom with its donors. I had to dig deep to understand just why the institute could not meet its reporting and financial obligations to the donors. After recruiting five new staff, we implemented new procedures to keep things on an even keel, and within six months we had salvaged what had been quite a dire situation. Data management and integration of information across different research and finance functions was the basis of the changes we made. And we never looked back. By the time I retired from IRRI, we had supported raising the institute’s annual budget to around USD 60 million, and IRRI’s was shining bright among the donors.

Here I am with PCC staff on my last day at IRRI, 30 April 2010. Left to right: Eric Clutario, Corinta Guerta, Zeny Federico, me, Vel Ilao, and Yeyet Enriquez. After I left IRRI, Corinta became head of PPC and was made a Director, the first national staff to rise through the ranks from Research Assistant in 1975 (she was originally a soil chemist) to a seat on the senior management committee.

As a Director, I was a member of IRRI’s senior management team taking responsibility for the institute’s strategy development and medium term plans, performance management, and several cross-cutting initiatives that enhanced IRRI’s welfare and that of the staff.

It wasn’t a bowl of cherries all the time at IRRI. There certainly were some impressive downs. The institute had a bit of a bleak patch for just under a decade from the time Lampe retired in 1995 until Bob Zeigler’s appointment in 2005. The institute had lost its way, and I guess that was one of the reasons I was asked to create the PPC office, to coordinate different functions of institute management.

But all good things come to an end, and by 2009 I’d already decided that I wanted to retire (and smell the roses, as they say), even though Zeigler encouraged me to stay on. By then I was already planning the celebrations for IRRI’s 50th anniversary, and agreed to see those through to April 2010. What fun we had, at the Big Show on Sunday 13 December 2009 and earlier.

With the Big Show production crew on stage afterwards.

The best?
Having thought long and hard about this, I believe that the DPPC role was the one I enjoyed most. That’s not to say that everything else I accomplished has not been cherished. But DPPC was different. I’d moved into a position where I could really influence events, I was managing areas of the institute’s portfolio and making a difference.

IRRI gave me the honour of hosting my despedida during the institute’s 50th gala anniversary dinner on 14 April 2010.

Do I have any regrets about the career choices I made? Not for one second.

I made some useful contributions to science (some of which is still being cited 40 years after publication). I traveled the world. I became fluent (for a while at least) in Spanish. And I have worked alongside many great scientists, fought with a few. Made many great friends, some sadly no longer with us.

Who could ask for more?

 

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8 billion . . . and counting

This is the latest estimate of the world’s population announced by the United Nations on 15 November 2022. Can you imagine? I was born 74 years ago when the population was just over a quarter of what it is today.

So many more mouths to feed, so many challenges to overcome. And population growth fastest in many of the world’s poorest countries.

The UN’s latest prediction is that another billion will be added by 2037, and that . . . half of the world’s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia (ordered by their expected contribution to total growth).

In 2021, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN or FAO reported that 193 million people in 53 countries or territories were facing acute food insecurity. And while conflict and the effects of the Covid pandemic are contributors to this state of affairs, there is no doubt that weather extremes are also a major contributing factor, affecting many more people worldwide. More frequent storms. Too much water—or too little. Rising temperatures reducing the agricultural productivity in many regions.

Sustainable food and agricultural production were appropriately important themes at the latest climate change conference—COP27—in Egypt. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research or CGIAR, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN or FAO, and the Rockefeller Foundation together were prominent at COP27 with the aim of putting agrifood systems transformation at the heart of the conference.

So, whether you are a believer in climate change or a denier (I’ve never been a climate change denier—quite the opposite, in fact), surely you have to accept that something strange is happening to our climate.

More than 30 years ago, two University of Birmingham colleagues—Brian Ford-Lloyd and Martin Parry—and I organized a workshop to discuss the impact of climate change on agriculture and the conservation of plant genetic resources (and how they could, and should, be used to mitigate the effects of a warming climate). The proceedings were published in 1990. Twenty-five years later, in 2014, we followed up with a second volume reflecting how the science of climate change itself had progressed, and how better we were equipped to use genetic resources to enhance crop productivity.

So while agriculture has been—and continues to be—one of the contributors to climate change (livestock, methane from rice paddies, use of fertilizers and the like) it can and has to be part of the solution.

Since more than half of the world’s population are now urban dwellers, they do not produce their own food. Or at least not enough (even if they grow their own vegetables and such on small holdings or allotments) to support many others.

Subsistence farming is not a solution either, even though these farmers can increase productivity by adopting new agricultural practices and higher-yielding crop varieties, if appropriate and affordable. And those campaigners who advocate the abolition of livestock farming (and I have seen one young person state that all farming should be stopped!) have little notion of how that would affect the lives of farmers globally, or where the rest of us would source our food.

There has been much talk recently about diversification of farming systems and adoption of so-called ‘orphan crops’ as part of the solution. Of course these approaches can make a difference, but should not diminish the role and importance of staple crops like wheat, maize, rice, potatoes, sorghum, and many others.

So what are the options? Investment in plant breeding, among others, has to be central to achieving food security. We will need a pipeline of crop varieties that are better adapted to changing environmental conditions, that are one step ahead of novel pest and disease variants. Crop productivity will have to increase significantly over the next few decades.

My first encounter with plant breeding—or plant breeders for that matter—was during a visit, in July 1969, to the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge during a field course at the end of my second year undergraduate degree course at the University of Southampton. We heard all about wheat breeding and cytogenetics from Dr Ralph Riley FRS (right) no less (later knighted and Director of the PBI from 1972 to 1978). Our paths crossed again several times during the 1990s when he was associated with the CGIAR.

During my third and final year at Southampton, 1969-1970, I enjoyed a plant breeding module taught by genetics lecturer Dr Joe Smartt whose original research background was in peanut cytogenetics. He had spent some years in Africa as a peanut breeder in Zambia (then known as Northern Rhodesia).

It was in that course that I was introduced to one of the classic texts on the topic, Principles of Plant Breeding by University of California-Davis geneticist, RW Allard (first published in 1960). Sadly I no longer have my copy that I purchased in 1969. It was devoured by termites before I left the Philippines in 2010.

I’ve never been actively involved in plant breeding per se. However, the focus of my research was the conservation of genetic resources (of potatoes and rice, and some other species) and pre-breeding studies to facilitate the use of wild species in plant breeding.

It’s been my privilege to know and work with some outstanding plant breeders. Not only did they need a knowledge of genetics, reproductive behavior, physiology and agronomy of a plant species, but this was coupled with creativity, intuition and the famous ‘breeder’s eye’ to develop new varieties.

Perhaps the most famous plant breeder I met in the early 1990s was 1970 Nobel Peace Laureate (and ‘Father of the Green Revolution’) Norman Borlaug, who spent a lifetime breeding wheat varieties, first with the Rockefeller Foundation and then with the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico. I wrote about that encounter here.

Explaining how rice seeds are stored in the International Rice Genebank at IRRI to Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug

In the potato world I met Stan Peloquin from the University of Wisconsin, George Mackay in Scotland, and John Hermsen from Wageningen University. I worked alongside Peruvian potato breeder and taxonomist Carlos Ochoa (below) for several years.

When I joined IRRI in the Philippines in 1991 as head of the Genetic Resources Center, one of my close colleagues was 1996 World Food Prize Laureate Gurdev Khush (below left) who led the institute’s breeding program. He and his team bred more than 300 varieties of rice, some of which—like IR36 and IR72—have been grown over millions of hectares and saved countless millions from starvation.

And another rice breeder (and 2004 World Food Prize Laureate) famous for NERICA rice was Monty Jones (above right) at the Africa Rice Center in West Africa. Monty was a graduate at Birmingham and I was the internal examiner for his PhD thesis in 1983.

Plant breeding has come a long way since I first became interested 50 years ago. Breeders now have access to a whole new toolbox to accelerate the development of new varieties, some of which were not available just a few years ago.

A decade ago I asked my friend and former colleague at IRRI, Ken McNally to contribute a review of genomics and other ‘omics’ technologies to discover and analyse useful traits in germplasm collections to the 2014 genetic resources book that I referred to earlier [1]. I’m sure there have been many useful developments in the intervening years.

One of these is gene editing, and Nicholas Karavolias (a graduate student at Berkeley University) has written an interesting review (from which the diagram above was sourced) of how the CRISPR gene editing tool is being used to improve crops and animals.

Among the climate change challenges that I mentioned earlier is the likelihood of increased flooding in many parts of the world. Just last year there were devastating floods along the Indus River in Pakistan where rice is an important crop, as it is in many Asian countries. Although grown in standing water in paddy fields, rice varieties will die if totally submerged for more than a few days when floods hit.

Rice paddies near Vientiane, Laos.

There are rice varieties that can grow rapidly as flood waters rise. Known as deepwater rice varieties, they can grow several centimeters a day. But they are never submerged as such for long.

The harvest of deepwater rice varieties in Thailand.

Over several decades, submergence tolerant rice varieties were developed in a collaborative project between US-based scientists and those at IRRI using marker-assisted selection (not genetic engineering) to identify a gene, named Sub1 (derived from an Indian rice variety) and incorporate it into breeding lines. My former IRRI colleagues, plant physiologist Abdelbagi Ismail and breeder David Mackill have written about response to flooding. In the video below you can see the impact of the Sub1 gene [2]. And the impact of that gene is readily seen in the video below which shows two forms of the rice variety IR64 with and without the Sub1 gene.

To date, the impact of genetic engineering in crop improvement has not been as significant as the technology promised, primarily because of opposition (environmental, social, and political) to the deployment of genetically-modified varieties. I wrote about that issue some years back, and focused on the situation of beta-carotene rich rice known as ‘Golden Rice’. After many years of development, it’s gratifying to see that Golden Rice (as the variety Malusog) has now been grown commercially in the Philippines for the first time, and can now deliver real health and nutritional benefits to Vitamin A impoverished communities in the Philippines and hopefully elsewhere before too long.

In recent weeks there have been interesting news releases about the development of perennial rice and its potential to mitigate some climate change effects, and reduce labor usage. Researchers at the John Innes Centre in the UK have identified a gene that they hope will make wheat varieties more heat-resistant. The need for trait identification has never been greater or the importance of the hundreds of thousands of crop varieties and wild species that are safely conserved in genebanks around the world. Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, there are now better and more efficient tools available to screen germplasm for disease and pest resistance, or for genes like the wheat gene just discussed.

In terms of adaptation to a changing climate through plant breeding, I guess much of the focus has been on developing varieties that are better adapted to changing environment, be that the physical or biotic environment.

But here’s another challenge that was first raised some years back by one of my former colleagues at IRRI, Melissa Fitzgerald (right) who was head of the Grain Quality, Nutrition, and Postharvest Center, and is now Professor and Interim Head of the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia.

And it’s to do with the potential global savings of carbon. Melissa and her colleagues were looking at the cooking time of different rice varieties. This is what she (and her co-authors wrote in an interesting 2009 paper):

The cooking time of rice is determined by the temperature at which the crystalline structures of the starch begin to melt. This is called gelatinization temperature (GT). Lowering the GT of the rice grain could decrease average cooking times by up to 4 min. Although this might initially seem entirely insignificant, by computing the number of times rice is cooked in any one day by millions of households around the world, a decrease of just 4 min for each cooking event could save >10,000 years of cooking time each day. This represents massive potential for global savings of carbon and is of particular relevance to poor, rural households that depend on scarce local supplies of fuel.

Now there’s a huge breeding challenge.

Anyway, in this post I’ve really only scratched the surface of the topic, but hopefully for those readers not familiar with plant breeding, what it entails, and what it can promise, I hope that I’ve explored a few interesting aspects.

[1] McNally, KL. 2014. Exploring ‘omics’ of genetic resources to mitigate the effects of climate change. In: M Jackson, B Ford-Lloyd & M Parry (eds), Plant Genetic Resources and Climate Change. CABI, Wallingford, UK. pp. 166-189

[2] Ismail, AM & Mackill, DJ. 2014. Response to flooding: submergence tolerance in rice. In: M Jackson, B Ford-Lloyd & M Parry (eds), Plant Genetic Resources and Climate Change. CABI, Wallingford, UK. pp. 251-269.

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Launching a career in agricultural research

Over a career spanning almost four decades, I spent more than 27 years in international agricultural research in South and Central America, and Asia. And a decade teaching at the University of Birmingham.

It all started on this day, 50 years ago, when I joined the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru as an Associate Taxonomist.

But first, let me take you back a couple of years, to September 1970.

I’d enrolled at the University of Birmingham for the MSc degree in Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources, taught in the Department of Botany. It was the following February that I first heard about the possibility of joining CIP.

The head of department, potato expert Professor Jack Hawkes had just returned from a six week expedition to Bolivia (to collect wild species of potato) that was supported, in part, by the USAID-North Carolina State University-sponsored potato program in Peru.

The American joint leader of that program, Dr Richard Sawyer (left), mentioned to Jack that he wanted to send a young Peruvian scientist, Zosimo Huamán, to Birmingham for the MSc course in September 1971, and could he suggest anyone to fill a one-year vacancy.

On the night of his return to Birmingham, Jack phoned me about this exciting opportunity. And would I be interested. Interested? I’d long had an ambition to travel to South America, and Peru in particular.

However, my appointment at CIP was delayed until January 1973. Why? Let me explain.

In 1971, Sawyer was in the final stages of setting up the International Potato Center. However, a guaranteed funding stream for this proposed research center had not been fully identified.

At that time, there were four international agricultural research centers:

  • the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines (founded in 1960);
  • the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) near Mexico City (1966);
  • the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria (1967); and
  • the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia (also 1967).

All received bilateral funding from several donors, like the non-profit Rockefeller and Ford Foundations for example, or government agencies like USAID in the USA or the UK’s Overseas Development Administration.

In May 1971 there was a significant development in terms of long-term funding for agricultural research with the setting up of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research or CGIAR (an umbrella organization of donors, run from the World Bank in Washington, DC) to coordinate and support the four centers I already mentioned, and potentially others (like CIP) that were being established.

Since its inception, CGIAR-supported research was dedicated to reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition, and ensuring more sustainable management of natural resources.

For more than 50 years, CGIAR and partners have delivered critical science and innovation to feed the world and end inequality. Its original mission—to solve hunger—is now expanding to address wider 21st century challenges, with the aim of transforming the world’s food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis. More on that below.

Back in 1971 the question was which funding agencies would become CGIAR members, and whether CIP would join the CGIAR (which it did in 1973).

Throughout 1971, Sawyer negotiated with the UK’s ODA to support CIP. But with the pending establishment of the CGIAR, ODA officials were uncertain whether to join that multilateral funding initiative or continue with the current bilateral funding model.

Decisions were, in the main, delayed. But one important decision did affect me directly. The ODA gave me a personal grant in September 1971 to remain in Birmingham until funding to CIP could be resolved. I therefore registered for a PhD on potatoes under Jack Hawkes’ supervision, and spent the next 15 months working on ideas I hoped to pursue further once I could get my hands on potatoes in the Andes, so to speak.

With Jack Hawkes in the potato field genebank at Huancayo, central Peru (3100 m above sea level) in early 1974.

In the event, the ODA provided £130,000 directly to CIP between 1973 and 1975 (= £1.858 million today), which funded, among other things, development of the center’s potato genebank, germplasm collecting missions around Peru, and associated research, as well as my position at the center.

Arriving in Peru was an ambition fulfilled, and working at a young center like CIP was a dream come true, even though, at just 24, I was somewhat wet behind the ears.

However, there were some great colleagues who taught me the ropes, and were important mentors then and throughout my career. I learnt a lot about working in a team, and about people management, very useful in later years as I moved up the management ladder.

For the first three years, my work was supervised and generously supported by an American geneticist, Dr Roger Rowe (right, with his wife Norma) who joined CIP on 1 May 1973 as head of the Breeding and Genetics Department. I owe a great deal to Roger who has remained a good friend all these years.

Always leading from the front, and never shy of making the tough decisions, Roger went on to fill senior management positions at several CGIAR centers. As a former colleague once commented to me, “Roger was the best Director General the CGIAR never had.” I couldn’t agree more.

When I joined CIP’s Regional Research group in 1976 and moved to Costa Rica, my new boss was Ken Brown (left). Ken had been working as a cotton physiologist in Pakistan for the Cotton Research Corporation, although he had previously worked in several African countries.

Ken never micromanaged his staff, was always there to help set priorities and give guidance. In those aspects of people management, I learned a lot from Ken, and he certainly earned my gratitude.

Aside from my work on potato genetic resources (and completing my PhD in 1975), I enjoyed the work on bacterial wilt and setting up a regional program, PRECODEPA as part of my Regional Research activities.

Jim Bryan (right, with Costarrican assistant Jorge Aguilar) was my closest friend at CIP. A native of Idaho, Jim was CIP’s seed production specialist. Down to earth and pragmatic, Jim taught me the importance of clean potato seed and seed production systems. He came to work with me in Costa Rica during 1979/80 and together we worked on a successful project (with the Costarrican Ministry of Agriculture) for the rapid multiplication of seed potatoes.

But by the end of 1980, I was looking for a new challenge when one came to my attention back home in the UK.

In April 1981, I joined the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in the Department of Plant Biology (as the Department of Botany had been renamed since I graduated).

I have mixed feelings about that decade. Enthusiastic for the first few years, I became increasingly disenchanted with academic life. I enjoyed teaching genetic resources conservation to MSc students from many different countries, and particularly supervision of graduate students. I also kept a research link on true potato seed (TPS) with CIP, and around 1988 participated in a three-week review of a Swiss-funded seed production project at four locations in Peru.

With members of the project review team, with team leader Carlos Valverde on the right. Cesar Vittorelli, our CIP liaison is in the middle. I don’t remember the names of the two other team members, a Peruvian agronomist, on my right, and a Swiss economist between Vittorelli and Valverde.

But universities were under pressure from the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher. It was becoming a numbers, performance-driven game. And even though the prospects of promotion to Senior Lecturer were promising (I was already on the SL pay scale), by 1991 I was ready for a change.

And so I successfully applied for the position of Head of the Genetic Resources Center at IRRI, and once again working under the CGIAR umbrella. I moved to the Philippines in July, and stayed there for the next 19 years until retiring at the end of April 2010.

I was much happier at IRRI than Birmingham, although there were a number of challenges to face: both professional and personal such as raising two daughters in the Philippines (they were 13 and 9 when we moved to IRRI) and schooling at the International School Manila.

Whereas I’d joined CIP at the beginning of its institutional journey in 1973, IRRI already had a 30 year history in 1991. It was beginning to show its age, and much of the infrastructure built in the early 1960s had not fared well in the tropical climate of Los Baños and was in dire need of refurbishment.

A new Director General, Dr Klaus Lampe (right) from Germany was appointed in 1988 with a mandate to rejuvenate the institute before it slipped into terminal decline. That meant ‘asking’ many long-term staff to move on and make way for a cohort of new and younger staff. I was part of that recruitment drive. But turning around an institute with entrenched perspectives was no mean feat.

With responsibility for the world’s largest and most important rice genebank, and interacting with genebank colleagues at all the other centers, I took on the chair of the Inter-Center Working Group when we met in Ethiopia in January 1993, and in subsequent years took a major role in setting up the System-wide Genetic Resources Program (SGRP). This was a forerunner—and a successful one at that—of the programmatic approach adopted by the CGIAR centers.

The Swiss-funded project to collect and conserve rice varieties from >20 countries, and the innovative and pioneer research about on-farm conservation were highlights of the 1990s. As was the research, in collaboration with my old colleagues at Birmingham, on the use of molecular markers to study and conserve germplasm. A first for the CGIAR centers. Indeed a first for any crop.

Helping my genebank staff grow in their positions, and seeing them promoted gave me great satisfaction. I’d inherited a staff that essentially did what they were told to do. With encouragement from me they took on greater responsibility—and accountability—for various genebank operations, and their enthusiastic involvement allowed me to make the necessary changes to how the genebank was managed, and putting it at the forefront of CGIAR genebanks, a position it retains today.

My closest friend and colleague at IRRI was fellow Brit and crop modeller, Dr John Sheehy (right). John joined the institute in 1995, and I was chair of his appointment committee. Within a short time of meeting John for the first time, I recognized someone with a keen intellect, who was not constrained by a long-term rice perspective, and who would, I believed, bring some exceptional scientific skills and thinking to the institute.

Among his achievements were a concept for C4 rice, and persuading the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to back a worldwide consortium (now administered from the University of Oxford) of some of the best scientists working on photosynthesis to make this concept a reality.

By May 2001, however, change was in the air. I was asked to leave the Genetic Resources Center (and research) and join IRRI’s senior management team as Director for Program Planning and Communications, to reconnect the institute with its funding donors, and develop a strategy to increase financial support. I also took IT Services, the Library and Documentation Services, Communication and Publication Services, and the Development Office under my wing.

IRRI’s reputation with its donors was at rock bottom. Even the Director General, Ron Cantrell, wasn’t sure what IRRI’s financial and reporting commitments were.

We turned this around within six months, and quickly re-established IRRI as a reliable partner under the CGIAR. By the time I left IRRI in 2010, my office had helped the institute increase its budget to US$60 million p.a.

This increased emphasis on funding was important as, by the end of the 1990s, several donors were raising concerns about the focus of the centers and how they should be supported. Furthermore, a number of external factors like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, agreed by 150 countries in 1992), the growing consensus on the threat of climate change, the adoption of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, and subsequent Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs) meant that the 15 CGIAR centers as they had become could not continue with ‘business as usual’.

Until the end of the 1990s, each center had followed its own research agenda. But it became increasingly clear that they would have to cooperate better with each other and with the national programs. And funding was being directed at specific donor-led interests.

There is no doubt that investment in the CGIAR over 50 years has brought about great benefits, economically and in humanitarian ways. Investment in crop genetic improvement has been the mainstay of the CGIAR, and although research on natural resources management (NRM, such as soils and water) has been beneficial at local levels, it has not had the widespread impact that genetic improvement has.

The impact of the CGIAR is well-documented. Take this 2010 paper for example. Click on the image for more information.

My good friend from the University of Minnesota, Professor Phil Pardey and two colleagues have calculated the economic benefits of CGIAR to be worth about 10 times the cost. Impressive. Click on the image below for more information.

I have watched a couple of decades of CGIAR navel gazing as the system has tried to ‘discover’ the best modus operandi to support national programs and the billions of farmers and consumers who depend on its research outputs.

There’s no doubt these changes have increased bureaucracy across the CGIAR. One early development was the introduction of 3-year rolling Medium Term Plans with performance targets (always difficult in agricultural and biological research), which led to perverse incentives as many centers set unambitious targets that would attract high scores and therefore guarantee continued donor support.

I did not favor that approach (supported by my DG), encouraging my colleagues to be more ambitious and realistic in their planning. But it did result in conflict with an accountant in the World Bank – a ‘bean counter’ – who had been assigned to review how the centers met their targets each year. I don’t remember his name. We had endless arguments because, it seemed to me, he simply didn’t understand the nature of research and was only interested if a particular target had been met 100%. Much as I tried to explain that reaching 75% or perhaps lower could also mean significant impact at the user level, with positive outcomes, he would not accept this point of view. 100% or nothing! What a narrow perspective.

A former colleague in the CGIAR Independent Evaluation Arrangement office in Rome and a colleague have written an excellent evaluation of this performance management exercise, warts and all. Click on the image below to access a PDF copy.

Now we have OneCGIAR that is attempting to make the system function as a whole. Very laudable, and focusing on these five highly relevant research initiatives. Click on the image below for more information.

What I’m not sure about are the levels of management that the new structure entails: global directors, regional directors, program or initiative leaders, center directors (some taking on more than one role). Who reports to whom? It seems overly complicated to my simple mind. And there is certainly less emphasis on the centers themselves – despite these being the beating heart of the system. It’s not bureaucrats (for all their fancy slogans and the like) who bring about impacts. It’s the hard-working scientists and support staff in the centers.

Nevertheless, looking back on 50 years, I feel privileged to have worked in the CGIAR. I didn’t breed a variety of rice, wheat, or potatoes that were grown over millions of hectares. I didn’t help solve a water crisis in agriculture. But I did make sure that the genetic resources of potato and rice that underpin future developments in those crops were safe, and ready to be used by breeders whenever. I also helped IRRI get back on its feet, so to speak, and to survive.

And along the way, I did make some interesting contributions to science, some of which are still being cited more than four decades later.

I’m more than grateful for the many opportunities I’ve been afforded.