!! spellx done
134   Food Needs Require Us 
      To Apply Basic Biology
      The Washington Post, January 25, 1969

     Genetic engineering in the form of domestication of wheat and
other crop plants, impelled the earliest steps towards the
civilization of the earth.  The impending saturation of the planet's
resources by an explosively growing human population will not be
averted merely by further technological devices.  We face even more
baffling problems of social organization to govern the allocation of
the world's tasks and goods.  We can, however, make sure that the
population growth is stemmed sooner by mass starvation than by
voluntary regulation if we neglect to nurture and use our expertise
in fundamental biology in support of agriculture's race to keep up 
with more mouths.

     Our faults in the transformation of basic to applied biology are
for the moment obscured by America's parochial and transient problem
of crop surpluses, and by the isolated but important successes (like
IR-8 dwarf rice) that stand to the credit of contemporary plant
breeding work.  It must also be noted that many scattered improvements
in crops yield must be attributed to unreliably good weather and to
the long-belated introduction of chemical fertilizers.  The
fertilizers and the current new breeds rest solidly on the basic
science of 30 to 40 years ago.

     Botanists are well aware of their unfulfilled responsibilities.
They also perceive internal problems derived from the segregation of
plant breeding departments in universities.

     Prof. Sherret S. Chase of Harvard's Botanical Museum points out,
in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that too often
"these departments are subservient to the specialized interests of the
existing staff, the local economy and the local policy.  Too little
attention is paid to the concentration and consolidation of plant
breeding knowledge; toward synthesis and internal criticism; too
little effort is directed toward fundamental research".

     He pleads persuasively for "a broadly oriented, international
plant breeding center, charged directly and specifically with the task
of furthering the art and science of plant breeding throughout the
world and with the upgrading of the plant breeding profession".

     Plant cell biology is nonetheless the scene of some exciting
new advances.  A recent issue of Science magazine reported a finding
that individual pollen grains (from tobacco plants) could be cultured
on special media, sprouting eventually into whole, intact plants. 
Since the pollen grain normally functions to fertilize the plant
egg, it has a chromosome count only half that of the parent plant.
The finding has important potentials for greatly speeding up the
production and testing of pure lines and will undoubtedly become
an indispensable technique (after another 40 years?) in the
development of new crops.

     The French authors of this work were evidently unaware of some
earlier studies. (In fact, with the help of modern bibliographic
tools not yet widely enough available, I quickly discovered that the
fundamental discovery of this kind had been made in 1964 by Drs.
Sipra Guha and S. C. Maheshwari in New Delhi (reported in Nature
magazine).  Furthermore, H. Niizeki and K. Oono of the Agricultural
Science Institute at Hiratsuka had reported to the Japan Academy
last summer their successful production of rice by the same method).

     The French workers, J.P. and C. Nitsch, must nevertheless be
credited with great improvements in the efficiency of the method.
All in all, this example illustrates the need for the kind of focus
and improved communication in a subject having high priority of
world interest that Prof. Chase demanded.

     The outgrowth of pollen into a complete plant is also of great
interest to general biology, for it shows that the plant egg carries
no structures or information indispensable to the full growth and
development of the offspring.  The DNA of the pollen grain nucleus
is enough -- perhaps together with any structures are also regularly
transmitted by pollen grains, despite the fact that these normally
pass a male nucleus to the egg and do little else.  The parallel
question for eggs and sperm of higher animals remains open, but we are
one step closer to a general answer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------