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High-Tech Botanical Haven
| Article
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10460 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,285 Words |
| Author
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Linda Joyce Forristal
Linda Joyce Forristal, Life editor for The World & I, is a
member of Les Dames d'Escoffier and is on the board of the
Weston A. Price Foundation. |
Plants play a critical role in life on earth. But because they don't go about expounding their own importance, their contributions often go unnoticed. By converting the sun's energy to food, plants fuel our lives and are the basis for a healthy human diet. Also, plants and plant fossils are the major suppliers and removers of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Additionally, over 30 percent of the medicines on the market today come from plants.
Even so, there is a fundamental "knowledge deficit" about the role plants play in the global ecosystem. The real or perceived problem of acid rain is intrinsically related to plants, specifically trees in a forest setting. No discussion of global warming is complete without mention of CO2--a critical molecule in plant chemistry. The more we know about the critical role of plants in nature, the better will be our understanding of how they might help solve global environmental problems.
For the past six plus decades, since 1924, Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (now at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York) has been chipping away at this knowledge deficit through active research on plants and plant ecosystems. The institute was conceived in 1917, when Col. William Boyce Thompson, a mining magnate, was serving as a representative of the American Red Cross in revolutionary Russia. There he came face-to-face with poverty and starvation and felt the acute need for a dependable food supply. In the next few leagues and business associates, he sought to establish a research institution that would focus on basic plant research. Today, the institute that he founded and gave his name to is the only independent, not-for-profit research institute in the United States that focuses exclusively on plants.
An early product of biotechnology
The twenties and thirties were seminal decades. Headquartered then in Yonkers, New York, the institute's research focused on plant diseases, environmental effects, and plant growth hormones.
In the mid-1930s, scientists at Boyce Thompson were focusing on root growth in plants and, specifically, on a plant hormone called indoleacetic acid one of the five or six known plant hormones. They synthesized several chemical relatives of indoleacetic acid. One of them was 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid or 2,4-D. It was the most potent root growth promoting substance they had ever seen. 2,4-D was soon recognized as a selective herbicide, a chemical agent that induces certain plants,
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