Maize Transposable Elements

MAIZE TRANSPOSABLE ELEMENTS NINA V. FEDOROFF* Plants and Molecular Biology I am delighted to have been the 1990 recipient of the T. H. Ricketts Award, not only in a very personal sense but also as a woman in science and a plant biologist. In the first dozen years that this award was given, between 1914 and 1926, almost a third of the 17 recipients were women. Yet among the almost 70 individuals who have received the award since 1926, only two have been women. Plants have fared worse than women: only once, in 1914, has the award gone to an investigator working with plant cells. And although, for sensible historical reasons, the Ricketts Award most often goes to research whose medical relevance is obvious, a clear bias has begun to emerge in recent years toward the best in basic biological research. Hence the list of Ricketts Awards is curiously telling: it reveals the very real absence—perhaps adumbration is a better word—of both women and plants from the forefront of scientific inquiry . I hope that this particular award is a signal, not a token: a sign that women are back out front and, perhaps in the not too distant future , will be as likely as men to receive the award. But what about plant research? There was a time when universities had both a department of zoology and a department of botany. That time is long gone: zoology evolved into biology, then molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. Botany, the study of plants, all but disappeared . And one can hardly claim that a knowledge of plants is valued in the larger society. In a New Yorker cartoon published several years ago, a portly gentleman strolling in the woods with a young boy (perhaps his son) says to him: "It's good to know about trees. Just remember nobody ever made big money knowing about trees." Even inside the Presented as the Howard Taylor Ricketts Lecture, University of Chicago, November 14, 1990. *Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 115 West University Parkway, Baltimore, Maryland 21210.© 1991 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/92/3501-0760$0 1 .00 2 Nina V. Fedoroff ¦ Maize Transposable Elements biological research establishment, plant research occupies the least prestigious corner of the biomedical research arena. It is not at all obvious why the study of plants fell from favor. Genetics, the biological science of the century, started with Mendel's experiments on peas. These were carried out late in the nineteenth century, although it wasn't until the early part of the twentieth century that their significance was understood. Throughout the early history of genetics, seminal observations came as much from plants as from animals. My own organism , maize, was the experimental organism ofchoice for two generations of enormously talented geneticists. But all that changed in the last 30 or 40 years, and plant research became a backwater. Even today plant research receives a fraction of a penny of every dollar spent on basic biological and medical research. It is as if plants weren't important somehow , as if our lives didn't depend on them. Perhaps the recent neglect of plant research is, at least in some measure , the result of its spectacular early success. Unlike previous generations of Americans, today most of us. live lives far removed from the basics of growing food plants. A small and ever-shrinking fraction of our population farms, primarily because the agricultural enterprise has become stupendously efficient. Until the last year or so, our food supply appeared to be unlimited—our biggest headaches were surpluses. The discoveries of plant geneticists and the work of plant breeders have been central to this success (although one should not minimize the importance of increasing mechanization and use of chemicals for fertilization and pest control). And corn, specifically hybrid corn, has been one of our very biggest success stories. Yet the extraordinary productivity of our contemporary maize plants, so central to our food security, is based on a chance observation made during the first decade of the century by George Harrison Shull, working at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring...