Clinical Social Workers: Lightening the Patient's Burden
Improving Patients' Quality of Life Through Pain Relief
Making New Neurons With Stem Cells
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In the 1920s, Edgar S. McFadden, son of a South Dakota wheat farmer, was a determined plant breeder working on the devastating problem of wheat rust diseases. McFadden crossed Triticum turgidum and T. dicoccum in an attempt to introduce stem-rust resistance into the resulting cultivar, which he named "Hope." The rust-resistant plants that grew out of his efforts were aptly named, and it was later determined that a single gene, Sr2, was largely responsible for his success. As what has been described as one of the most important disease-resistant genes deployed in modern plant breeding, Sr2 was used for over a half century by plant breeders around the globe, according to Rolf H. J. Schlegel, author of the Concise Encyclopedia of Crop Improvement: Institutions, Persons, Theories, Methods, and Histories (Haworth Press, 2007). McFadden's "Hope" was credited with saving millions of people from starvation. Meanwhile, in the United States, publicly funded plant-breeding programs virtually ground to a halt as the focus shifted to plant molecular genetics research.
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Ann Marie Thro '71 |
Today, Ann Marie Thro '71 is providing renewed impetus for plant breeding. As national program leader for Plant Breeding and Genetics at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Cooperative States Research, Education, and Extension Service (CREES), she works with recipients of federal funding for plant genetics research to help them address emerging problems and opportunities for developing science-based contributions to agriculture.
Applied to Basic Research
"Public plant-breeding programs were initiated in the late 1800s," explains Thro. "Traditionally, state and federal funding supported research and development of crop plants, such as wheat, that farmers would then propagate."
In the 1970s, federal funding was shifted from plant breeding to molecular genetics—from applied to basic research. "At the time, food was abundant and cheap," Thro explains. "There were subsidies to get farmers to produce less. The expectation was that the government would support upstream research, and the private sector would use it to develop crop plants."
In the case of corn, that is what happened. "Private plant breeders developed corn hybrids, whose seeds are sold annually to farmers," Thro says. "Since 1900, corn yields have increased five-fold, and at least half of that is due to plant breeding. It is one of the most astonishing accomplishments of the last century."
However, private plant breeders focused on developing "enterprise" food crops. "Other foods, such as blueberries, strawberries, apples, pears, wheat, barley, and oats, were not getting attention," Thro says.
Moreover, Thro observes, "Public support for applied crop research was vanishing just at the time that wonderful new plant-breeding tools were coming out of biotechnology and molecular genetics."
History to Agronomy
During the 1970s, Thro was also in transition. She graduated from Bryn Mawr with a history degree but without a clear career direction—during a recession. "I wanted to work outside doing something that society would need in good times or bad, which led me to production agriculture," she recalls.
So Thro obtained a second bachelor's degree in agronomy from Virginia Tech. "I chose plant genetics because it is a marvelously challenging intellectual puzzle," she says.
After completing her doctoral degree at Iowa State University, Thro accepted a position as an assistant professor of plant breeding at Louisiana State University. She later served as technical adviser for the National Program for Grain Legumes in Congo, Africa, and as coordinator of the global Cassava Biotechnology Network for CIAT, an international research center. In 1999, she joined the USDA as commissioner of the Plant Variety Protection Office.
Biotechies to Organic Folks
Thro's current efforts to promote plant breeding grew out of an Embassy Science Fellowship (ESF) with the U.S. Mission to Germany in 2002 and an ESF in the USDA's Austrian office of the Foreign Agricultural Service in 2003. She participated in discussions about transgenic or "bioengineered" food crops with a wide range of people and organizations, from founders of biotechnology start-up companies to "green" parliamentarians. And she found that "the one thing everyone agrees on is the need for plant-breeding programs. The 'biotechies' know they need it because they can't use genes to construct a plant from scratch, and the organic folks know they need it because organic agriculture depends on plants that are bred for specific environments."
In 2007, Thro organized a committee representing the estimated 2,500 U.S. plant breeders in the public and private sectors to advance the case for plant breeding. "I have encouraged my colleagues to work together to identify our issues, opportunities, and constraints, develop leadership, and communicate to the public the importance of what we do."
Among her long-term goals, Thro says, "I'd like to see good integration of basic and applied science and the establishment of plant-breeding centers of excellence that enjoy public support, just as we support medical research. And I'd like to see plant breeding contribute to diverse agricultural production systems—local foods, organic agriculture, conventional agriculture, and high-tech agriculture, each of which plays a role in our national and international economies and food systems. That will happen if top young scientists are attracted to becoming the plant breeders of the future—and that will mean a reconsidered balance between molecular genetics and breeding, one that offers young plant breeders the chance of a rewarding career in this important field."
Dorothy Wright contributes news and feature articles on science, technology, engineering, and general-interest topics to a variety of publications, including Civil Engineering and Engineering News Record.