Described below are several famous plant scientists whose accomplishments and character inspire us at Edenspace. The enormous impact these men and women have had on the world testifies to the crucial importance of science-based agriculture in our daily lives.

George Washington Carver
In 1935 Carver submitted one of the earliest Government grant proposals for development of fuel ethanol from crop plants. Had his proposal been funded, biofuels technology might be twenty-five years ahead of where it is today. Carver's amazing personal story, from orphaned slave to renowned university scientist, his visionary work with bioproducts, his mentorship of younger scientists and his dedication to helping farmers continue to inspire us.

 

 

Nikolai Vavilov
This Russian scientist scouted the world for plant diversity, creating the world's largest seed bank which he and his assistants protected with their lives from wartime destruction during the Siege of Leningrad. His devotion to exploration, stewardship and intellectual honesty received the ultimate test when he starved to death in a Soviet prison in 1943 rather than recant his belief in what the followers of Lysenko called the "bourgeouis pseudoscience" of genetics. Vavilov reminds us that sometimes intellectual honesty demands a price.

 

 

Norman Borlaug
This champion of crop breeding and of crop biotechnology (standing, left) won a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize for his work in spearheading the Green Revolution. Without his leadership and dedication to improving crop yields hundreds of millions of people would now lead poorer, hungrier lives and hundreds of millions of acres of forest and savannah would today be plowed under to grow food.

 

 

Charles Darwin
A scientist who needs no introduction, this English naturalist was mocked and scorned by otherwise intelligent people who, though they disagreed with him, should have demonstrated better manners. Today his supporters and detractors alike often share a profound ignorance of the practical side of his theory of evolution, which ranges from our ability to observe "evolution in action" when pathogen populations adapt to antibiotics, to the fact that all living things - humans, plants, microbes and more exotic beasties -- share a common gene pool that accelerates our understanding of medicine and biotechnology. Among other things, we are impressed that as a college student Darwin once placed a bombardier beetle in his mouth.

 

Gregor Mendel
Mendel was a German monk who reconciled his belief in God with his astonishing discovery that inheritance of traits in pea plants is mathematically predictable. We admire the patience, careful observation, and open mind of this father of modern genetics. We also learn from him the drawbacks of excessive modesty (not generally a problem here at Edenspace) because the importance of his work was scarcely recognized until decades after his death.

 

 

Barbara McClintock
Carnegie scientist McClintock was a slow, careful researcher who discovered that genes in many organisms, including corn and humans, can hop around in the genome like fleas from generation to generation, indicating that evolution can happen in a hurry and that there is nothing truly fixed about genetic structure. As the Nobel Prize Committee wrote of her work in 1983: "The discovery of mobile genetic elements by McClintock is of profound importance for our understanding of the organization and function of genes. She carried out this research alone and at a time when her contemporaries were not yet able to realize the generality and significance of her findings. In this respect, there are several similarities between her situation and that of another great geneticist active 100 years ago, Gregor Mendel, who, studying the garden pea, discovered other basic principles of genetics."

E.O. Wilson
Wilson is an ant guy rather than a plant guy, but he's our hero both because of his early warnings about the rapid loss of Earth's biodiversity and because of the beauty of his thought and writing about the interplay of human evolution and ethics with our changing environment. From his work we conclude that humans must become the fiduciary stewards of an increasingly fragile world ecosystem.