WOMEN IN PLANT BIOLOGY

Reflections on Relevance
by Mary E. Musgrave
Professor and Head, Department of Plant Science, University of Connecticut; mary.musgrave@uconn.edu

Mary Musgrave

The first time I thought seriously about what makes science relevant came during my days as a graduate student studying the physiological significance of cyanide-resistant respiration in plants. My major adviser in the Botany Department at Duke University, then assistant professor Jim Siedow, had given me a grant proposal to read. I thought that the paragraphs at the beginning of his proposal to NIH, giving background on the linkage between cyanide-resistant respiration and disease, “didn’t fit in,” because it was the first time I had considered that studying plant mitochondria could have medical applications. Over the intervening years, I saw the relevance of this basic research on plants to combating human disease; Jim used his extramural funding from NIH to make many fundamental research discoveries and move through the ranks as a powerful and effective advocate for science.

In my own first faculty position, at Louisiana State University, I had the title of plant stress physiologist. In Louisiana, it was easy to discover the most relevant environmental problem—soil waterlogging—and the most severely affected crop—winter wheat. The Louisiana Small Grains Research and Promotion Board funded work that promised to identify wheat varieties that best stood up to waterlogging, and this gave me an opportunity to study physiological traits that confer waterlogging tolerance. Since waterlogging affects 12% of agricultural soils in the United States as a whole and a much higher percentage in Louisiana, the relevance of my work was becoming increasingly clear to me.

Nevertheless, this relevance was suddenly challenged by an unfortunate national discourse that arose surrounding “plant stress” at that time (which other stress physiologists in ASPB no doubt recall). Former President Clinton chose to ridicule investigators studying plant stress, charging that scientists should have better things to do with their time and the nation’s money than fretting over the emotions of vegetables. The fallout was immediate. Almost overnight, I became an “environmental plant physiologist,” and my popular graduate course, Plant Stress Physiology, followed suit with the new name of Environmental Plant Physiology.

In the 1990s, I realized that what I had learned about waterlogging could be put to use in solving a persistent problem facing NASA. Plants had been grown in “microgravity” (<10-3 g) in freely falling orbital spacecraft since the 1960s. However, by the late 1980s, the problems with getting plants to reproduce in space had led researchers to conclude that there might be some step in flowering and seed production that was absolutely dependent on gravity. Waterlogging research had given me the perspective that the problems faced by plants growing in microgravity were likely caused by zero-g-related environmental conditions rather than by any direct biological requirement for gravity. Microgravity, famous for scenes of astronauts playing with floating globs of water, also gives us the ultimate in undrained rootzones.

At the time, NASA had two research programs that sponsored plant research: the Space Biology Program and the CELSS (Controlled Ecological Life Support System) Program. The former was dominated by scientists who wanted to use the microgravity environment to perform basic research on gravitropism, while the latter was a group of scientists pushing the limits of yield in hydroponic culture by manipulating light, carbon dioxide, and nutrients, with the long-term goal of being able to sustain human food and atmosphere regeneration needs away from Earth.

Program managers in both groups were convinced that a project investigating the reasons behind reproductive failure by plants in microgravity fell solidly in the other program’s camp. However, when I proposed to team up with plant anatomist Shirley Tucker to tackle this problem, the work qualified as “Space Biology.” My lab soon had the opportunity to study early reproductive development in Arabidopsis during a series of experiments on the U.S. Space Shuttle. Our findings that the microgravity environment was functionally waterlogging the rootzone due to lack of drainage and starving the plants for carbon dioxide due to ineffective gas exchange lay the basis for redesigns of plant growth hardware and cultural practices, so that during the late 1990s and early 2000s, reproduction became a routine success for plants growing in space. The relevance of terrestrial research to extraterrestrial systems was immediate and obvious.

Because of the success of this initial work with Arabidopsis on the space shuttle, NASA soon gave my group a new opportunity. In 1995, for purposes of foreign policy, it was decided that a Ukrainian was going to fly on the U.S. Space Shuttle. This edict was given to NASA, along with the task of selecting a project that would make best use of the astronaut/cosmonaut’s time in space. NASA managers had to decide whether a space welding demonstration or experiments in plant space biology would have greater relevance.

The decision tipped in the favor of plant space biology when we showed that the experiments could intercalate with education and outreach by engaging the public in the scientific process. Discarding Arabidopsis in favor of the more charismatic Wisconsin Fast Plant (Brassica rapa L., cv. “Astroplants”), we partnered with Paul Williams, who developed “Teachers and Students Investigating Plants in Space,” a middle and high school hands-on curriculum that adapted our flight experiment to the classroom. More than 200,000 students in the United States joined 20,000 students working with the Ukrainian version of the curriculum. The scope of the project and intensity of the media coverage during the real-time participation by students gave us scientists celebrity status. It was a public relations coup for NASA.

Years passed, and new opportunities came for experiments in space. My experience with a national-scale outreach project earned me the position of associate dean in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. After four years in this role, I found myself missing the relevance of my background as a plant scientist to my daily work.

It was while I was interviewing for the Plant Science Department head position at the University of Connecticut that I had a mishap at the Dairy Bar. During one of the dental visits that followed, I happened to notice that the Highlights for Children I was reading had run an article about my research, “Farming in Space.” Knowing that Highlights has a readership of about 4 million, I strangely felt that I had arrived.

Surely of all scientists, plant scientists have the greatest opportunity to devote their lives to relevant pursuits. From our antecedents in agronomy, horticulture, and forestry, we inherit the scientific stewardship of the world’s food supply, its atmosphere regeneration, and its nutrient and water cycling. The green revolution, biofuels, phytoremediation, nutriceuticals, sustainability, seeds . . . our list of key words goes on and on.

For my group, hooked on space biology, thoughts now turn away from weightless plants to those that will grow in habitats on the moon or Mars. The relevance test continues: I am in Washington, D.C., taking a cab to the National Academies building, and the driver’s eyes narrow back at me in the rearview mirror. “Are you some kind of scientist?” As I explain my work, he nods in slow understanding and grudging respect. I realize anew that it is a privilege to be a scientist. Much of a scientist’s satisfaction comes from the simple joy of discovery, but it is just as important that what we do matters to the rest of the world—that we are, in a word, relevant.

View past columns of Women in Plant Biology at http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/wipb.cfm.