OBITUARIES

Art playing jazz saxophone.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ELIZABETH GALSTON.

Arthur W. Galston

Arthur Galston, president of the American Society of Plant Physiologists from 1962 to 1963, died at age 88 of congestive heart failure at his home in Hamden, Conn., on June 15, 2008. He was Eaton Professor Emeritus of Botany in Yale University’s Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and professor emeritus in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Art spent much of his career studying the processes of higher plant development, particularly the role of light. A major contribution was his suggestion and identification of evidence for the role of a flavoprotein—not carotene, as previously believed—as the photoreceptor for phototropism, which was subsequently confirmed by other researchers more than 30 years later. He also worked in many other areas of plant growth and development, including auxin physiology, phytochrome, and polyamines. Interestingly, he was the first to present data that phytochrome was in the nucleus, again more than 30 years before confirmation by molecular techniques.

During his career, Galston worked with more than 60 postdoctoral and visiting faculty colleagues from more than 20 countries, as well as innumerable students. In his teaching and writing, he was a great storyteller, enthralling generations of students and colleagues with tales of botanical discovery and lucid explanations of how plants worked. He was also noted for his friendship to many junior colleagues.

Art served as president of the Botanical Society of America and received numerous academic honors, including Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Senior National Science Foundation fellowships and honorary degrees from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. In 1994, he received Yale’s William Clyde De Vane Medal for lifelong teaching and scholarship. In 2004, he received the Alumni Achievement Award from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois.

Art was a leading voice for the social impact of science and a lifelong proponent of bioethics. In his PhD research on 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid (TIBA) as an antagonist of the effect of auxin, he discovered that high levels of TIBA would induce leaf abscission. This discovery subsequently led to the use of auxin herbicides as defoliants and the development of Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. He campaigned vigorously against the use of Agent Orange, visiting Vietnam repeatedly to assess its impact. In 1971, he was the first U.S. scientist invited to visit China following the Communist revolution, and he met with Premier Chou En-lai. The New York Times featured his trip to China on the front page and devoted an editorial to his criticisms of Agent Orange. His outspoken criticism of the uses of Agent Orange led to its being banned by President Nixon in 1970. [Editor’s note: Professor Galston himself recalled his decision to actively oppose official U.S. policy regarding the use of Agent Orange in the March 2002 issue of Plant Physiology (http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/full/128/3/786).]

Born in Brooklyn in 1920 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Art enrolled at Cornell University’s New York State College of Agriculture only because he could go there free, a great advantage because his father was jobless because of the Depression. At Cornell, he fell under the spell of a pipe-smoking professor of botany, Loren Petry, who redirected his intended career away from medicine into the lifetime study of plants.

A gifted saxophone player, Art worked his way through college performing in swing bands in the Borscht Belt in upstate New York and earned his BS from Cornell in 1940. He earned his MS and PhD from the University of Illinois in 1943. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology as an associate professor, where he worked closely with Nobel Prize winner George Beadle on defense-related research, until he joined the Navy as an enlisted man. Stationed at Okinawa, he served as a natural resources officer.

After leaving the Navy, Art spent one year at Yale and then returned to Caltech. He rejoined the Yale faculty in 1955 as a professor of botany. At Yale, he chaired the Botany Department and later the Biology Department after the two merged, and he served as director of the university’s Division of Biological Sciences. He retired from Yale in 1990 at the then-mandatory retirement age of 70 but continued to teach courses there until last year. He developed an introductory bioethics course for undergraduates that became one of the college’s most popular courses. He remained active in Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies, where he helped lead the Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project.

Art published more than 320 articles in peer-reviewed science journals and wrote several widely used textbooks on plant physiology (Principles of Plant Physiology with James Bonner, Control Mechanisms in Plant Development with Peter Davies, and the third edition of The Life of the Green Plant with Peter Davies and Ruth Satter), as well as books explaining plant function to lay readers (Green Wisdom and Life Processes of Plants). In addition, he wrote more than 50 articles on public affairs, two anthologies on bioethics, and Daily Life in People’s China, based on his travels in China in the early 1970s. He served ASPP through membership on the editorial board of Plant Physiology and several committees and was named a Fellow of the Society in 2007.

He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Dale, whom he met while at Cornell; his son, William, of Bethesda, Md., former deputy domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and holder of the Zilkha Chair at theBrookings Institution; his daughter, Beth, a well-known artist in Carlisle, Mass.; and his grandson, Ezra, of New York.

William Galston
Beth Galston
Peter Davies, Cornell University