• Copyright © 2002 American Society of Plant Physiologists

An Accidental Plant Biologist

Arthur W. Galston, Eaton Professor of Botany, Emeritus

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, a region not exactly known for its botanical or agricultural riches. Yet in 1936, at the age of sixteen, I found myself enrolling as a freshman in the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, where, importantly, tuition was free for residents of New York state. I came not to study botany or agriculture, but to spend one year of study required as a prelude to entry into the College of Veterinary Medicine at the same institution, where tuition was also free. Veterinary medicine was also not my burning passion: Inspired by Paul de Kruif's “Microbe Hunters” and similar books, my true aspiration had always been to become an M.D. But the year was 1936, The Great Depression was on the land, my father had been out of work for several years, and there seemed not the slightest possibility of my being able to enter the long and expensive study required to become a physician. A friend happened to tell me about the Agriculture and Veterinary Schools at Cornell, where “the price was right”. Since I was confident that I could use my saxophone-playing skills to earn my living expenses, this seemed like an excellent substitute, so off I went to Ithaca. But after an arduous freshman year and a successful application for admission to the Veterinary School, I declined the offer of entry tendered me by then Dean William A. Hagan, and remained in the College of Agriculture to major in Botany.

The reason for this unanticipated change in direction was, simply, infatuation with Professor Loren C. Petry, who taught the yearlong course in Elementary Botany. Not only his remarkably skillful lectures, but also his entire persona attracted me and many other students. Dignified and bearded, he was an inveterate pipe-smoker and lively conversationalist, who presided over many far-ranging Saturday evening discussions in the student union building labeled “Petry's Bull Sessions.” I so admired him that I wanted nothing more than to imitate his life style, impractical though that might have been. The attractiveness of the academic career, with its opportunities in teaching and research, seemed to me an ideal worth pursuing. So I stayed on in Botany, but deviated from Petry in choosing to concentrate on plant physiology rather than on his specialty of paleobotany.

Cornell was then a center of excellence in the plant sciences. I took advantage of this excellence by enrolling in every possible botany course, then bootlegged as many College of Liberal Arts and Sciences courses in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and geology as were permitted to students in the Agriculture school. All in all, I received a fairly satisfactory education, and I emerged with a BS in Botany in 1940. (My undergraduate record also included such non-botanical but appropriately preveterinary first-year courses as “Types and Market Classes of Livestock” and “Feeds and Feeding”.)

Despite my fine academic record, in the depression year of 1940 I received only one offer of a Teaching Assistantship to support my graduate study, which I gratefully accepted. In the fall of 1940, I ventured into the terra incognita of the American Midwest, to begin my graduate study in the Department of Botany at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. After a year of looking around, I chose to work with Harry Fuller, a plant physiologist who was a brilliant lecturer and coauthor, with another young faculty member, Oswald Tippo, of an outstanding textbook in Botany. (This probably inspired my later efforts as a textbook author.) Fuller introduced me to the world of plant hormones and photoperiodism that were the subject of my 1943 PhD dissertation. Unfortunately, because World War II had engulfed the United States in December 1941, Fuller was not able to give me much guidance, for when the Japanese conquest of Malaysia made rubber unavailable to the Allies, he was sent on an extended mission to South America to locate remnant stands of Hevea brasiliensis. He remained absent for several years, and I thus muddled through my research pretty much on my own, except for occasional critiques by mail. Under a wartime mandate, I had to finish my graduate work in three years, working full time every summer. I felt short-changed, because of the shortened period of study and also deprivation of my advisor.

I had expected induction into military service immediately after the receipt of my degree, but again, serendipity intervened to change the course of my life. I had taken several courses in biochemistry, including a lively literature seminar run by a young faculty member, Herbert Carter. While every other student reported on animal and microbial biochemistry, I spoke on such topics as photosynthesis (Ruben, Kamen, and Hassid), auxin (Thimann, Bonner) and “florigen” (Chailakhian). Carter was delighted with my “atypical” presentations and we became good friends. Convinced that I could be of greater use to the country as a scientist than as a soldier, Carter arranged for me to join Bonner's group at Caltech, working on the Emergency Rubber Project, which sought to convert the Mexican shrub, guayule (Parthenium argentatum Gray), into an important rubber-producing plant. This was an exciting and ultimately successful project, whose potential importance was short-circuited by the simultaneous success of the synthetic rubber program. I lasted with guayule just one year before being drafted; I joined the Navy as an enlisted man, and after many vicissitudes, served as Natural Resources officer in Naval Military Government on Okinawa.

By the time I was slated for discharge in the spring of 1946, my wife and I had become parents, and since all four grandparents lived in New York City, I was urged to find a job in the east, despite an offer of continued employment at Caltech. I spent the academic year of 1946–7 as an Instructor at Yale, but feeling overworked and underpaid, and with little time for personal research, left after one year to return to Caltech. I then spent nine happy and productive years in Pasadena, first as Research Fellow, and ultimately as tenured Associate Professor. I flourished in the plant physiology group led by Went and Bonner, with young colleagues like Sam Wildman and George Laties, and frequent contact with outstanding scientists like George Beadle, Linus Pauling, Max Delbruck, and Richard Feynman. Yet early in 1955, mainly for family reasons, I succumbed to an attractive offer from Oswald Tippo, newly appointed Chairman of Botany at Yale, to return to Yale as a full Professor. This was an important fork in the road for me; before the move, I was doing experiments mainly with my own hands, but thereafter I was greatly involved in planning, equipping, and staffing laboratories, teaching courses, and overseeing the research of numerous grad students and postdocs. This was fulfilling work, but very different from Caltech!

My major research contribution, made at Caltech, was to provide the first evidence for flavin-based photoreception. This heterodox idea, opposed by many pundits who favored carotenoids, including Thimann, Went, Bünning, Skoog, and Nobelist George Wald, led me into difficulties with granting agencies, and I accordingly shifted my research to other areas. Time has proved this to have been a mistake; one need only note the outstanding recent results in flavin photoreception achieved by Briggs et al. with phototropins and by Cashmore et al. with cryptochromes.

Two other “decision points” affected my life greatly. From 1956 to 1978, I had been a consultant to DuPont, and at one point was tempted by an opportunity to leave academia for industry. It was mainly my love of teaching and contact with students that deterred me. The second critical decision developed out of our government's use of Agent Orange and other chemicals to defoliate and kill vegetation during the war in Vietnam. This violated my deepest feelings about the constructive role of science, and moved me into active opposition to official U.S. policy. Starting with the business meeting of the American Association of Plant Physiology in 1967, and working with like-minded colleagues around the country, I began a time-consuming and distracting campaign against this type of chemical warfare (Galston, 2001). Our small group was eventually successful in helping to change our country's policy, when President Nixon ordered the end of the spraying at the end of 1970, almost five years before the end of the war. Since we now know that Agent Orange contained significant levels of teratogenic dioxins, this was an important accomplishment. It was followed by five visits to Vietnam and six to China, including the honor, with Ethan Signer of MIT, of being the first American scientists invited to visit the People's Republic of China. In 1971, we met Chou En-lai, then Prime Minister, as well as King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, who then resided in Shanghai. This pre-Kissinger-Nixon visit to China, as well as my family's subsequent (1972) summer on an agriculture commune (Galston, 1973) was page 1 news in many newspapers, including the New York Times.

Agent Orange also seems to have turned on other activist genes in my makeup, and since then I have been drawn increasingly by an interest in the social and ethical consequences of scientific research. After my mandatory retirement from Biology in 1990, I helped to organize a Bioethics Project at Yale, and am now an active member of that group, teaching, leading seminars, and helping to plan activities. Life does play funny tricks with our career plans!