Plant Biotechnology and Genetics: Principles, Techniques and Applications

It is important that plant breeders have

a good background in biotechnology

and that they work with specialists

in the field. The marriage between

the ancient profession of plant breeding

and the new field of biotechnology

will be good for future advances in

crop improvement.

LIFE BOX 3.2. P. STEPHEN BAENZIGER

P. Stephen Baenziger, Eugene W. Price Distinguished Professor,

University of Nebraska

Stephen Baenzigerwith Dr. Sanjaya Rajaram

of ICARDA and CIMMYT looking at an in situ

collection of wild barley in Syria, near the

origin of barley.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Although I am not particularly religious,

those words have always moved me.

When I was in high school, I thought

of becoming a human nutritionist so

that I could work on world hunger.

The U.S. Senate had a subcommittee

led by Sen. McGovern on hunger in

America that catalogued the dismal

state of the poor and Paul Ehrlich pub-

lished “The Population Bomb” high-

lighting, quite incorrectly, that massive

famines were set to occur in the 1970s.

In college, I was a biochemistry major

which was the pre-med major, a group

of students whom I never really

enjoyed being with because they

seemed more interested in their grades

than the knowledge (getting into

medical school was very competitive),

so I gravitated to plant biology, a field

that the pre-meds did not know existed.

The professors in plant biology were

spectacular (Winslow Briggs, Lawrence

Bogorad) and I decided that, as a nutri-

tionist, I would better define a problem,

but not really solve its root causes.

Food would still be limiting. Hence, I

decided to work on the production side

to ensure that there was ample food for

those who needed it. At this time, the

Green Revolution in wheat, led by

Norman (Norm) Borlaug of CIMMYT,

and in rice, led by Henry (Hank)

Beachell, then Gurdev Khush of IRRI,

had greatly increased the food supply

and the predicted famines never

occurred. In graduate school, David

Glover, who was working on breeding

high lysine maize (now referred to as

quality protein maize) offered me an

assistantship and sealed my fate to

become a plant breeder. It was also the

last time that I worked on maize. My

first job was to develop small grains

(wheat and barley) germplasm with

improved disease resistance and toler-

ance to acid soils (note I only audited

one plant pathology course in graduate

school and never took a soils course)

80 PLANT BREEDING