PRESIDENT'S LETTER

A New Land-Grant Mission for the 21st Century

As I begin my term as president, I express my appreciation for the opportunity to serve the one society that has molded my entire professional career. Over my 35 years as a member of ASPB, I’ve seen the Society become a truly global community that promotes and serves plant biology research: almost one-half of our membership currently resides outside the United States. I also thank my immediate two predecessors, Tuan-hua David Ho and Sally Assmann, for their superb job in strengthening focus on the role ASPB continues to play in the globalization of plant biology. Together they provided guidance for the formation last year of the Global Plant Council (GPC), a new partnership of plant societies spanning six continents. Spearheaded by ASPB’s Mel Oliver, with Willi Gruissem, president of the European Plant Science Organization, Zhihong Xu, president of the Chinese Society of Plant Biologists, Kasem Zaki Ahmed, former president of the African Crop Science Society, and 10 other representatives, the GPC strives to create partnerships and collaborations for plant scientists to address together the issues of world hunger, energy security, climate change, health and well-being, and environmental protection.

Never has there been a greater need for the collective work of plant biologists worldwide to be brought to bear on these grand challenges. By the time ASPB holds its 2011 annual meeting next August in Minneapolis, the world’s population will have surpassed 7 billion. We have already passed the “inflection point” along the human population growth curve at which instabilities in food and energy security mount as resources of arable land and adequate fresh water diminish. We are on a trajectory to reach 9 billion people by 2030, increasing food, water, and energy demand by at least 50%, without considering aggravating factors of climate change, increased urbanization, and increased demand from developing countries to attain Western standards of living.

Developed countries have brought these issues into political focus as a basis of establishing new funding priorities for the research needed to meet unprecedented needs. Not only is it a moral imperative for the most prosperous countries of the world to meet the challenge, but it is also in the interest of global economic security. The European Commission’s “Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy” (KBBE) continues a €1.94 billion ($3.1 billion), seven-year program to merge life sciences and biotechnology
with sustainable agricultural production and management—an investment in what is viewed to be a €1.5 trillion industry (1). Brazil, a progressive developing country, is a world leader in the proportion of per capita spending in science, particularly in research to improve sugarcane as an energy crop that has provided energy independence (2). Brazil’s investment in science will reach 2% of the country’s entire GDP in the coming year. The funding investments by developed countries are not as rosy elsewhere. For example, the United Kingdom continues a two-decade-long stagnation in funding of basic science. And in Japan, researchers are breathing easier only after plans for austere cuts did not materialize, in part due to collective protests from almost every living Japanese Nobel laureate (3).

In the United States, the primary source of funding of agricultural research is the Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has endured decades of dismal research funding capacity compared to the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), and National Institutes of Health (NIH). The recent reorganization of the USDA’s competitive grants program into the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) drastically changed the funding vehicle that ASPB members had grown to rely upon for single investigators to conduct basic research. In an open letter to Roger Beachy, director of NIFA, ASPB President Ho expressed the concerns of our members with respect to the apparent redirection of funding to large, coordinated projects centered around a few foci that left a significant number of our members unable to contribute (4). Director Beachy responded that the goal of restructuring in NIFA was to better address important challenge areas yet preserve support for single-investigator and small-team innovative projects—support that the Obama administration aims to see grow significantly in years to come, along with expanded priorities for investigation.

In one sense, the resolve of NIFA to apply fundamental plant biology to address U.S. national research needs echoes the historical land-grant mission. In 1862, just two months after the establishment of a commission that would become the USDA, the Morrill Act paved the way for the founding of “land-grant colleges” whose mission was to provide practical knowledge in engineering and agriculture in the developing states. With the addition of the 1890 schools, the land-grant institutions of today are home to almost one-half of ASPB’s U.S. membership. The Hatch Act of 1887 created a system of state agricultural experiment stations (SAESs) at land-grant colleges and regional stations to conduct research of direct relevance to the growers. No one would argue that the impact of the USDA-SAES system on U.S. agriculture has been anything short of spectacular. However, by the late 1970s a perception grew that the decades of mission- and commodity-oriented successes would soon stagnate if not augmented with basic knowledge derived from fundamental science (5). The 1972 Pound Report of the National Academy of Sciences (6) gave a scathing assessment that the “outmoded, pedestrian, and inefficient” USDA-SAES research system was in need of reshaped administrative philosophies to address the support for basic sciences that underpin agriculture, and so take advantage of the revolutionary advances being made. The NAS report regarded the USDA-SAESs as “bystanders” to the revolution in molecular biology and recombinant DNA technology, and it concluded that any profound advances that served agriculture were coming primarily from support by NSF, NIH, and the Atomic Energy Commission (now DOE). Even at that time, the assessment was unfair to many in the USDA system who were already making seminal discoveries in basic biology, but the call to arms did energize the SAESs to change their own infrastructure as well as look to include many other contributors outside the USDA system.

Action came five years later, notably through the leadership of ASPB members Joe Key and David Krogman (5), in the formation in 1977 of the Competitive Research Grants Office (CRGO), which awarded its first grants the following year. The rationale for the CRGO clearly contrasted that of NSF because of its mission to apply basic research to directly advance agriculture. Nevertheless, over the next 30 years of the program’s existence, the plant biology community began to rely on it as a new source of single-investigator grants for basic biology. Despite repeated attempts to undermine and eliminate the CRGO by certain sectors of the USDA who saw the competitive funds as a threat to the line item traditional noncompetitive support, the CRGO survived, evolved, and even grew: today it is known as the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative (AFRI). The $0.26 billion to support competitive research this year, while greater than the amount expended over the entire first decade of the CRGO’s existence, is barely one-quarter of the amount spent by a single private company for plant biotechnology (7).

Even with such modest funding levels, the advances that plant biologists have already created in the combined university, government, and private sectors have made crop plants more productive, more nutritious, and better adapted to marginal environments. While an overhaul of regulatory constraints is badly needed to allow these advances to be put into practice (8), there is realization that we have to do more and with greater urgency, and this time it will need a serious and substantial increase in funding. If Congress expects NIFA to be agriculture’s NIH, then a more balanced funding is needed on par with the $30 billion provided to NIH and the $7 billion to NSF. These are the levels that keep fundamental science in the public domain for the public good and solve problems that are global in scale (7).

In 2008, the National Research Council (NRC) convened a committee—with support from NSF, NIH, and DOE—that produced a report entitled A New Biology for the 21st Century (9). For the first time, a broadly constituted committee with experts from across the biological sciences underscored the need for a seriously upgraded infrastructure supporting agricultural research. Keith Yamamoto, chair of the Board on Life Sciences for the NRC and member of the New Biology committee, gave congressional testimony that spelled out the priority to find ways to provide food and energy to a growing population without destruction of our ecosystems and stated that a bold new action plan is needed because these challenges cannot be solved by a “business as usual” approach (10). While we need to continue to promote the creativity of individual scientists, Yamamoto reported that it is now time to address these challenges by channeling this single-investigator curiosity into coordinated team approaches across all federal agencies, including Agriculture, Interior, Education, Energy, NIH, and NSF, as well as public and private partners. While it is not yet close to the scale commensurate with the challenges ahead, NIFA has stepped up to the plate.

Cynics may lament that we can never meet the challenges of food and energy security no matter how much money is thrown at the problems. However, I’m reminded of a comment that Bob Goldberg made many years ago. Speaking at an ASPB symposium shortly after the completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequence, a task that was finished years ahead of schedule, he related how scientists are really lousy at predicting how much time is needed to get something done. Over the short term, we underestimate the time required to complete an experiment. We expect to leave the lab at a reasonable hour but find ourselves at the bench well into the night. However, over the long term, we grossly overestimate the time needed to solve the really big problems, and we do this for two reasons: first, we don’t take into account the advances in technology that enable us to do more and much faster, and second, we underestimate the power of a community working together.

Now is the time for ASPB members to step up. Young researchers beginning their career are asked to think beyond biological curiosity to a grander challenge. In turn, college administrators need to value the contributions of their young faculty working in teams and with metrics other than their individual grant support. While a great many of our ASPB members are at U.S. land-grant institutions, the majority are not. However, I suggest that, given the deep challenges of global food and energy security we face, a new land-grant mission belongs to us all.

Nick Carpita

References

1. Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE). FP7 specific programme cooperation research theme: Food, agriculture and fisheries, and biotechnology.
2. Petherick, A. (2010). High hopes for Brazilian science. Nature 465: 674–675.
3. Normile, D. (2010). Japan: 2010 Science budget not apocalyptic, as feared. Science 327: 131.
4. Letter from Dr. Tuan-hua David Ho, President of ASPB, to Dr. Roger Beachy, Director of NIFA. (April 27, 2010).
   The response from Dr. Roger Beachy to Dr. Tuan-hua David Ho and ASPB. (July 8, 2010).
5. Huang, H.T. (1988). The USDA’s competitive grants program and agricultural research. Agricultural History 62(2): 270–278.
6. National Research Council. (1972). Report of the Committee on Research Advisory to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.
7. Grant, B. (2010). Can USDA’s NIFA be Ag’s NIH? The Scientist.
8. Fedoroff, N.V., Battisti, D.S., Beachy, R.N., Cooper, P.J.M., Fischoff, D.A., Hodges, C.N., Knauf, V.C., Lobell, D., Mazur, B.J., Molden, D., Reynolds, M.P., Ronald, P.C., Rosegrant, M.W., Sanchez, P.A., Vonshak, A., Zhu, J.-K. (2010). Radically rethinking agriculture for the 21st century. Science 327: 833–834.
9. National Research Council. (2009). A new biology for the 21st century: Ensuring the United States leads the coming biology revolution. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.
10. Yamamoto, K.R. (June 29, 2010). A new biology for the 21st Century. Report before the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.