‘Let’s call it Genetic Resources!’

How did you eventually become involved in working on genetic resources?

Well, there were two components of the curious way that came about. In the 1960s I was asked to represent Australia on the international scene. As it happened, Ledyard Stebbins – a very distinguished friend of mine and a well-known American evolutionist and taxonomist – took a leading part in the earliest stages of the International Biological Programme, and because he thought I should become interested in what became known as gene pools, he bullied me into taking over that field in the new IBP. So this is how it all started.

To make a long story short, it got me into the Food and Agriculture Organisation as a temporary consultant to advise on what they ought to be doing about genetic resources, as we later called it. I was one day sitting in my office in FAO when in came Hermann Kuckuck, a German agricultural scientist, younger than I, whom I had known a little. He told me a very interesting story, that extremely important genetic resources in Iran and in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) were disappearing. This was quite new to me and it made an enormous impact, because I had been interested in plant collecting and plant collections for many years, almost from my student days. As I then followed this up and got information about land races – the old peasant varieties which had been selected by farmers and also, very largely, by natural selection, and which had been the real resources of plant breeders ever since plant breeding started – so my interest in genetic conservation grew.

An international meeting of experts in Rome, which I organised, was the formal beginning of the whole campaign to assemble and to salvage the genetic wealth that had been accumulated in different parts of the world where agriculture had evolved. That was really the beginning of it for me, and the beginning of the movement to save genetic resources. At that 1967 meeting, I was talking to my colleague Erna Bennett, who had come to FAO to help with the final phases of organising this conference, about what we were going to call this. And together we said, ‘Genetic Resources!’ That’s where the name comes from, and that is how we started the campaign against the loss of plant and animal species. And I’m still very much involved.

Genetic diversity in nature reserves

What was the other component of your involvement in genetic resources work?

That was an invitation to give a Macleay Memorial Lecture, in a series which had been established by the Linnean Society of New South Wales. I wasn’t actually very intrigued, but such distinguished people had given that lecture before that I thought it would be pretty immodest if I were to refuse.

I was going to talk about what I had done before, but whilst I was thinking about genetic conservation it suddenly occurred to me, ‘We plant breeders have all these land races and wild relatives of crops as our resources, and we bring them together, we cross them and we select. But what happens in nature reserves?’ God would have to do it, and I couldn’t see God coming down and making all these crosses! How would Nature have the diversity to select from for natural selection to occur when the environment changed – say if the climate hotted up or got dry or wet? As that sank in to this dumbskull head, I thought, ‘This is quite something. There must be genetic diversity in nature reserves.’ And this is why the Macleay Lecture is, to a degree, quite seminal. People hadn’t talked about this. Perhaps everyone took it for granted, but no-one had emphasised it. And now it’s become a bandwagon and it’s being overemphasised.

Honest science for self-sustaining ecosystems

Tell me about the book you are working on at present, Otto.

It is like a sequel to the one that came out of the contributions to the 1967 conference, which became really the first bible of genetic conservation. In writing The Conservation of Plant Biodiversity, Dr Tony Brown (A H D Brown), Dr Jeremy Burdon and I are trying to establish a scientific balance. Biodiversity has become a catchword of the first order, but in this book one of the subjects we are dealing with is justification for species conservation.

You see, conservation takes two major forms. One is the conservation of communities, which we strongly advocate, and the other is conservation of individual species, whether of particular significance or not. Many people, including very distinguished American biologists, now say that everything must be preserved – simply, as one of them said to me the other day, ‘Because it’s there.’ To me that makes little sense, so in this book we discuss various aspects of species conservation, among many other things, in a scientific way.

The three of us are firm that the important issue is the conservation of natural areas, although we have some differences about letting things die out. I am quite cheerful about that; I see no reason for attempting to preserve everything just because it’s there. There must be a degree of selectivity. But I am all for preserving as many ecosystems as we can contrive to. I don’t think we are winning in that battle, however, because of the increase in human populations everywhere. We can’t win until we ourselves stop growing. This is not just about gene pools but about communities – complex communities which can sustain themselves and develop through natural selection.

Focus questions

• Why is it important to plant breeders that old land races of cereals and other plants are maintained? What other groups of people might also see this as important?

• In considering the conservation of biodiversity, which form of conservation do you see as most promising: the conservation of individual species or the conservation of communities? Why?