A Conversation With Peter Raven

A scene from the Missouri Botanical Garden The saying "if you want something done, give it to a busy person" fits Peter Raven like a glove. Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden since 1971, home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of textbooks in biology and botany, Raven hosted about 5,000 scientists from more than 100 countries as president of the XVI International Botanical Congress in St. Louis August 1-7. With Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson, Raven is biodiversity's chief maven. Speaker after speaker reminded the congress that Time magazine crowned Raven "Hero for the Planet" for his tireless efforts as godfather to Earth's 10 million species.1 Raven presided at the congress' opening ceremonies, fielded questions from reporters, and delivered a lecture predicting that two-thirds of the world's species may be gone by the middle of the next century, thanks largely to destruction of tropical ecosystems. In between he helped break ground for St. Louis' new Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Scheduled to open in 2001 and energized by a collaboration among the Missouri Botanical Garden, state and local government, Monsanto Corp., the Danforth Foundation, and area universities, the center will explore research fronts in agriculture, plant biotechnology, and molecular biology. At the congress Raven also took time to talk to The Scientist's Barry Palevitz and Ricki Lewis. Following, in question-and-answer format, is a summary of that conversation. Q: The word biodiversity is as familiar to most people as ecology. How did that happen? A: Ecology used to be the study of plant distribution around the world; it was really plant geography. The idea of an environmental crisis came from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962--it was a sea change. Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, and people became concerned with overpopulation. The first Earth Day was in 1970, and 20 million people participated--that's one in 10 in the whole country. I find that staggering. The Clean Air and Clean Water acts were passed under Richard Nixon. With the Stockholm Congress in 1972, sustainability came to the fore. The term biodiversity was coined at a Washington meeting in 1986, and it became synonymous with life on Earth, the web of life. It went from a world inventory of species to everything about life on Earth, and that is what made it magical. Biodiversity became the other side of sustainability. So biodiversity was quite a conceptual switch, and a very recent one. Peter Raven Q: Recently, 29 nations established the Global Biodiversity Information Facility--GBIF--to digitally catalog and organize the world's species and cross-link databases. How will the project affect plant preservation and the Missouri Botanical Garden? A: I think it's a wonderful idea. I can't imagine going any other way. The GBIF will initially be names--it's a starting point. The Missouri Botanical Garden has the most extensive database of plant names in the world, called TROPICOS, and I fully expect it to be incorporated into the new facility. I expect all databases to converge rapidly. Unfortunately, $32 million is only a drop in the bucket. Plants are in relatively good shape, but some other groups, like invertebrates, are not as good. Q: A major theme of the congress was plant evolution.2 Recent advances in phylogeny and systematics have lots of people here excited. How do you account for that? A: People invented hierarchical classifications to remember information. Systematics classically involved comparative studies, how to name plants, and this was central to past congresses. Two really big things have happened to change that. The first was the development of cladistics, the ability to distinguish between ancestral and derived characteristics [thereby reflecting evolutionary relationships]. It's basically a philosophical approach. When you have those methods of analysis, you have an entirely different way to look at relationships and characteristics of organisms, leading to different classifications. It is very exciting. At the evidentiary level, there is the new molecular information. It's not philosophically profound, but pragmatically it's a very important addition. When you can compare genes, that is a huge power, and it links back to cladistics. Combining the two approaches made this explosive. Missouri Botanical Garden is the oldest of its kind in the United States. Q: Biotechnology is another important focus of the congress. You and the Missouri Botanical Garden were instrumental in forming the new Danforth Plant Science Center here in St. Louis. How do biodiversity and biotechnology interface? A: Monsanto supports the garden financially, as they always have, even though we don't do biotech work other than bioprospecting. Back in February 1996, Bill Danforth [professor of medicine and chairman of the board of trustees, Washington University], Virginia Weldon [director of the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University], and I thought it would be great to have a center in St. Louis to study basic plant science, to combine the resources we have here. I insisted that we also include the University of Missouri in Columbia. The heads of the various institutions would be on the board of directors of the center but would have no direct say in research projects. The center would drive its own programs and have huge flexibility in terms of gathering a group of cutting-edge plant scientists in an independent institution. Eventually, the center will build to 15 principal investigator groups, with 150 scientists. Agriculture is bad for biodiversity. But biotech can be used to preserve species. The relationship is mainly this: The most biodiversity will be preserved if we have the most sustainable agriculture, the most productive agriculture. Madagascar, for example, has a rice economy. Lowland rice production is efficient, but human population is outstripping it, spreading upland, into the forest. Biotech is one part of what I hope will be a movement toward sustainable agriculture. Agriculture now is not sustainable, with millions of dollars in damage from pesticides, loss of topsoil, millions of birds lost in the United States alone. You can see how engineering of plants to do a more precise job would make agriculture a heck of a lot more productive. Q: You've been at the Missouri Botanical Garden since 1971. Have you fulfilled your goals? A: As Abraham Lincoln liked to say, "I've navigated point to point." We built our goals as we've gone along. Missouri is the oldest garden in the United States. In the last 20 years, it's grown tremendously in research, staff, Ph.D.s, and K-12 education programs. I also think we solidified an already outstanding position with the people of St. Louis. But I'm not particularly satisfied with one aspect--it's hard to get people going away with the idea of sustainability. I'm not sure how to do it. At the end of the day, I'm pretty disappointed that it's such a small effort compared to the enormity of the problem. Q: What are your goals for the future? A: We're working very hard on the flora of China, and I'd like to bring that to completion in the next 10 years. It's an important way to enhance international understanding. I'd also like to inventory about 100 sites in the rain forest of South America. I'd also like to see an information-retrieval system for plants and get as many countries as possible that espouse saving plants. My greatest satisfaction is encouraging people to do what they can do. Q: How do you manage to do so many things in a 24-hour day? A: I guess I can keep a lot of footballs in the air at the same time, working from 6:30 to 6. Barry A. Palevitz (palevitz@botany.dogwood.uga.edu) and Ricki Lewis (rickilewis@nasw.org) are contributing editors for The Scientist. www.pathfinder.com/time/reports/environment/heroes/heroesgallery/0,2967,raven,00.html B.A. Palevitz, "Botanists paint the arch green," The Scientist, 13[17]:1, Aug. 30, 1999.

A Conversation With Peter Raven

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