ABOVE: Dick Staples
BOYCE THOMPSON INSTITUTE
Richard (Dick) Staples, a renowned plant pathologist, died on January 15 in Ithaca, New York, two weeks before his 95th birthday.
Staples worked at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), a plant sciences research facility now affiliated with Cornell University, for 42 years before his retirement in 1992. His PhD research focused on carbon metabolism of bean rust fungus (Uromyces appendiculatus) spores involved in infection, and he continued to work on this plant pathogen for the rest of his career.
“Dick’s big question was how cells communicate. . . . Dick was really interested in signal transduction, how genes work, how cells recognize and respond to their environment,” says Raymond St. Leger, an entomologist and biotechnologist at the University of Maryland and Staples’s collaborator. “The rust fungus is very informative about processes which are generally applicable to many other different kinds of cells . . . ...
