People: UC-Davis Tomato Genetics Researcher Is Honored With The Von Humboldt Award

Charles M. Rick, a researcher in tomato genetics and an emeritus professor of vegetable crops at the University of California, Davis, received the $10,000 Alexander von Humboldt Award in a ceremony on the Davis campus October 25. The award is given annually by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which has headquarters in both Germany and the United States. The foundation presents the award to the individual it deems to have made the most significant contribution to American agriculture during the previous five years. Rick, 78, who has won many awards, says that the von Humboldt holds special significance for him: Over the course of the 14 expeditions he's taken through South America in search of wild tomato varieties, he says, he has retraced the route taken by von Humboldt--the German naturalist and geographer after whom the award is named--and French botanist AimBonpland from 1799 to 1804. In addition, Rick notes, one of the wild species of tomatoes he's studied in South America, Lycopersicon hirsutum H and B (for Humboldt and Bonpland), was first collected and named by the pair. The species is one of thousands he's collected in more than 50 years of expeditions and study of tomato genetics, research that has enabled him over the years to map the location of several of the genes on the tomato's 12 chromosomes. Rick's genetic characterization of the tomato is credited by many with making the crop a preferred model system for molecular genetic studies and leading to its being the first genetically engineered food to reach the consumer market. Many of the species he's researched are now extinct in their native habitats but preserved in his collection, housed since 1990 in the Charles M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center on the Davis campus. With more than 2,500 wild and mutant tomato strains, it is one of the largest collections of tomato genetic material in the world. "It just developed as a secondary event," Rick recalls. "In fact, in my first trip to the Andean region, collecting wasn't my main purpose. I was just doing some experiments on pollination. I naturally was interested in the wild species, and we made a few collections on that trip. "It gradually dawned on us as we studied the material, and what was available in collections, that an awful lot needed to be collected to round out the collection--for representation of different geographical areas and different subspecific types and even new species. "At first we only had a few collections and then the second trip, in '56-'57, was intended more as a collecting trip. Then we came back with just a raft of stuff. It was logical that we'd better do something with this stuff and make sure that all these were kept alive. In the meanwhile, we were doing a lot of genetic experimentation, getting different mutations, chromosomal abnormal types, and these were being built up in our collection, too, and we were using all this stuff for our own purposes. It just sort of grew like Topsy, and finally it became a major enterprise." It is a matter of serendipity that the resource center does not house strains of asparagus, rather than tomatoes. After earning his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1940, Rick joined the UC-Davis faculty and was at first assigned research on asparagus. But a senior professor suggested that he investigate the cause of unfruitfulness in certain tomato plants that, he discovered, suffered from a variety of genetic disorders. His research on the abnormalities that caused the infertility of the plants led to a program that eventually resulted in the construction of a linkage map of the positions of variable genes on the tomato's chromosomes--and he was hooked. "I was never tempted to get off the track," Rick says. "It's been totally fascinating. One area of research would gradually shift into another area, and new developments would take place and we could now develop areas that we had been working on before in a much easier fashion." Rick retired from UC-Davis 12 years ago, but returned recently to collaborate on a successful project to sexually transfer genes from distantly related plant species into the tomato, a breakthrough that will enable researchers to introduce a new range of agronomic traits into cultivated tomatoes. Rick was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. In addition to the von Humboldt, he has received the Merit Award from the Botanical Society and the Frank N. Meyer Medal from the American Genetics Association. --Phil Beck

People: UC-Davis Tomato Genetics Researcher Is Honored With The Von Humboldt Award

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