Turning point article to root or not to root, that is the question: Reflections of a developmental plant physiologist

To root or not to root, that is the question (with apologies to Shakespeare in Hamlet), has been the overriding concern of my 35 þ years of research. How did this happen and why? I was born in Barbados, the West Indies and attended school there, graduating with the Oxford & Cambridge General Certificate of Education (GCE), Advanced Level with credits in Chemistry, Physics and Biology. I intended to go on to university, but to study what and where? At that stage I had no intention of going beyond a B.Sc. degree, but in what subject? My first choice would have been Organic Chemistry, but such a degree would have meant that I would probably end up teaching in a high school in Barbados. Since I did not want to teach, I decided by elimination of different topics and professions to study agriculture. However, there was a problem. I had failed French three times at the GCE, Ordinary Level, and was therefore not admissible to a British university, the dream of most British colonials. Thus Wye College, Kent didn’t get the opportunity to deny me admission! However, to work in the colonies at the time, you required a degree from a Commonwealth university. Fortunately, Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, using his five principles for peaceful co-existence, had introduced scholarships for people of developing countries to study in India. I applied for and was awarded a Cultural scholarship in 1956. As a teenager in Barbados, India, along with Brazil, Japan and New Zealand, were four countries that I wanted to visit. (Of course, visiting the mother country, the UK, was a given!) But where in India should I study. Again, I was fortunate that the Representative of the British Council in Barbados at the time had also worked in India, and he recommended the Allahabad Agricultural Institute. I studied there from 1957 to 1961 and obtained a B.Sc. Agric. degree, with specialization in Pomology. It was during my studies in Pomology that I became interested in two problem areas; namely alternate bearing (the tendency for fruit trees to bear heavy and light crops and therefore yields in an alternating fashion), and the inability to root cuttings selected from mature fruit trees. The latter required the development of a variety of time-consuming, expensive and low multiplication-rate techniques including grafting, budding, and layering (Hayes, 1957; Hartman et al., 1990). After working in the Department of Agriculture in Barbados as Tree Crop Officer in the Extension Service for 2 years, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship by the US Department of State to study Horticulture at the University of California, Riverside (UCR, the site of the famous Citrus Experiment Station). Because the scholarship was for only 1 year, I opted to obtain the M.S. degree by course work (in 1964), but nevertheless did a project which was subsequently published (Thorpe and Hield, 1970). Again, I had no intention of going any further, but the fact that I would be returning to my job in the Extension Service (not a particularly interesting one), and the suggestion from a couple of the professors at UCR that I was Ph.D. material came into play and altered the course of my life!