The official opening of the John Innes Horticultural Institute at Bayfordbury takes place on Friday, 2nd June attended by 500 guests, including Lord Rothschild, Chairman of the Agricultural Research Council and representatives of 15 countries. Visitors are welcomed by Colonel F. C. Stern, chairman of Council, and are able to see the buildings, demonstrations of work in the laboratories, the experimental plots and the newly completed glasshouses. The occasion is described in Nature on June 17th.

A village, known as Broad Green, has been built for the married staff and twenty families are now accommodated on the estate.

Research on the genetics and chemistry of anthocyanins carried out at Merton from 1930 to 1940 had to be terminated through war-time lack of staff. Since then the advent of paper-chromatography methods, first introduced to biochemistry in 1941 to separate and identify mixtures of compounds that are, or can be coloured, has simplified methods for studying the anthocyanins and has opened up new fields of pigment research. It is now possible to analyse flavones and similar compounds; formerly the analytical techniques available were too laborious and the quantities of material needed too large to make genetic work with flavones practical. In 1950 work on flower pigments resumes at JIHI with investigations of anthocyanins and flavones in Antirrhinum, Rosa, Primula sinensis and Chrysanthemum maximum. The JIHI staff are trained in chromatography methods by E. C. Bate-Smith and T. Swain at the Low Temperature Research Station in Cambridge.

Weekly seminars were given by the staff and visitors to the Institution in the winter season from 1911 to 1915, from 1920 to 1926, and were continued irregularly from 1926 to 1939. They were completely interrupted during 1939-1946 and again from 1948-1949. At these seminars the chief genetic discoveries of the last 40 years have been propounded. Among the speakers have been Baur, Beadle, Biffen, Blaringhem, Bridges, Buller, Chambers, Fisher, Goldschmidt, Goodspeed, Gowen, Haldane, Harland, Johannsen, Lotsy, Mohr, Morgan, Muller, Punnett, Seifriz, Sturtevant, Vavilov, Watson, and Winge. The weekly seminar programme resumes at JIHI in October 1950.

In recognition of the fruitful work that William Lawrence has overseen as head of the Garden Department, and to relieve him from routine work, Darlington puts Lawrence in charge of a new ‘Garden Research Department’. John Newell becomes ‘Curator’ in charge of the gardens in his place. Lawrence’s services to horticulture are also recognised by the award of a Royal Horticultural Society ‘Victoria Medal of Honour’ in this year. One of the new projects that Lawrence oversees is the study of glasshouse climatology, aided by the appointment of a physicist, Dr Raymond Whittle, in 1952. The experience gained during these studies is later put to use in the design and operation of JIHI’s new controlled growth rooms. Lawrence (1980) wrote:

‘I doubt if members of the JI staff during the 50’s will ever forget Raymond Whittle’s array of instruments which from time to time, ‘cluttered up’ one house or another, to the incredulity, and sometimes chagrin, of the genetical staff! There were radiometers, solarimeters, recording photometers that clicked up the foot-candle-hours, electrolytic dc light integrators, potentiometric recorders, electrical resistance thermometers, power meters, katharometers, ratemeters, and from time to time, during the recording of ventilation rates, the glasshouse air would be contaminated by hydrogen, krypton and argon gases also common smoke’.

The glasshouse climatology experiments attract many visitors; Whittle and Lawrence summarise their conclusions in a series of five articles in the Journal of Agricultural Engineering Research in 1960.

See also: W. J. C. Lawrence, Catch the tide: adventures in horticultural research, London: Grower Books, 1980, p. 83.

The Pomology Department sees results from its breeding programmes on tomatoes and sweet corn which use hybrid vigour to produce new varieties. Others had published theoretical studies of hybrid vigour using tomatoes and sweet corn in 1937 and 1939, but there were no investigations on hybrid cultivated tomatoes in England until Morley Crane, Kenneth Mather and Gavin Brown commenced a study of hybrid vigour as measured by increased fruit yields in 1939. These experiments have continued annually at JIHI, both at Merton and at Bayfordbury, and have led to the introduction (in 1952) of two successful John Innes F1 hybrid tomato varieties. Trials show that ‘Hertford Cross’ and ‘Ware Cross’, are capable of higher yields and earlier and better quality fruits than either of their parents or other varieties tested with them. Both varieties receive the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Merit in 1958.

Two other new JIHI tomato varieties are released in 1950-51, ‘Antimold A’ and ‘Antimold B’; these are resistant to leaf-mould disease (Cladosporium fulvum). Though initially of interest to growers in the north of England where this disease is most severe, growers’ trials unfortunately show that most of JIHI’s best lines are also resistant to yield (Day 1992). Nevertheless JIHI research generates much information of value to tomato growers since many of the experiments on simple cultural problems make use of tomato seedlings, both because the tomato is the most important glasshouse crop and because it is a good test plant.

JIHI’s breeding programme for sweet corn, which started in 1936, is described by Gordon Haskell in ‘Sweet Corn in England’ in 1949. The crop is so new to his British readership that Haskell has to explain that ‘Sweet corn is to Americans what cabbage is to Englishmen. It is a form of maize with sugary instead of starchy seeds. It is picked unripe, boiled for ten minutes and eaten hot on the cob with butter and salt’. Work at JIHI has involved trials to establish the best methods of growing and storing the crop, as well as finding the best varieties for English conditions. Two F1 hybrid varieties of sweet corn developed at JIHI, ‘John Innes I’ and ‘II’, produce early and high quality cobs. They were selected after a series of trials to be good quality and early maturing. Earliness is particularly important with sweet corn in the English climate, and these hybrids can be relied on to produce ears in most regions. By the mid-1960s ‘John Innes II’, also known as Canada Cross, has become popular and is one of the main varieties grown in England.

 See also:

G. Haskell and A. Gavin Brown, ‘Hybrid vigour in cultivated tomatoes’, Euphytica 4 (1955): 147-162

G. Haskell, ‘Sweet Corn in England’, The Fruit, the seed and the soil, 3rd ed. (1954), pp. 71-83. First published in 1949.

A. Gavin Brown, ‘Catalogue of Plants Bred by the John Innes Institute 1910-1967’, John Innes Institute 58th Annual Report (1967), pp. 35-47.

P. Day, ‘Plant pathology and biotechnology: choosing your weapons’, Annual Review of Phytopathology, 30 (1992): 1-13.

For the first time staff at Bayfordbury have access to controlled environment facilities for plant experiments. Two rooms, planned by Dan Lewis with the General Electric Company, offer light and temperature control (–8ºc to +40ºc), but a suitable method for the control of humidity is yet to be established. Genetics experiments in the past had to ignore variations in the environment and were confined to investigations in which external changes played a minor part. The new rooms bring investigation of genotype-environment interactions, the complex of environmental factors affecting the fertility of hybrids and the behaviour of cell components, within the practical reach of JIHI’s scientists.

JIHI joins with the research stations of East Malling (Kent) and Long Ashton (Bristol) to arrange a series of exhibits at the Festival of Britain, a national exhibition which opened in May. The exhibits, demonstrating incompatibility in fruit trees and the importance of planting the right kinds together, have taken the Pomology Department two years to prepare. Much of London is still in ruins after the German bombing campaign and the Festival is an attempt to foster in the public a feeling of national recovery and progress and to commemorate the achievements of British science.

For more information on science in the Festival of Britain see Soraya de Chadarevian, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 43-47.

A series of woolly aphid-resistant apple root-stocks, raised jointly by JIHI and  East Malling Research Station, are sent this autumn to a number of research stations in the Commonwealth and the United States. To recognize the results of this collaboration (which began in the 1920s) the root-stocks are to be known as the Malling-Merton series. Clones of 14 selections, MM. 101 to MM. 114, are distributed. This series, which also carries genes for powdery mildew resistance, was produced by crossing Malling and Merton rootstocks with Northern Spy.

By the mid-1950s the focus of the apple-breeding programme has moved away from producing new varieties to helping growers reduce their costs of production, especially their losses from frost damage and disease. Research on apple mildew (Podosphaera leucotricha) and apple scab (Venturia inaequalis) begins as many popular varieties are highly susceptible to both diseases. The apple scab research is a collaborative project with researchers in America, Canada and Europe and advanced scab crosses are screened for resistance to powdery mildew, and promising material incorporated into the breeding programme. The variety ‘Gavin’ (released c. 1980) resulted from this work.

JIHI’s biennial Summer Courses in genetics and cytology are revived this year for recommended postgraduate students. Fifty-six students attend lectures in the history of genetics; mitosis and meiosis; chromosome breakage; nucleus and cytoplasm; origins of cultivated plants; gene mutation; chimaeras; chemistry of flower pigments; incompatibility and isolation; and contamination in seed crops. Students are also given demonstrations in chromosome projection, staining techniques and chromatography, and, outdoors, in genetic experiments, the glasshouses and composting methods, and the National Rose Species Collection.

C D Darlington establishes a Bateson Lecture to commemorate the founder of JIHI, William Bateson; it is twenty-five years since Bateson’s death on 8 February 1926. The first Bateson Lecture serves as a grand finale to the Summer Course for postgraduate students. Professor Ronald Fisher, FRS gives a talk on ‘Statistical Methods in Genetics’ which is afterwards published in Heredity, the journal Darlington and Fisher co-founded in 1947. Fisher has held the Balfour Chair of Genetics at Cambridge University since 1943, and from 1952 will become a member of JIHI Council. Fisher receives a knighthood for his services to genetics in 1952.

Fisher’s article: http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v6/n1/pdf/hdy19521a.pdf

Fisher’s work at Cambridge: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/About/News/departmenthistory.htm

In June 1952 the Cytology Department at JIHI host a Symposium to bring together in one place (and later in one volume) knowledge about the breakage of chromosomes: spontaneous, radiation, and chemical breakage. It is 25 years since Hermann Muller discovered the nature of the permanent effects of radiation on the cell, due to changes in the structure of chromosomes. Study of chromosome breakage in cells has lagged behind research on gene mutation (which is studied by observable effects in whole organisms), because it has proved technically less accessible. Now it is a focal problem in biology, both in connection with the study of cancerous tumours in medicine and as a way of understanding more about chromosome structure and behaviour as well as for the mapping of genes on the chromosomes. Of the 24 contributions to this (mostly British) Symposium, nine are by JIHI staff. C D Darlington, A. Haque, Len La Cour and J. W. Morrison present work on radiation breakage; John McLeish discusses chemical breakage, while Darlington and A. P. Wylie, and J. B. Hair, examine secondary and spontaneous breakage of chromosomes.

See also:

Symposium on chromosome breakage, held at the John Innes Horticultural Institution, 9-11 June 1952. Supplement to Heredity, volume 6. London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1953.

Hermann Muller’s mutation research which won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946:

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York show that only the DNA of a virus needs to enter a bacterium to infect it. Their experiments on the T2 phage, a virus infecting Escherichia coli, the workhorse of bacterial genetics, provide strong support for the idea that genes are made of DNA. Their work affirms the conclusion that Oswald Avery and his colleagues at Rockefeller University Hospital proposed in 1944 from their work with the Pneumococcus, namely that DNA not chromosomal protein is the transmitter of genetic information.

For more information see: http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/ahershey.html

Francis Crick and James Watson describe their double helix model of the structure of DNA. Presented at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, their two-dimensional stick and ball model represents DNA as a ‘twisted-ladder’ structure, with the sugar-phosphate backbone on the outside of the helix and the four bases (adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine) on the inside (the rungs of the ladder). Most people unable to see the physical model in Cambridge will have seen the schematic drawing by Odile Crick published in Nature in April 1953. It is a conceptual simplification, omitting atomic detail and precise co-ordinates (which are still uncertain). A more detailed version and a small photo of the wire model are published in 1954.

Crick and Watson have built their model on the X-ray diffraction research of Alex Stokes and Maurice Wilkins at King’s College, London, which at the beginning of the 1950s suggested that DNA molecules are arranged in a helical fashion. In addition, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, continuing the work of the King’s College school, provided evidence that ‘gave several of the vital helical parameters’. Crick and Watson are also inspired by the work of physical chemist Linus Pauling, an expert in the chemical structure of proteins at the California Institute of Technology, who had recently proposed a triple helix model for DNA. The double-helix model quickly supersedes Pauling’s model, and ‘immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for genetic material’ (Watson and Crick, 1953). The original Watson and Crick paper is not cited frequently until the end of the 1950s when the double helix model becomes iconic, making its first appearance on television in 1958. However, locating the double helix as the origin of molecular biology is problematic. The double helix has a slow and indirect impact on research directions at Cambridge and a programme in ‘molecular genetics’ takes root only several years later.

See:

• http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/Views/Exhibit/narrative/doublehelix.html
• http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/dna_double_helix/readmore.html
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/feb/15/obituaries.genetics
• Soraya de Chararevian, Designs for Life. Molecular Biology after World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cyril Darlington’s application for the Sherardian Professorship of Botany at Oxford University is successful and in October he leaves JIHI to join a department that has no history of research in cytogenetics. Under his Directorship of 14 years the Institution has grown from 64 staff at Merton to 100 at Bayfordbury. Darlington’s views and books, especially The Evolution of Genetic Systems (1939) have been a constant stimulus to staff.

The Directorship is advertised in March and eight applicants are considered for the post. JIHI’s Council also approach Kenneth Mather but to their great disappointment he declines their offer and decides to remain at Birmingham. The strongest candidates include biophysicist Professor J. T. Randall of King’s College, London who wants to bring some of his medical and biophysics units, including a biochemical unit, with him. In the 1940s and 1950s biophysics encompassed diverse research traditions, including electrophysiology, protein crystallography and radiation studies; much of the territory later occupied by ‘molecular biologists’ was first claimed by biophysicists.  John Randall had been interested in applying physical methods to biological material since before the war and had discussed this with Darlington. War mobilisation had produced new instruments and people with new skills and Randall wanted to use them to investigate sub-cellular structures, especially chromosomes. Randall’s unit at Kings’ (founded 1947) is one of the biggest centres for biophysical research in Britain and includes Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins who had recently contributed decisively to the structure determination of the DNA molecule.

Randall’s surprise application leads to discussions in favour of the introduction of biophysics and the expansion of biochemistry at JIHI and the search for a new Director is extended from the biological to the biochemical field. The Council also hears arguments against too great a departure from the Institution’s genetics and plant breeding tradition. The Council find it impossible to make an appointment by the time of Darlington’s departure so they invite William Lawrence, Head of the Garden Research Department, to be ‘Acting Director’.

For an exploration of the emerging and complex field of biophysics see: Soraya de Chadarevian, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

In association with JIHI’s work on the National Rose Species Collection, a programme begins at Bayfordbury to help solve some of the outstanding problems of rose propagation. Modern garden roses are dependent on borrowed roots for their vigour, and so considerable economic importance is attached to the choice of stocks. Most of the stocks in use are selected strains of wild species or vigorous first generation crosses, but until recently nothing had been done in Britain to breed new stocks or standardize the existing types on lines similar to those employed for fruit stocks. In 1953, after a study of rose stock trials in France, Gordon Rowley assembles a collection of 31 of the most popular rose stocks for experiments on methods of propagation, compatibility problems, and field trials on different soil types.

During the next eight years tests of the stock/scion effect on questions of vigour, susceptibility to black spot and mildew, and cold resistance show that some of these problems (vigour, cold resistance) are connected with the type of stock used. Trials demonstrate that the choice of stock greatly influences plant size, the number of flowers produced, and the extent to which suckering occurs. Other rose breeding work reveals that rose cuttings can be made more successfully with rooting hormones, and that the germination of seeds of the dog rose used for understocks can be made more certain by artificial cold treatment. These results are of considerable interest to rose growers.

See also:

Gordon D. Rowley, ‘The National Rose Species Collection’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 79, part 9 (1954): 382-389

John Newell, ‘The John Innes Institution and its work’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 82, part 3 (1957): 107-121

The basic John Innes compost formula is modified (the lime content replaced by sulphur) to produce a special compost for ericas, rhododendrons and other calcifuge plants which in some cases had shown signs of chlorosis when grown in John Innes composts. The formula of the standard John Innes compost has remained unchanged since 1936 and after nearly 20 years is now used by 80 per cent of nurserymen and gardeners.

Kenneth Dodds is appointed in March 1954 and brings with him experience as a Lecturer then Professor of Botany and Genetics at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, Trinidad (1937-49); Officer-in-Charge of the Commonwealth Potato Station at the School of Agriculture, University of Cambridge (1949-51) and Director of the Agricultural Research Council’s Potato Genetics Station at Cambridge (following the transfer of the Potato Collection to the ARC). With Dodds’ appointment the Institution accepted responsibility for the Commonwealth Potato Collection, the bulk of which was collected in 1939 and whose primary object was to provide material for the study of variation in potatoes and a reservoir of hereditary characteristics for breeding. For ten years the resistance of member lines of this collection to diseases, pests and frost was studied by workers under the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux. Later, under ARC control, the collection was used for cytological and genetic research. Dodds led a group studying the South American potato collection, looking at the breeding systems of diploids, the genetics of pigmentation and the inheritance of resistances, particularly to virus Y and Late Blight. Dodds hopes that the new experimental programme at JIHI will ultimately have benefits for commercial potato breeding. Dodds arranges for an additional block of four glasshouses to be added to the Bayfordbury site to accommodate the needs of the new Potato Genetics Department (Dodds, J. B. Harborne, Ellis Marks and G. J. Paxman).

One of Kenneth Dodds’ immediate actions as new Director is to change the names of three of JIHI’s departments (which up until now are Genetics, Pomology, Garden Research, and Cytology): the Pomology Department becomes the Department of Plant Breeding to recognize the considerable effort that has always been devoted to the production of improved varieties of plants and to plant breeding methods. Mr Watkin Williams is appointed to head the new Department in December, replacing Gavin Brown who has been Acting Head since Morley Crane’s retirement. Williams, a senior agricultural botanist from the University of Durham, has in the past directed a legume breeding programme at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station and has a close acquaintance with the problems of the commercial seed industry. The Garden Research Department, led by William Lawrence, is renamed the Department of Physiology and Plant Culture to highlight changes in emphasis since this Department was established in 1950: attention is now mainly given to the physiological responses of plants to controlled environments. Finally, the Cytology Department is gradually subsumed within Dodds’ planned new Department of Cell Biology.

Dodds’ review of the laboratory accommodation of the various departments at Bayfordbury reveals that the Department of Plant Breeding has few facilities for experimental pathology; the biochemists have no separate rooms for their balances, chromatographic equipment and spectroscopes, and the Department of Physiology needs a laboratory. The problem of lab space is intensified by the arrival of the new Potato Genetics department and by Dodds’ intention to build up a small group at the Institution working on cell biology and using a cytochemical approach to the study of cell processes.

Dodds establishes a small collaborative group of cell biologists at the Wheatstone Laboratory of the Department of Biophysics, King’s College, London. This group includes cytologist Joseph Chayen and physicist J W C Crawley, who develop with the helpful co-operation of Professor J. T. Randall. Crawley receives the training necessary to maintain an electron microscope and experience in building electronic equipment, particularly for measuring DNA on chromosomes. John McLeish, a JIHI cytologist, is sent to them for several months in 1956 for training in cyto-chemical techniques.

Dodds’ vision is to fully develop chromosome and genetics research at Bayfordbury by integrating the disciplines of the cytologist, geneticist, biochemist and biophysicist into a functional whole (meaning free exchange of ideas and apparatus). This integration cannot be achieved within the confines of Bayfordbury mansion so a new block of modern laboratories to house biochemistry and cell biology is planned. Until this is done JIHI’s new group of cell biologists will remain at the Wheatstone Laboratory in London.

It is ten years since the publication of Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants by C D Darlington and E. K. Janaki Ammal, a systematic arrangement of chromosome counts which aimed to ‘put classification back on a genetic basis’. In this interval the number of plants with known chromosome numbers has nearly doubled; they have now been studied in some fifty thousand flowering plants belonging to nearly twenty thousand species. Ammal (JIHI cytologist 1931, 1935, 1940-44) has contributed significantly to these developments in her work at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Gardens at Wisley, and later with the Indian Botanical Survey in Calcutta. Chromosome counting is an important part of the routine work of JIHI cytologists as Brian Snoad later recalled: ‘at that time there was a lot of emphasis on collecting chromosome numbers, rather akin to genome analysis today, with any new numbers being fed into the bible of the day [the Atlas]’. The Atlas includes unpublished counts by many correspondents, and by Len La Cour, R. D. Brock, J. B. Hair, B. Snoad and R. de V. Pienaar, who are able to take advantage of the genetic variability that is so readily available in the parkland, the ornamental gardens and the burgeoning glasshouse corridors at Bayfordbury.

C D Darlington and Ann P. Wylie’s new Atlas serves four purposes: first, to show the systematist how chromosome numbers can be used as a basis for plant classification; secondly, to help the plant breeder by showing what species may be crossed and with what results; thirdly, to give the cytologist a bibliographic guide to work in cytology, and fourthly, to provide the geneticist and evolutionist with the rules or laws of chromosome variation. In all Darlington and Wylie include over 15,000 species and 2,500 genera in the catalogue. The interpretation of the data in the Atlas has grown to fill a separate companion volume, Chromosome Botany (1956), which brings chromosome systematics into fertile union with plant geography and plant ecology.

Ann Wylie was also responsible for much of the cytological work on the National Rose Species Collection at Bayfordbury which assisted Keeper Gordon Rowley in his plant identifications. The Collection serves as a model experiment in the classification of a genus.

See also:

C D Darlington and E K Janaki Ammal, Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945

C D Darlington and A P Wylie, Chromosome Atlas of Flowering Plants, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955

C D Darlington, Chromosome Botany, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956

A P Wylie, ‘The History of Garden Roses’ [Masters Memorial Lecture, 1954], Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 79, part 12 - 80, part 2 (1954)

Gordon D. Rowley, ‘The National Rose Species Collection’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 79, part 9 (1954): 382-389

Dan Lewis, Head of the Genetics Department at JIHI, is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his pioneer work on the genetics of incompatibility in flowering plants. Lewis’s election follows on from his outstanding 1954 article summarizing 18 years of work and thought at JIHI, giving a comparative treatment of seven genetic systems of incompatibility. Lewis’s review becomes a citation classic and brings him widespread recognition, including a Rockefeller Foundation Special Fellowship at California Institute of Technology in 1955-56.

Lewis’s work on the incompatibility or ‘S’ gene, is important for three reasons. First, for contributing to understanding of incompatibility relations and breeding systems in higher plants; secondly, for adding to the tools geneticists have for studying rare spontaneous mutations. Lewis (1949) highlighted the importance of the incompatibility locus of higher plants to biologists engaged in mutation research, and showed its advantages for refined studies in genetics, radiobiology and evolution; thirdly, for its potential agronomic benefits. It is hoped that inducing self-fertility in cross-pollinated species may be an asset in fruit breeding. More generally Lewis’s research raises the interesting possibility of inbreeding and selecting for valuable agronomic traits which might otherwise never be expressed in cross-pollinated plants.

The first application of Lewis’s research is to the sweet cherry, Prunus avium, cultivars of which are self-incompatible and will not set fruit when pollinated with their own pollen. Lewis produced self-compatible mutants of Prunus avium by irradiation in the mid-1940s. Crosses with these mutants have produced progenies that are all self-fertile. Though Lewis will be denied the satisfaction of seeing the commercial exploitation of his discovery in Britain, his work will lead to the development by the Canadian Department of Agriculture of the first commercial self-compatible sweet cherry, Stella.

See also:

http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1986/A1986D500400001.pdf

Dan Lewis, ‘Incompatibility in flowering plants’, Biological Reviews, 24 (1949): 472-496

Dan Lewis, ‘Comparative incompatibility in angiosperms and fungi’, Advances in Genetics, 6 (1954): 235-285.

D. de Nettancourt, ‘Radiation effects on the one locus-gametophytic system of self-incompatibility in higher plants’, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 39 (1969): 187-196.

Because of the way agricultural research has gradually grown up in the past, a dual system has operated in England and Wales whereby some research institutes are financed and administered directly by the Agricultural Research Council, while others (including JIHI which has been a grant-aided station of the Ministry of Agriculture since 1946) are on the Vote of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, although the Agricultural Research Council is responsible for their scientific policy and scientific direction. Following a report of the Select Committee on Estimates, the Government decides that the financial and general administration of these latter institutes, as well as their scientific direction, should be unified under the Agricultural Research Council. The JIHI, like the other institutes transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture, remains under its separate governing body.

JIHI’s new Department of Plant Cell Biology is founded under Dr Robert Brown, FRS, Director of the Agricultural Research Council’s Unit of Plant Cell Physiology at Oxford, and the cell biology group at King’s is re-located to Bayfordbury. It is expected that Brown will bring two or three members of his own staff and some equipment from Oxford, and plans for a new cell biology building are now able to make progress. Six new appointments from Oxford are made in 1958: N. Sunderland, J. K. Heyes and A. J. Tullett from Brown’s lab and three biochemists who had been working under Sir Hans Krebs (J. E. Amoore, R. G. Stickland, and U. Loening). The intention that Brown will become Head of Department is not realised because in 1958 Brown accepts the Regius Chair of Botany at Edinburgh University. In these changed circumstances only Sunderland and Stickland in the Oxford group decide to come to Bayfordbury and the search begins to find a senior scientist to lead the Department.

Dr Graham Hussey begins a collection of strains of Arabidopsis thaliana for developmental studies and is also making observations on the growth and flowering of six different wild-type mutants grown under fluorescent lamps. Hussey is a newly appointed postdoc in the Department of Physiology and Plant Culture. He studied Arabidopsis for his Ph.D. at Imperial College, London, under the distinguished plant physiologist F. G. Gregory who has a special interest in the effects of light and temperature on flowering plants. Gregory and Hussey are the only scientists working on the physiology of Arabidopsis in the UK in the early 1950s.

Both are building on the work of Friedrich Laibach (1943), Professor of Botany at the University of Frankfurt, who recognised the potential of Arabidopsis as a model research plant for studies in physiology and genetics. Among its advantages are its short life cycle and small size, it takes up little space so that control of light and temperature can be achieved in modest size installations. It can also be grown easily in vitro, although techniques for doing this are not well developed in the 1950s.

Hussey’s work on Arabidopsis at Bayfordbury is short-lived because he is directed by William Lawrence to concentrate on the effect of light on tomatoes. Although in the 1950s and 60s several research groups begin to follow up on Laibach’s initiative, in particular in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and in Columbia, USA, it will be the late 1980s before Arabidopsis research takes off at the John Innes Institute. As late as the early 1980s Hussey finds himself unable to interest the Director (Harold Woolhouse) in this ‘tiny little weed’.

See also:

F. Laibach, ‘Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. als object fur genetische und entwicklungsphysiologische untersuchungen’, Botanische Archiv. 44 (1943): 439-455.

G. Hussey, ‘Photoperiodic studies on long day plants’, Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1953 (159 pp.)

G. Hussey, ‘Photoperiodic responses of Arabidopsis thaliana’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Session 164 (1953): 137-139.

G. Hussey, ‘Experiments with two long day plants designed to test Bunning’s theory of photoperiodism’, Physiologia Plantarum, 7 (1954): 253-60.

For information on the history of Arabidopsis as a model organism:

S. Leonelli, 'Arabidopsis, the botanical Drosophila: from mouse cress to model organism ' , Endeavour, 31, Issue 1, March 2007, Pages 34-38

C. Somerville & M. Koornneef, 'A fortunate choice: the history of Arabidopsis as a model plant', Nature Reviews Genetics 3, 883-889 (November 2002)

Dan Lewis, who has been on the staff of JIHI since 1935 and became Head of Genetics in 1948, leaves to take up the Quain Professorship of Botany at University College, London in October 1957. The post remains vacant until April 1960 due to a shortage of suitable applicants; there are very few geneticists experienced in higher plant genetics in their 40s, and only a few more in their 30s, that can be considered as candidates for this post. In addition, more universities are competing for personnel as new professorships in genetics are established. The Council consider a range of potential candidates, not all of whom turn out to be available, including John Thoday, Angus Bateman, John Jinks, J. Alan Roper and John Fincham.

In November 1959 Fincham writes to Dodds expressing his continued interest in the still vacant post: ‘I thought it might be worth while asking whether you had definitely decided that I was not the kind of geneticist you wanted, or whether you still considered me as a possibility’. Fincham, Reader in Genetics at the University of Leicester, is a biochemical geneticist whose research interests have so far specialised on the bread mould Neurospora crassa. His appointment, which is confirmed in 1960, will establish JIHI as a serious player in the developing field of microbial genetics.

Most of the apparatus required for a preparation laboratory for electron microscopy is installed at Bayfordbury during this year. The electronic equipment for the high-voltage electron microscope they hope to build at JIHI has to be re-designed to improve its stability and enable it to operate satisfactorily from the rather erratic mains electricity supply at Bayfordbury. In the meantime staff have access to the new Siemens electron microscope at Rothamsted. The Institution’s first electron microscope is a high voltage microscope acquired from King’s College, London. It arrives as a box of bits and pieces and is re-built in an old wine cellar of Bayfordbury mansion by John Crawley. By 1958 it is in regular use, both as a survey instrument at low voltage (80kV.) and for experiments with high voltage (up to 200kV.) Having a survey instrument makes it possible to examine specimens as they are prepared, and to select only those really suitable for examination in the high resolution instruments at King’s College or Rothamsted. In November1959, on the back of plans to expand cell biology, JIHI is able to install a new Siemens Electron Microscope Elmiskop 1.

See also: History of electron microscopy

In the early days JIHI work with fungi was dominated by practical considerations of disease control and was pursued independently from the work of the geneticists. Dorothy Cayley, the Institution’s first mycologist, began work in the 1910s with the diseases of peas and fruit. Between 1920 and 1930 she worked particularly on the life history of Diaporthe pernicisiosa, a fungus producing rapid wilt and ‘die-back’ of stone fruits and a cause of rot in apples. In the 1950s Peter Day’s mycological work with Fulvia fulva (Cladosporium fulvum), the cause of leaf mould disease, was directed at solving a particular problem plaguing commercial tomato growers. JIHI’s Pomology Department had since the 1940s been at work to produce new greenhouse varieties resistant to leaf mould disease but found that resistant varieties were rendered useless after a few years because they encountered physiologic races of the fungus (forms of the species that are specialised to attack different cultivars). Day was soon more interested in the pathogen than the host, but his work was mainly confined to identifying the physiologic races of F. fulvum from samples sent by the National Agricultural Advisory Service from various parts of England and Wales. These were needed to select useful major gene resistance for the tomato breeding programme. Fulvia unfortunately was not promising material for fungal genetics because it has no known sexual stage and does not readily form heterokaryons (cells with two or more genetically different nuclei). Dan Lewis and Day (1957) were able to use induced pigment markers to demonstrate induced mutation to virulence, but the limitations of Fulvum prevented further genetic work.

A key step towards the establishment of fungi as model organisms in the Genetics Department at JIHI occurred with Lewis’s Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology during 1955-56. While there he isolated some induced mutants of the basidiomycete fungus Coprinus cinereus (C. lagopus, an ink-cap mushroom). Lewis suggested to Day on his return that he work on Coprinus, which Day thought at the time might be a model system for exploring the dikaryons of rusts and other basidiomycete plant pathogens. Conveniently this fungus formed fruit bodies on the farmyard manure heaps at Bayfordbury, providing a local source of wild-type stocks. Day’s training had recently been enhanced by 18 months working in the Department of Plant Pathology at Madison, Wisconsin during which time he attended Professor Joshua Lederberg’s course on microbial genetics. Lewis was in the process of switching experimental materials from self-incompatible flowering plants to explore the multiple allelic system at two unlinked loci, A and B, that govern mating type in Coprinus. Their project began with the isolation and characterization of mutants and mapping their linkages with the A and B loci. Day’s work on the genetics of Coprinus continued after Lewis left to become Professor of Botany at University College, London.

In 1958 Day is joined by Robin Holliday fresh from his PhD work in the Botany School at Cambridge on the genetics of Ustilago maydis, a fungal disease of maize (corn smut). Dodds makes this appointment specifically to provide a ‘mutually stimulating’ partnership for Day and to keep JIHI ‘reasonably up-to-date on fungal genetics’.  The turn to fungal genetics is completed by the arrival of John Fincham as the new Head of Genetics in 1960.

In August 1959 Henry Harris accepts the post of Head of the new Department of Cell Biology. Trained under Sir Howard Florey at the William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, Harris has worked on the nature of chemical stimuli affecting cells during tissue injury. Recently his investigations have centred on the physiology and biochemistry of mammalian cells, in particular the factors influencing and controlling cell multiplication. He brings with him two members of his Oxford team, a biochemist, John Watts, and his personal technician Marianne Jahnz. Together they have been developing techniques for the investigation of the biochemical organization of somatic cells. The research they plan to bring to John Innes concerns the factors controlling the kinetics of protein and nucleic acid synthesis in mammalian cells. They are particularly interested in the differences between multiplying cells, both normal and malignant, and non-multiplying cells. Though Harris’ training and experience situate him more comfortably within a medical research environment, Dodds is confident that Harris will achieve a successful marriage between plant and animal cell biology. However, Dodds does have to reassure Council that Harris’ research team will devote a large part of its activities to the simultaneous study of plant cells. The new Cell Biology Building is completed at the end of the year.

Harris later wrote: ‘Although it masqueraded as a horticultural institution, the John Innes was a very distinguished scientific establishment. Its Director in 1959 was Kenneth Dodds and, for reasons that remain obscure to me, he was eager to develop the subject of cell biology. As far as I am aware, this was not then a recognized subject in any university in the world, and he must either have been very far-sighted or he was disenchanted with the further prospects of formal Mendelian genetics on higher plants. In any case, with the support of the Agricultural Research Council, he had constructed a new laboratory at Bayfordbury that he proposed to devote to cell biology’.

See also:

Henry Harris, The Balance of Improbabilities: A Scientific Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 112-115.

Building the Cell Biology Building A short extract from the film 'Bayfordburyania'.

During 1958 Kenneth Dodds suggests that the John Innes Horticultural Institution change its name, omitting the word ‘horticultural’ which he considers misleading and a ‘hindrance to the recruitment of suitable staff’. This sparks lengthy discussions in Council about what the future research direction of JIHI should be. Dodds wants to move the Institution further towards fundamental research on cytology and genetics, research that cannot be tackled at the Agricultural Research Council’s technological stations: those that have primary responsibility for meeting the needs of public industries (the Plant Breeding Institute at Cambridge, the Glasshouse Crops Research Station at Rustington (Sussex), and the National Vegetable Research Station at Wellesbourne in Warwickshire, for example). His plan is for the Institution to re-visit many of the problems investigated during Darlington’s era, among them polygenes, translocations, chiasmata, and speciation, but using the combined approaches of the new cell biology department, a new genetics department re-oriented to microbial genetics, the potato genetics department and the department of plant breeding.

Not everyone in Council is agreed that the more practical aspects of the Institution’s present programme should be handed on to other stations. In particular, there is dissent over whether JIHI should abandon its tradition in fruit-breeding, supported as it is by the fruit collections assembled by M B Crane. There is a feeling that the new Department of Cell Biology is getting all the limelight and that applied research might be pushed into the shadows. Dodds view is that JIHI can no longer carry out actual breeding work on top-fruit and potatoes, which he maintains would require a scaling up of operations, but should confine its research to fundamental problems. Agreement is reached that JIHI should change its name and that this would be to signal the greatly increased scope of the research undertaken, rather than a complete divorce from horticulture.

In November 1959 Kenneth Dodds embarks on a four month expedition to Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador to collect local varieties of cultivated diploid potatoes. The material brought back will assist Dodds in his investigation of the origin of the diploid potato.