President Barack Obama has asked Roger Beachy, Ph.D., president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, to lead a new federal agency that will transform the way that plant science research is funded in the United States.
Beachy is the founding president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, a private, nonprofit research institute in St. Louis County founded in 1999 by a partnership that includes Washington University.
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA, a newly named agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will manage the external grants of the Department of Agriculture, including the competitive grant program now called the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.
In the past decade or so, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has distributed between $120 million and $180 million in competitive grants. “The goal we’re aiming for in the next four or five years is an annual budget of $700 million,” Beachy said.
“Plants are key to the future, to our survival,” Beachy said. “But they just haven’t been getting the attention they need from the research community or the U.S. public.
“We’re beginning to see aberrations in climate, and the Earth’s growing population will need not just more food but better food and will need to use less of the world’s water supply so that the growing population will have what they require to live,” Beachy said.
“We also have perhaps 50 to 70 years to invent plant-based substitutes for the products that now come from dwindling petroleum stocks. The nexus of challenges that face the world is not insignificant. And we need to address them,” he said.
Forming a new agency was a key recommendation of a task force led by Chancellor Emeritus William H. Danforth, the plant science center’s chairman. The task force, which issued its report in 2004, felt a new agency would be needed to make agricultural research as strong as medical and basic research administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“For a long time and for a variety of reasons, the Office of Science & Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget have not been confident that the research funds of the Department of Agriculture have been well spent, so they have been holding down the budgets for perhaps 30 years,” Danforth said.
“That became very clear with the stimulus package, when the NIH got $10 billion, the NSF got $3 billion, and the agriculture department got nothing,” Danforth said. “That was certainly a wake-up call for the community. Roger Beachy will have an opportunity to restore confidence that the funds are being well spent.
“I am sure he will succeed,” Danforth said.
Beachy relishes the opportunity to create the solid institutional structure that will attract the brightest and best scientists. “Right now, too few of the best biologists are working in the field of plant science and agriculture; instead, they’re going into biomedical research or fundamental sciences,” he said. “That’s one of the most significant goals I have — attracting the next generation of researchers and teachers. Providing the research-funding structure should help to do that.”
“I just can’t imagine anybody, anywhere, who would do a better job than Roger,” Danforth said. “He’s perfect for it.”
Beachy is known internationally for his work in biotechnology and particularly for the development of transgenic plants that are resistant to viral infection — an interesting challenge, he said, because plants don’t have immune systems.
Born in Ohio, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Goshen College, followed by a doctorate in plant pathology from Michigan State University.
Beachy joined the WUSTL faculty in 1978, staying until 1991, when he moved to The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He rejoined the faculty when he took the position as the first president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in 1999. He announced earlier this year that he would be stepping down as president to become vice chairman of its board of trustees.
Beachy himself has mixed emotions about leaving his scientific career, however temporarily.
“When I was contemplating this decision,” Beachy said, “my son said to me, ‘You know, Dad, you said that if you had one more shot, it would be to try to make a difference around the world. So here it is. What are you going to do with it?'”
Beachy accepted.