howard griffiths
The birth of the cool: from isotopes to air plants in Trinidad
'Plant man' Howard Griffiths (BSc botany 1976) now holds the Chair in Plant Ecology at Cambridge but the seeds of his enthusiasm were fertilised in his student years by a host of colourful characters and field trips. He remembers the days when plants were cool and botanists were kings:
We had many scrapes and humorous moments - when a tadpole popped out in the cooling water of the oxygen electrode, or the frantic cleaning of rotary pumps and heaving at generators as we tried to power up our vacuum lines. Research in Trinidad has been highly rewarding - particularly the fascination of trying to explain the ecological distribution of air plants within the rainforest canopy in physiological and molecular terms. Without the friendship and support provided by local scientists and colleagues at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine - particularly Charles McDavid and Yasmin Baksh-Comeau - we could not have succeeded. These studies have led me to work on epiphytes in Singapore, Venezuela and Panama, and now to the Chair in Plant Ecology at Cambridge.
It is a rare opportunity these days to be located among a critical mass of plant scientists, sufficient to maintain a separate department. Despite being keen on plants as a lad, I have to thank the inspiration, chidings and encouragement from Janet Sprent, John Raven and colleagues in the department of biological sciences for providing an opportunity to realise that interest. Whilst appreciating the need for streamlining and rationalisation to meet internal efficiency drives and external research assessment, it is sad to think the 'home' provided by the department for us as undergraduates, and those inspiring teachers, is now being dissipated. For me, an appreciation of plants across molecular, biochemical and ecological scales is essential if we are to meet the challenges of agricultural production and natural vegetation in a changing environment.
I learned to appreciate contemporary jazz from my undergraduate days, and for me botany continues to be a 'cool' subject- so let's get on and convince the next generation of undergraduates. Why are kids today embarrassed to be seen being interested in plants? You'd think the shadows cast by the publicity surrounding GM technologies would at least stimulate some interest. It wasn't like that in my days as an undergraduate at Dundee. We had one of those rare years when botanists exceeded zoologists, and the collective enthusiasm of the class kept up our momentum culminating in a midsummer foray to Glen Clova after finals.
I'm not sure what trapped so many of us - for me, it was the quips and asides from John Raven, whilst inadvertently we absorbed the latest developments in membrane processes and photosynthesis. In those days too, departments were not sanctioned on the completion rate of their PhD students, and as long as we were in at the bench to respond positively to Janet Sprent's cheery greeting, well maybe she wouldn't notice if we'd manage to blag a lock-in over at the Tav when the cricket was on. And there was always the allure of the mountains - whether storming over to Creag an Dubh Loch or the Cuillin Ridge, with John Riley forever in sandals, and using the adrenalin to ward off objective dangers, despite the tragic deaths of Iain and Mike at Creag Meagaidh, and other sad mountaineering losses within the department.
John Raven proved to be a generous postdoc supervisor in many ways, not only setting me loose on the mass spectrometer in pursuit of carbon isotope analyses, but allowing such a still-disparate youth to participate in a departmental expedition to Trinidad in 1981. Organised by Steve Hubbard and John Riley, this was a chance to forsake mountains for tree climbing. The contributions of the botany team were more than crystallised by the arrival of Andrew Smith (now at Oxford), who I'd met in Dundee as a friend of Jonathan Weyers. I knocked up shelters at our field sites and then sampled leaves from up and down the canopy for 48 hours or more, whilst Andy and Mary Bassett, one of the undergraduate students, did all the technical measurements! We showed how photosynthetic pathways of epiphytic bromeliads (air plants) were related to exposure within contrasting forest formations, based upon their carbon isotope composition and water relations characteristics.
This work earned me a lectureship at Newcastle upon Tyne, and has led to a subsequent six trips to Trinidad. In 1983, we went back with Andrew and Professor Luettge of Darmstadt, Germany, this time to make more detailed measurements in situ in the rainforest canopy. In 1990 I took a team of two research students and a post doc from Newcastle, so well organised in advance that I wrote to the wrong address to book accommodation at the Simla Research Station. Fortunately there was plenty of space, with mainly termites and soldier ants for company and the occasional visit by David Attenborough's team as they filmed the Trials of Life. Want to know why they never showed two hummingbirds scrapping at the edge of their territories? Me! I slammed the damaged bonnet of our locally-hired car at the exact moment when that tantalising moment might have been filmed.
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