C.J.A. The Last Mycologist Who Was BSA President
At the American Institute of Biological
Sciences meeting in San Diego in 1995 I learned that earlier strong ties
that had existed between botanists and mycologists were severed. BSA
members wondered who was the John S. Karling, who had made a generous
bequest to the BSA (and also MSA)? That incident has been rectified by a
short Karling biography and the notice of the Karling Award that was
established with the gift on the BSA web site. I recalled this incident
after I discovered that C. J. Alexopoulos was the last person to have
served as president both of the BSA (1963) and of the MSA (1958-1959),
marking a lost connection. Also gone is the Department of Botany at the
University of Texas and the diverse group of botanists who had written
all the textbooks I used there as a student in the late 1960s and early
1970s. The Plant Biology/Botany graduate program link on the Texas web
site leads to "The page cannot be found." Mycology, however, is still
present at Texas in Paul Szaniszlo's lab in the Department of Molecular
Genetics and Microbiology. As I recall that is where it was (as the
Department of Microbiology) before Jim Maniotis, and then Dr. Alex,
inhabited the Department of Botany. Dr. Alex was happy at Texas,
commenting on the luxury of walking out on a December day without a top
coat, having lunch with Harold Bold, having lunch and coffee with his
students, and with Mrs. Alex, taking advantage of the musical programs
available on the campus certainly not the music of the Austin scene that
was becoming so popular nationally around him.
One item on the Texas web site was a happy discovery:
Dr. Alexopoulos was a lucid, enthusiastic
and inspiring teacher of both undergraduate and graduate students.
During his career he supervised nine M. A. students and twenty-eight Ph.
D. students, eighteen of the latter at The University of Texas. He was
greatly respected and beloved by his graduate students who demonstrated
their loyalty clearly and to an unusual degree.
— Harold Bold, Jerry J. Brand, and R. Malcolm Brown
The quote is from the memorial resolution, prepared by a committee made up of Dr. Alex's good friend and former BSA president [see below],
as well as two younger faculty members, one a graduate student in Dr.
Alex's time (who involved him in an air-borne spore project that was the
beginning of my own association with Dr. Alex), and the committee
designed a cogent resolution !
Today his students are mostly mycologists; one, a lawyer; many retired
or nearing retirement; several untimely dead; none resides in a botany
department, although one mycological grandchild comes close as the
member of a Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. Most of the
students followed him as academics, six followed him as MSA president,
and one, as IMA president —but not one has been a BSA president. All of
the students remain loyal "to an unusual degree," but it is only the
later Texas students that could be contacted easily, making this piece
very Texacentric. The Texas students, however, were linked to earlier
students from the University of Illinois, Kent State University,
Michigan State University, and University of Iowa, because we saw their
photographs on Dr. Alex's office wall daily a rogue's gallery he
referred to with great affection
In addition to the memorial resolution that
appears on the University of Texas web site, two biographies were
published soon after Dr.Alex's death (Brodie, 1987; Blackwell, 1988).
The Brodie biography was published in Mycologia at a time when
society notables oftenmade a last appearance on the first page of an
issue of that journal. The other biography in the journal of the British
Mycological Society memorialized the society's Honorary Member. His
last, slightly updated CV is posted at <http://lsb380.plbio.lsu.edu/LabPersonnel/cja.html>. He name was given to the MSA Alexopoulos Prize "awarded annually to an outstanding mycologist early in their [sic]
career. The nominees will be evaluated primarily on the basis of
quality, originality, and quantity of their published work." His
students established the prize at the time of his retirement from
teaching at Texas, and over the years some students continue to
contribute to the gift. In fact one year the fund mysteriously swelled,
and I learned later that Henry Aldrich (Ph.D. Texas (1966) contributed
the excess profits he had had to accept as a principal of the
"non-profit corporation" of organizers of the Second International
Mycological Congress at Tampa. There also is an MSA student travel award
named for Dr. Alex, again mostly with contributions from former
students.
این وبلاگ توسط نورالدین سلطانی یلمه دانشجوی رشته ی بیماری شناسی گیاهی دانشگاه علوم کشاورزی و منابع طبیعی گرگان نوشته میشود.