Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dianne Edwards

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.054

1879-0445

Dianne Edwards,

Bryophyte Studies and Records

Dianne Edwards received her bachelor’s degree in Botany, Geology and Biochemistry from Girton College, Cambridge in 1964. From there, she spent the first year of her PhD working with Harlan Banks at Cornell University, and then returned to Cambridge University Botany School to complete her PhD in 1967. She remained at Cambridge as a research fellow until 1970, when she and her family moved to Cardiff. Initially she held a University of Wales fellowship at the then University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, now Cardiff University, and in 1972 became a lecturer there. She has remained at Cardiff ever since, studying early land plant evolution. Dianne is now Distinguished Research Professor and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996. What turned you on to biology in the first place? I work on fossils, but my first love was living plants. As a child, I spent months every year on the Gower Peninsula where my family had a bungalow. My father was a keen bird watcher and, I suppose to keep me occupied, encouraged me to collect and identify flowers. I kept notebooks with sporadic records of flowering times, drawings, etc., and supplied the nature table in my primary school in Manselton, Swansea, with flowers. My father was very much an amateur who had left school in his early teens — I wish he had introduced me at that age to Latin names. Incidentally, my first encounter with rocks resulted in a drawing of what I thought was a fossil in the Carboniferous limestone at Pwlldu, but I now suspect it was an artefact. I became more geologically informed later at secondary school when I joined the Swansea Scientific Society on Saturday excursions under the leadership of Dick Owen, whose enthusiasm and knowledge were legendary. What is the best advice you’ve been given? When it became apparent after O levels that I had the ability to attempt Oxbridge entrance exams, my father took me to visit the mycologist Ivor Isaac, then professor of botany at the University of Swansea, for advice. They had been friends at primary school, where they were introduced to birdwatching and egg collecting by a ‘Mr. Webb’. Both had passed entrance exams to grammar school, but my grandparents could not afford the uniform. I remember Isaac asking me what newspapers I read, and on discovering that they were the Daily Express and Sunday tabloids (hidden when entertaining visiting Baptist ministers) he recommended the Guardian and the Sunday Times. In the absence of television, they did indeed widen my horizons. I don’t remember any life-changing advice during my subsequent career. Who were your early influences? Relatively recently I came across the term ‘role model’. In retrospect, I would have to include my secondary school teachers Elizabeth Bremner (botany), Eluned Leyshon (chemistry) and Eileen Jones (maths) as mine. They were incredibly supportive in preparing for the Oxbridge exams — I was the first girl to do so in sciences from the school. My only disappointment now is that they did not encourage me to question. Miss Leyshon in particular tried to make me more worldly wise with loans of both scientific and non-fiction books, by helping me gain a part-time job in a market garden and, much to the consternation of my parents, showing me how to preserve fruit in various forms of alcohol. At university, my most influential teachers were Janet Harker, my director of studies at Girton, and Enid MacRobbie who, as a biophysicist, introduced me to the quantitative aspects of botany. I suppose now we are in an era of Athena Swan initiatives, but then in the shelter of an all-girls school and Girton, I never realised that women were disadvantaged and, with one exception (from an unmarried woman who felt that a man with a family was more deserving of a job in Cardiff), I have never experienced prejudice, although it was hard going during my son’s early years. Why palaeobotany? Even before university, I had a romantic idea of a research career from school projects. Later in Cambridge, I realised that to achieve this aim, what I lacked in intellect I could compensate for by hard work — a sort of educated parrot. In my final year, I was influenced by two external speakers — a female professor on carbohydrate biochemistry, and Harlan Banks from Cornell, who was an inspirational, arm-waving lecturer and leader of a very active research group. This was the beginning of a major research period on early land plants led by North American palaeobotanists. Banks invited me to join his group and, financed by a NATO studentship, I spent the first year of my PhD research in his department learning techniques. There was no appropriate supervision in Cambridge at the time, when Bill Chaloner in London led research on Palaeozoic palaeobotany. Later in the year, after graduation, I attended my first conference — the tenth International Botanical Congress in Edinburgh. Logistics were horrendous; I lodged in a seedy tenement and seemed to spend more time rushing between lectures than listening to them. It did, however, give me an opportunity to glimpse the ‘big names’ in contemporary palaeobotany. I still dislike large conferences with numerous parallel sessions, and enjoy more intimate interdisciplinary and themed ones — those organised by the New Phytologist Trust come to mind. Who dead would you like to meet? Only in writing this did I realise that I was most influenced by female scientists, and this leads me to Agnes Arber. As only the second woman president of the Linnean Society, I began to look into the struggles of early female botanists in gaining recognition in the academic world. Arber was among them. She was a botanist as well as philosopher with wide cultural interests, who was the first female botanist (and the third female) to become a fellow of the Royal Society in 1946, and although she had lived and worked in Cambridge, never held an appointment at the University. At one stage, she was offered accommodation in the Botany School, but she declined this as it was in the Botanic Gardens at the opposite end of the city to her home on Hills Road, and would have been logistically inconvenient for a widow with a small daughter. Instead, she worked at home where she had converted a maid’s bedroom into a laboratory. Her brilliance had been recognised when she was still at school by another pioneering woman botanist at Girton, Ethel Sargant, who became a life-long friend and supporter. The Girton archive holds a series of fascinating letters sent by Sargant to Arber and kept by Arber (the remainder of her archive was sadly sent to the Hunt Botanical Library in Pittsburgh). Sargant had destroyed all her replies, but from the one-sided correspondence we get a glimpse of the struggles of a married female scientist and the hostility of the male community. This was particularly apparent when Arber was nominated as President of Section K (Botany) for the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences’ annual meeting in Edinburgh in 1921 — a group of male botanists (some of my heroes among them!) united to oppose her. There are records of letters with comments to the effect that it would be an insult to John Balfour (then Professor at Edinburgh) and Edinburgh to have to deal with a woman with inferior academic prowess. Frederick Bower wrote that ‘a botanical gynocracy is unacceptable’. I think Arber and I would have a lot to talk about, not the least her interests in plant morphology and development. If I had to choose a man I’d like to meet, then it would have to be John Lubbock, but that’s another story. Is there too much emphasis on big data collaborations as opposed to hypothesis-driven research? There is a need for both, and in particular in this genomic phase of molecular biology, big data collaborations are the obvious way forward. Indeed, they are in my own field, where assembled data can be effectively used to answer the big ‘sexy’ questions. However, in my own research, funding requirements are not so much based on testing of hypotheses, but in the end are based on the need for generation of data. This is where I would make a case for up-front funding for fundamental discovery science per se (not dressed up as extraordinarily imaginative, often futile hypotheses) to finance the data gatherers, and particularly for technical support and basic infrastructure. As an example in Devonian palaeobotany, I would cite the practice in Münster, where a technician has been employed over tens of years to provide thin slices of fossiliferous chert. These samples have led to major advances in the understanding of early terrestrial ecosystems, including the life cycles of tracheophytes, and plant symbiotic relationships with lichens, mycorrhiza, as well as terrestrial and aquatic arthropods. In my own case, I cannot overestimate the SEM technical support from Lindsey Axe, a school technician available even when I had no grants, and without whom my career would not have been as productive or successful. Finally, I am conscious that big data analyses are only as valuable as the quality of the data on which they rely. What is the use of sequencing an organism of dubious identity? Is there a need for more cross-talk between biological disciplines? Attitudes are changing quickly. While a primary concern for me has been the description of the nature of early vegetation, a major aim to reconstruct their activities as living organisms requires collaboration with neobotanists, and in particular plant physiologists. This I have achieved at a personal level, for example, with John Raven, but attempts to seek funding from the BBSRC have been unsuccessful, because I work in fossils, which is NERC territory. The advent of genomics and its application to consideration of physiology, development and phylogeny of early land plants is already building bridges, as demonstrated, for example, by Liam Dolan and his research group in Oxford. There is also the need for access to equipment for both imaging and chemical analyses. However, there remain problems of attitudes within the biological community itself — particularly as biomedical disciplines merge with more traditional biological ones, and organismal biologists sometimes appear to be fighting a rear-guard action against ‘molecular’ colleagues. Such conflict is fuelled by the use of bibliometrics in assessment of research quality, and a lack of recognition that one size does not fit all when evaluating small communities, where outputs may be better suited to low-impact journals. I (perhaps naively) have been astounded when sitting on various award committees at the ignorance of some, usually younger, members who still equate excellent science with high incomes and h indices — an attitude now very much in evidence at university level, as they cherry pick for REF returns. Now there’s another hobby horse! What would you most want to know? Of course I want to find out if life exists elsewhere in the universe, but I despair when I read time and time again in grant applications that we seem to need to justify fundamental research on life on this planet to facilitate evaluation or detection of life on Mars, which at best will be at microbial level. I want to know about the origin of life on Earth and, closer to home, the nature of land vegetation before the dominance of vascular plants (through the discovery of megafossils yielding anatomical as well as morphological information) and its impact on lithosphere and atmosphere. What advice would you give to young biologists? Keep your options open as long as possible. Never choose a pathway where you have doubts or dislikes. Keep up with the physical sciences and maths. Enjoy your PhD. Read Jane Austen for succinct prose.