Word: stakman
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DIED. Elvin C. Stakman, 93, pre-eminent plant pathologist who led the war against wheat diseases; in St. Paul. Combating the fungus diseases called rusts, he attached Vaseline-coated slides to plane wings in 1921 and by collecting the parasitic red spores in the air, proved that the disease blew seasonally across the nation. A member of the University of Minnesota faculty (1909-53) and the Rockefeller Foundation, "Stak" increased the world's wheat yields by breeding new, hardier strains as the fungi also continued to evolve. "Find out all you have to buck," he once said, "and then...
...Stakman, 59, is perhaps the world's No. 1 expert on cereal diseases. On a 40-acre laboratory plot at Minnesota, he cultivates almost every plant disease known to the Midwest. There are thousands upon thousands. Stake's object is to develop tough new varieties of wheat and other cereals that will resist these diseases. But no sooner does he defeat one disease than a brand-new one, almost invariably, breaks out. Thirty-five years of such battling has convinced Stake that, for all of science, the best man can ever hope to do against bugs and plant...
From Scab to Smut. The war against wheat rust is at least as old as the ancient Egyptians. For 700 years the Romans propitiated a special god of stem rust, Robigo. But Elvin Stakman was one of the first to plumb the secrets of plant fungi growth. He discovered that every fungus contains a number of parasitic strains, and that a single fungus cell may produce thousands of varieties which look alike but differ in their plant tastes...
...example, when Marquis wheat was introduced, it stood off stem rusts but developed "head blighter scab"; Durham wheat overcame scab but succumbed to root rot. Kota, the next wheat hope, yielded to smut. Stakman, collaborating with the Department of Agriculture, has developed hardier & hardier wheat. But No. 56 has baffled him for 16 years...
Nonetheless, Stakman is no gloomy defeatist. His $300,000 laboratory at the University of Minnesota is one of the liveliest in the U.S., pulsing with Arrowsmithian fervor. His graduates have scattered over the earth, today are fighting fungi in Europe, Australia, China, India. Stake's popularity with youngsters is the talk of the campus. Told that her family planned to have steak for dinner, a faculty tot once burst into tears, sobbed: "But I like him. He's nice...