(The following text has been provided by Dr. Roger Croston)
Biography of Jack G. HAWKES
(The following text has been provided by Dr. Roger Croston)
John Gregory HAWKES was globally recognised amongst crop scientists as an outstanding expert, researcher, teacher and visionary in the conservation and utilisation of crop plant genetic resources. He was the world’s leading authority on the evolution and genetics of one of the most important staple foods, the potato. His work was of immense importance in safeguarding the genetic building blocks of the world’s food supply for plant breeders. When, in 1984, he was awarded the Linnean Society of London’s Medal for Botany, he was regarded “as having few rivals and no equals.”
The greatest influence on his life was his chance meeting in 1938 with the brilliant Russian academician Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov in Leningrad, who, amongst many posts, was one time President of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences; President of the Geographical Society of the USSR and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Vavilov, born in 1887, was to be murdered by the state on trumped up charges in 1943 as a consequence of the politics of the notorious Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) – a highly politicised biologist whose scientific views have since been discredited. When introduced to Lysenko, Hawkes found him “A dangerous, bigoted and wholly repellent person – a politician rather than a scientist, very able to ingratiate himself with communist Moscow.” In 1935 Vavilov had commenced publishing “The Theoretical Bases of Plant Breeding”. Hawkes, who had just taken a first class degree in Natural Science at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1937, was fascinated by this monumental 2,500 page work and he had travelled to Leningrad to meet Messrs Bukasov and Juzepczuk to study the potato collections they had recently gathered in South America. At that time plant breeders at the Commonwealth Bureau of Plant Genetics, Cambridge, were in great need of a wider selection of genetic material. Realising the urgency, the institute’s director, Dr. P. Hudson, decided on making a collecting expedition to the Andes and he had recruited Hawkes as his assistant. Unfortunately, ill health prevented Hudson from travelling and the consequent delay allowed Hawkes to visit the USSR before setting off on “The British Empire Potato Collecting Expedition 1938-39” under the leadership of Edward Balls accompanied by William Gourlay.
The three scientists set out from Lima, Peru, in January 1939 on what was to be the first of Hawkes’s dozen major potato collecting expeditions throughout South America over the next 42 years. During eight months the expedition travelled 9,000 miles along the eastern side of the continent to finish in Panama. In some remote areas they enjoyed the hospitality and generous assistance of long settled European and North American expatriates “who were only too glad of someone else to talk to.” In April, the team visited the Uro Indians who lived very simply on floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca. Such encounters with indigenous peoples captivated Hawkes with an enthusiasm with which he was later to inspire many students. At Macchu Picchu, in May, the collectors were so overawed by the archaeology that they missed discovering a rare species of potato growing next to their hotel, which was found in 1943 by local professors Cardenas and Vargas who named it Solanum hawksii in honour of Hawkes who had barely yet established himself in the crop’s study. During the journey, Hawkes got used to South American bureaucracy and its “comic opera routines” and learnt to accept it with “a shrug of the shoulders as a fact of South American life.” In September, at the expedition’s end, he voyaged home on a ship of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company that was among eight ships to form one of the first wartime Atlantic convoys and one which suffered several U-boat scares. Sixty years later Hawkes was to recount his first expedition in vivid detail in “Hunting the Wild Potato in the South American Andes” – a highly readable book about their daily adventures at a time when old fashioned transport by horse, mule or on foot was still a frequent necessity.
Returning to Cambridge, as a scientific officer – a reserved wartime occupation – Hawkes embarked on studying the more than a thousand potato samples the expedition had collected, for his doctorate, which he completed in 1941. Following this evaluation, he dispatched much useful new genetic material to plant breeders in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. Continuing this research until 1948 he became engrossed in understanding the complex relationships between the many species “of the humble spud” and in assessing them for pest and disease resistance. A fascination which occupied his life and he unstintingly shared his knowledge.
Hawkes was next seconded for three years to the Government of Colombia as the first director of their Potato Research Station in Bogot á. His wife and two daughters accompanied him and it was here that their twin sons were born. In this post he collected potatoes in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. With local colleagues he obtained fifty percent increases in crop yields by breeding new hybrid potato varieties.
Returning to England from Colombia he was engaged at the Agricultural Research Council’s Potato Genetics Station for a year and in 1952 took up a lectureship in Taxonomic Botany at the University of Birmingham. In 1961 he was appointed to a personal Chair as Professor of Plant Taxonomy and Head of the Department of Plant Biology until retirement in 1982. As Emeritus Professor he continued to work into his late 80s and, for example, undertook research in the ‘Municipal Archives of Seville 1573-1601’ to ascertain which potato varieties had been first introduced into Europe from the New World.
Few botanists worked with both wild and domesticated plants and Hawkes’s combined studies of these, especially the transitions in potatoes from wild to semi-cultivated and domesticated plants gave him an immense understanding of the origins and development of agriculture and he developed new, now widely accepted theories of the processes involved. Such academic research enabled him to introduce genes from wild and weedy species into the commercial crop and he became aware of its vast potential for improving food production worldwide. He began to study the origin, evolution and genetic diversity of other crops and he was one of the first, along with Jack Harlan in the USA, to realise that this valuable ancient heritage was fast being lost as a result of modern agricultural methods. In the 1950s he began to conserve genetic materials – a concept which later developed into an international system of gene banks once finance was eventually forthcoming in the 1970s from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN and the Rockefeller Foundation amongst others.
Realising that training was non-existent in developing countries where most genetic diversity is found, Hawkes established an international M.Sc. postgraduate course in 1969 at Birmingham and he developed the subject of plant genetic resources as its own discipline. He emphasised that students should be trained in fieldwork and “should think for themselves” and be able to use practical botany in plant breeding, crop protection and food production. Many students went on to occupy senior positions in genetic resources conservation in many lands.
Over many years, Hawkes eventually worked out the interrelationships between the more than 230 wild potato species. He was the first to clearly discover the evolutionary sequence of the cultivated potato and identify its four wild ancestors – a unique breakthrough for the crop whose origin until then had only been surmised. His work in the 1950s was pioneering and was the first to attempt geographical genetic mapping to help breeders find disease and pest resistance and he pioneered the use of computer mapping techniques when studying the flora of the English county of Warwickshire. Working with P. Gall and S. Wright at Birmingham University’s Medical School he initiated the use of human blood immunology techniques to understand plant species affiliations and they published a landmark paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1960. In the 1980s he established new ideas on conserving economic species of tropical forest trees.
In all Hawkes was to write, co-author or edit more than 240 scientific books and papers between 1941 and 2004, the first and last - coming full circle - covering the British Empire Potato Collecting Expedition. Among his main publications are:
Hawkes’s expertise was widely recognised and he served on many committees,
which included:- President of the EUCARPIA Gene Bank Committee for 30 years from 1961; an expert panel member on genetic resources for the FAO of the UN from 1964-84; advisor to the American Potato Introduction Station, Wisconsin; advisor to the International Potato Center, Lima, Peru, 1972-1984; the Scientific Advisory Panel to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, from 1975-1984; Vice President of the 12th International Botanical Congress, Leningrad, 1975, where he was awarded a Congress Medal; President of the Linnean Society of London, 1991-94 and he was latterly adviser to the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) Botanic Gardens Secretariat on conserving wild plant genetic resources.
He received various honours, including awards from The American Genetics Association (1973); The Potato Association of America (1973); The Linnean Society of London Medal for Botany (1984); Honorary Member of EUCARPIA (1989); The N.I. Vavilov Centenary Medal of the USSR Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1990, of which he was immensely proud) and in 1994 he was awarded the OBE.
In 1997, sponsored by the Linnean Society of London, he visited the N.I. Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) to discuss genetic resources and proposals for establishing strong collaborative links between the United Kingdom and the former countries of the USSR. In 1999 the institute awarded him an Emeritus Professorship – the second only and the first to a non-Russian. Thus his life had come full circle from his student days when Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov had been his greatest influence.
The immense wealth of the Solanaceae species collection, which includes many potatoes, that Hawkes and colleagues built up during many years at Birmingham University is now deposited and cared for by the University of Nijmegen Botanical Garden, The Netherlands.
John Gregory Hawkes was the son of the head of a technical college and was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School. In 1941 he married Barbara Leather whom he had met in ‘The Left Bookshop’ in the city of Cambridge where she was studying sociology at the London School of Economics’ wartime evacuation from London. The Hawkeses were generous with their hospitality at home to many overseas students from 70 nations ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
There can be no better epitaph for “JGH” as he was known to many, than that of an introduction given to the Linnean Society in London in the 1970s when Hawkes was announced as “The Golden Wonder of the Potato World.”
He is survived by his four children.
Professor John Gregory Hawkes, BA; MA; Ph.D; Sc.D; OBE.
Born Bristol 27th June 1915.
Died Reading 6th September 2007.