Students' Centennial Garden

 

A beautiful new garden is blooming behind Warren Hall and the Mann Library addition. Under the guidance of professors Peter Trowbridge and Nina Bassuk, landscape architecture and horticulture students in this year's Creating the Urban Eden course are designing and installing the new public space in a neglected triangular area formed when Mann's new building was completed four years ago. Collaborating with the students is sculptor Rebecca Thompson (MFA '03), who has created stone benches and trellis sculptures for the garden that incorporate architectural remnants from original buildings on the Ag Quad.

Complementing both the adjoining Deans' Garden behind Warren Hall and the McGregor Arcade behind the Mann addition, the new garden is named the Centennial Students' Garden. It will serve to commemorate not only the CALS centennial, but also the students' role in creating the garden and the rich contributions of many generations of CALS students.

This new space, made possible by a generous pledge by CALS alumnus John Dyson '65, is filled with a variety of plants selected both for their beauty in a shady spot and their usefulness as teaching specimens for future classes. This includes trees like magnolia and Japanese maple, shrubs such as Virginia sweetspire and dogwood, and groundcovers like hosta (four different kinds) and Canby's mountain-lover. The garden will also serve as a compost research site, where organic waste from places such as campus dining facilities will be tested as soil-improving agents.

A Tradition of Discovery at CALS

 

Teaching, research, and extension in the life sciences have had a long, distinguished history at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at Cornell, dating back to the university's founding in 1868.

Throughout the years, CALS researchers have probed and investigated genetic functions in plants and animals, making genetic breakthroughs that form the bedrock of genomic research today.

The following timeline highlights some milestones of CALS as it develops into a premier institution for biological research in the 21st century.

• 1868 Cornell University opens with 30 students enrolled in agriculture.
• 1888 The College of Agriculture is formed with departments in agriculture, veterinary science, agriculture chemistry, botany, entomology, and horticulture.
• 1888 Liberty Hyde Bailey is recruited to Cornell as professor of horticulture. He later wills to Cornell his collection of papers, including a copy of Mendel's original paper on the laws of inheritance in garden peas.
• 1908 The Laboratory of Plant Breeding is established with 13 graduate students and $600 for research.
• 1914 Rollins A. Emerson, who provided evidence that characteristics like yield, vigor, and quality are controlled by specific genes, becomes head of Cornell department of plant breeding.
• 1921 Would-be Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock attends the only genetics course open to undergraduate students.
• 1923 The NYS Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., established in 1880, becomes part of the College of Agriculture.
• 1928 Marcus M. Rhoades begins doctoral work, exploring the relation between chromosomes and genes with George W. Beadle. Rollins A. Emerson also establishes Maize Genetics Corporation, which Rhoades will coordinate.
• 

  McClintock at work.

• 1929 Barbara McClintock and her colleagues complete studies aimed at associating each of the 10 chromosomes comprising the maize complement with the genes each carries, making remarkable advances in maize cytogenetics.
• 1931 Barbara McClintock and graduate student Harriet Creighton publish their work correlating genetic and chromosomal crossover.
• 1932 Rollins A. Emerson hosts the Sixth International Congress of Genetics at Cornell.
• 1939 G. W. Salisbury initiates a significant research program in animal breeding and artificial insemination.
• 1940s Plant breeders Henry Munger, Neal Jensen, Royse Murphy, and Rollins Emerson begin releasing new and improved strains of field and vegetable crops.
• 1946 Biochemistry and nutrition professor James B. Sumner wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing that enzymes are proteins.
• 1947 M. Rosalind Morris and Leona O. Schnell become the first women at Cornell to receive PhDs in plant breeding.
• 1950s Animal scientists R. W. Bratton and Robert Foote conduct pioneering work that boosts bull semen preservation and fertility.
• 1950s Geneticist Adrian Srb introduces biochemical genetics to Cornell. He works out the genetic control of biochemical pathways in bread mold (Neurospora). Srb and geneticist Ray Owen publish General Genetics, which will become a standard basic text.
• 1954 Animal scientist Charles R. Henderson revolutionizes dairy cattle breeding with new techniques, and establishes Cornell as world leader in applied genetics through artificial insemination for animal breeding, particularly dairy cattle.
• 1958 Cornell alumnus and former agriculture professor George W. Beadle co-wins Nobel Prize in Physiology for his one geneÐone enzyme work with the bread mold Neurospora that began at Cornell 30 years earlier.
• 1958 Geneticist Margaret Emmerling is first woman to join Cornell genetics/plant breeding faculty. Geneticist Bruce Wallace introduces population and evolutionary genetics to Cornell. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Barbara McClintock.
•  
  1960s Charles R. Henderson develops new methods of predicting an animals genetic ability. His Best Linear Unbiased PredictionÓbecomes known worldwide as the way to evaluate animals genetically.
• 1964 The Division of Biological Sciences is organized to chart the course of basic biology at Cornell.
• 1965 Entomology professor Wendell L. Roelofs begins research on insect pheromones, leading to the development of microchemical techniques for the isolation and identification of pheromone components in more than 50 insect species.
• 1966 The Empire apple is introduced by the NYS Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva.
• 1968 Robert William Holley, former Cornell professor of biochemistry, wins Nobel Prize in Medicine for characterizing alanine transfer RNA, a key step for molecular genetics.
• 1968 Genetics research moves from plant breeding to the newly established Division of Biological Sciences, which includes the Section of Genetics, Development, and Physiology, headed by geneticist Robert A. Morison.
• 1972 The Integrated Pest Management Program is developed to help growers optimize expenditures by monitoring and forecasting the emergence of pests and using a combination of chemical, cultural, and biological controls.
• 1980s Plant pathologists Hans Van Etten and Olen Yoder identify and clone pathogenicity genes in pathogenic plant fungi. Cornell-developed methods for preserving bull semen are used in artificial breeding for 80 percent of the worlds dairy cows.
• 1983 The Cornell Biotechnology Program is established to promote the new discipline of modern biotechnology.
• 1983 Barbara McClintock becomes the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for her work on transposable elements in maize started at Cornell 30 years earlier.
• 1984 Animal science professor Dale E. Bauman demonstrates that recombinant bovine somatotropin (BST) stimulates milk production in cows.
• 1986 The gene gun and the biolistics process are invented by plant scientist John Sanford, working with engineer Edward Wolf and machinist Nelson Allen, to shoot DNA into plant and animal cells.
• 1990s Cornell enters a new era of nanotechnoloqy research into biochips to sequence DNA and supercomputer-based programs to pinpoint genomic landmarks.
• 1993 Plant breeding professor Steven Tanksley becomes the first to use map-based cloning in crop plants, successfully locating and transferring disease-resistance genes to tomatoes.
• 1995 Horticulture science professor Norm Weeden develops the technology for creating the matrix mill, a device for quickly grinding plant or animal tissue so that DNA is separated from the tissue.
• 1996 Papaya, the first genetically engineered fruit crop, is released by plant pathologist Dennis Gonsalves and his associates. It played a major role in helping Hawaii stave off a papaya disease crisis that threatened to destroy an important industry.
•  
  1997 The Cornell Genomics Initiative is launched, a blueprint to make the university a world leader in exploiting the results of DNA sequencing.
• 1998 The USDA-funded Genome Database Projects are established in Department of Plant Breeding to organize molecular and agricultural information about rice, small grains and Solanaceous crops for global computer access.
• 1998 Food science professor Carl Batt creates biosensors built on nanofabrication and biology technologies that revolutionized bacteria detection in food, water, and the environment.
• 1999 USDA establishes the Center for Bioinformatics and Comparative Genomics at Cornell.
• 2001 Cornell Genomics Initiative enters Phase II expansion for more resources and personnel, including a new life sciences building. It is potentially one of the largest funding initiatives in Cornell's history.
• 2001 Biological engineering professor Carlo D. Montemagno and his team of nanobiotechnologists successfully build and pilot-test the first biomolecular motors with tiny metal propellers.
• 2002 Cornell becomes the home of the Honeybee Genetics and Integrated Pest Management Center established by USDA.
• 2004 Plant breeder Steven Tanksley is co-recipient of the international Wolf Foundation Prize in Agriculture and cited as one of the world leaders in plant genomic research.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

So bountiful hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn from it our sustenance, that we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very much considered the essential relation that we bear to it as living parts in the vast creation.

 

 

It is good to think of ourselves-of this teeming, tense, and aspiring human race-as a helpful and contributing part in the plan of a cosmos, and as participators in some far-reaching destiny. The idea of responsibility is much asserted of late, but we relate it mostly to the attitude of persons in the realm of conventional conduct, which we have come to regard as very exclusively in the realm of morals; and we have established certain formalities that satisfy the conscience. But there is some deeper relation than all this, which we must recognize and the consequences of which we must practice. There is a directer and more personal obligation than that which expends itself in loyalty to the manifold organizations and social requirements of the present day. There is a more fundamental cooperation in the scheme of things than that which deals with the proprieties or which centers about the selfishness too often expressed in the salvation of one's soul.

We can only be onlookers on that part of the cosmos that we call the far heavens, but it is possible to cooperate in the processes on the surface of the sphere. This cooperation may be conscious and definite, and also useful to the earth; that is, it may be real. What means this contact with our natural situation, this relationship to the earth to which we are born, and what signify this new exploration and conquest of the planet and these accumulating prophecies of science? Does the mothership of the earth have any real meaning to us?

All this does not imply a relation only with material and physical things, nor any effort to substitute a nature religion. Our relation to the planet must be raised into the realm of spirit; we cannot be fully useful otherwise. We must find a way to maintain the emotions in the abounding commercial civilization. There are two kinds of materials-those of the native earth and the idols of one's hands. The latter are much in evidence in modern life, with the conquests of engineering, mechanics, architecture, and all the rest. We visualize them everywhere, and particularly in the great centers of population. The tendency is to be removed farther and farther from the everlasting backgrounds. Our religion is detached.

We come out of the earth and we have a right to the use of the materials; and there is no danger of crass materialism if we recognize the original materials as divine and if we understand our proper relation to the creation, for then will gross selfishness in the use of them be removed. This will necessarily mean a better conception of property and of one's obligation in the use of it. We shall conceive of the earth, which is the common habitation, as inviolable. One does not act rightly toward one's fellows if one does not know how to act rightly toward the earth.

Nor does this close regard for the mother earth imply any loss of mysticism or of exaltation: quite the contrary. Science but increases the mystery of the unknown and enlarges the boundaries of the spiritual vision. To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires-when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their term; and here also the responsible practices of life take root.

So much are we now involved in the problems of human groups, so persistent are the portrayals of our social afflictions, and so well do we magnify our woes by insisting on them, so much in sheer weariness do we provide antidotes to soothe our feelings and to cause us to forget by means of many empty diversions, that we may neglect to express ourselves in simple free personal joy and to separate the obligation of the individual from the irresponsibilities of the mass.

A reprint of The Holy Earth is available for purchase for $6.65, plus $5.00 shipping and handling per order (New York State residents add 8.25% sales tax) from:

Resource Center,
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PO Box 3884,
Ithaca, NY 14852-3884

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