「植物看得見你」公開課筆記／1.3 Plants & Biology Research

Three examples of scientists who used plants as their model systems.

The last 20-30 years of his life, Charles Darwin only studied plants and plant movements. And Darwin was one of the first people to ask the question, what does a plant see?

Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics. This monk and his peas really founded the basis of all modern genetic research, which affects not only agriculture, but also modern medicine.

Barbara McClintock was a botanist. She got her PhD in plant biology, in botany. She did a huge amount of work in cytogenetics, discovered many of the modern principles of genetics. Most importantly, in the early 1950s, she discovered transposons. She discovered that pieces of DNA can move in the genome. And this was going against the whole paradigm that the genome was immutable and unchangeable. Unfortunately, her work wasn't accepted in that time. She was actually quite derided for her ideas, and she stopped publishing on it. Now you could say maybe this was because she was a woman. Maybe because the idea was so new. But the kicker to this is, in 1983, she got the Nobel Prize for her finding. She's the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in medicine on her own without anyone else joining in with her. What she discovered using corn in the early 50s is now the basis for many of the cancers that humans get.

2 billion years ago, both animals and plants originated from the same unicellular organisms. So much of the biology that we find in animals is also shared with plants.

The other reason for studying plants is that they are a unique biological system. How do plants make flowers? How does a sequoia tree manage to get the water from its roots up almost 100 meters into the ground? These are incredible biological questions that plant scientists are asking today.