Previous Award Winners

GORDON CRAGG

Gordon Cragg obtained his undergraduate training in chemistry at Rhodes University, South Africa, and his D. Phil.(organic chemistry) from Oxford University in 1963. After two years of postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles, he returned to S. Africa to join the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. In 1966, he joined Chemistry Department at the University of South Africa, and transferred to the University of Cape Town in 1972. In 1979, he returned to the US to join the Cancer Research Institute at Arizona State University. In 1985, he moved to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, and was appointed Chief of the Natural Products Branch in 1989. He retired in December, 2004, and is currently serving as an NIH Special Volunteer. His major interests lie in the discovery of novel natural product agents for the treatment of cancer and AIDS. He has given over 100 invited talks at conferences in many countries worldwide, and has been awarded NIH Merit Awards for his contributions to the development of taxol (1991), leadership in establishing international collaborative research in biodiversity and natural products drug discovery (2004), and contributions to developing and teaching NIH technology transfer courses (2004). In 1998-1999 he was President of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, and was elected to Honorary Membership in 2003. He has established collaborations between the NCI and organizations in many countries promoting drug discovery from their natural resources. He has published over 140 papers related to these interests.

In addition to Dr. Cragg's remendously productive career as a cancer researcher, he has also made great contributions to biodiversity conservation. Dr. Cragg has been a tireless advocate for conservation of natural resources, which he sees as a repository of chemical diversity and thus a vitally important resource upon which humankind relies for the future of its health care.

Through the Natural Products Branch, Dr. Cragg played a key role in the development of the Letter of Intent, later Letter of Collection, which is the boiler plate agreement ensuring equitable benefit sharing with countries that provide the source material for drug discovery. This approach fully anticipated the Convention on Biological Diversity by three years and has been used as the primary model for such agreements in all subsequent discovery programs.

Gordon Cragg's advocacy for natural products has been legendary. Through dozens of publications, many written with NCI colleagues David Newman and Ken Snader, Dr. Cragg has documented the role of natural products in drug discovery. His influence throughout NIH was one of the factors leading to several other programs focused on natural products, including the NCDDGs, the National Cooperative Drug Discovery Groups.

One such program, the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups, or ICBG, is particularly noteworthy. Directed by Drs. Josh Rosenthal and Flora Katz of the Fogarty International Center, and co-funded by NIH, NSF, and USDA, this program has been designed to support natural products discovery in pharmaceutical and agricultural areas but to do so in biodiverse tropical countries in a manner that supports both conservation and economic development. The kinds of commitments that Gordon Cragg helped foster at NCI had a profound influence on the aim of the ICBG program to conduct research in a manner that has truly benefited the countries where the projects have been conducted.

View photos of the award ceremony.

HENRY SHANDS

Dr. Henry L. Shands, the 2004 recipient of the William L. Brown Award for Excellence in Genetic Resources Conservation, has devoted more than 50 years of his life to various genetic resources programs—as a student, post-doctoral researcher, public and private plant breeder, and, for the past 18 years, as a senior administrator positions with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He currently serves as the Director of the USDA-Agricultural Research Services’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Dr. Shands is a world-renowned leader in plant genetic resource conservation. As National Program Leader and later as Assistant Administrator for the USDA-ARS, Dr. Shands provided critical leadership to the U.S. National Genetic Resources Program from 1986 until 2000. His accomplishments include forming an internationally recognized, coherent, and accountable system of germplasm sites to collect, evaluate, and distribute germplasm both within the U.S. and throughout the World. The establishment and refinement of the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) allows the exchange of information and resources in and orderly and timely manner. His leadership in establishing and coordinating the Latin American Maize Project (LAMP) gained global recognition for the project, which promotes cooperation among member countries, ensuring that valuable genetic resources are both documented and utilized by breeders around the world.

From 1989 to 1992, Dr. Shands served as the key contact from the USDA for the Department of State’s involvement in the international Biodiversity negotiations. In 1988, Dr. Shands was appointed Executive Secretary to the National Plant Genetic Resources Board and served from 1992 to 2000 in a similar capacity on the USDA’s National Genetic Resources Advisory Council, reporting directly to the Secretary of Agriculture. His international service on various committees includes: ex-officio member of Canada’s Expert Committee on Plant and Microbial Genetic Resources; panel chair, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) for the evaluation of its genetic resources program across all centers; program review committee member for several CGIAR centers to assess and upgrade their programs and advise the World Bank on funding initiatives; member of the Rural Development Department of the World Bank to assess genetic resources issues; and representative to the FAO Commission on Plant Genetic Resources.

In his current position as Director of the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, Dr. Shands has overseen the expansion of the mission of the Center to include animal genetic resources. The unique capability for cryogenic storage of both plant and animal materials is a showcase for all genebanks. While leading the National Germplasm System, Dr. Shands had the foresight to include cryogenic capability in the construction of the new NSSL in 1990. This has now come to full fruition with the addition of animal, and in the near future, insect and microbial germplasm.

Throughout his distinguished career, Dr. Shands has been an instigator of cooperation among various program units within the National Plant Germplasm System, as well as among USDA-ARS programs and various international germplasm programs (in India, China, Brazil, Russia, and elsewhere). His broad knowledge and expertise are unequalled, and his advice on all sorts of genetic resources questions is highly sought.

Previous honors given to Dr. Shands include the Frank N. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources, USDA Superior Service Award, American Seed Trade Association Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and the Distinguished Agricultural Alumni Award from Purdue University. He has also been named a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Fellow of the Crop Science Society of America, Fellow of the American Society of Agronomy, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

CARLOS OCHOA

For 40 years, Peruvian plant explorer Carlos Ochoa has scoured the rugged Andean mountains and valleys in search of wild potato species. Many of the species he discovered and saved for future scientific work are now believed to be extinct in the wild—buried under volcanic ash in Colombia, scraped away by bulldozers building the Pan American highway, and crushed under the construction of slums on the outskirts of Lima, Peru.

Before joining CIP in 1971, Ochoa was a professor of plant breeding at Peru's National Agrarian University in La Molina. In 1969, he rediscovered a potato first described in the 1830s by Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. It was the first reported sighting of that species in more than 150 years.

Ochoa's explorations were often dangerous, bringing him into contact with bandits and guerrillas. One time, near the Peruvian village of Chota, a band of thieves mistook him for a treasure hunter and tried to kill him by rolling giant boulders down a mountainside. He escaped with a wild potato species by ducking under a rocky overhang. In Colombia, years ago, he managed to collect a wild potato species and escape down a mountainside before a long-dormant volcano erupted and destroyed the remaining plants.

In the rainy season, when potato plants bloom and are easy to find, Ochoa continues to trek through Andean valleys in search of still-undiscovered wild potatoes. But he believes that the chance of finding many more wild potato species is remote—that most of the uncollected ones have probably been destroyed by man or nature.

Of the potato species known to exist, Ochoa has discovered about a third of all the wild potatoes known—more than any man in history. Recently, a newly described wild relative of the potato was named after him by scientists at the University of Connecticut. Solanum cochoae is believed to have heat-resistant properties and could prove to be a source for breeding tropical potatoes. It is the third wild species to be named after Ochoa.

In 1992, Professor Ochoa was named winner of the Organization of American States $30,000 Inter-American Science Prize. He has also received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Minnesota for his significant contribution to the genetic improvement of potatoes. Ochoa, who began his work at the National Agrarian University in La Molina, is a Scientist Emeritus at CIP and winner of other important prizes and recognition. He is a fellow of both the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Linnaeus Society. He currently works documenting the hundreds of plants he has collected during his career. His book, Potatoes of South America: Bolivia, published by Cambridge University Press, is considered one of the definitive works on the diversity and taxonomy of the potato. His more recent book, Potatoes of South America: Peru, offers a thorough description of about 100 wild species of the tuber-bearing Solanum. This represents nearly 50 percent of the wild species known to exist in the Americas. Almost two-thirds of these were discovered and classified as new species by the author himself.

CALVIN QUALSET

Calvin O. Qualset has devoted forty years to the study and use of plant genetic resources. His early motivation was inspired by the needs for genetic resources in crop improvement through plant breeding. This took him to the study of the genetics of traits important to the adaptation of crop plants, principally wheat, and to design efficient strategies and methods of plant breeding. He was inspired to turn attention to genetic resources research by the simple observation that the only gene conferring resistance to the barley yellow dwarf virus in barley was found only in barleys from Ethiopia. Geographic differentiation was an important concept revealed by Nikolai Vavilov, Jack Harlan, and others. Qualset and his students began a series of studies on world collections of durum wheats and barley and the Bari, Italy durum wheat collections from Ethiopia, Algeria, and Sicily where multitrait associations could be related to spatial differentiation and on-farm selection for adaptation during the domestication of wheats. Triticale is a synthetic crop produced by hybridization of wheat and rye. Thus rye was used as means to expand the gene pool of wheat and to produce a new crop with its own unique properties. This crop presented new challenges in plant breeding which were addressed in a 20-year breeding program at University of California, Davis. A study of the triticale genetic resources developed in Canada, U.S.A, and Mexico revealed that adaptive genetic differentiation had already occurred in this young crop.

Through collaborations with colleagues in Italy, a series of studies were initiated with a wild, diploid, outcrossing relative of wheat, Dasypyrum villosum, which is native to marginal lands in the Mediterranean region. Collections from native stands in Yugoslavia and Italy, grown in common gardens, were found to show geographic diversity and traits useful in wheat breeding, such as resistance to several diseases, salt tolerance, and seed protein variants. Hybridization with durum wheat resulted in a productive combination, ‘Tritipyrum’, rather similar to triticale.

The importance of landraces to extant farmers and as genetic resources for plant breeding became more obvious through studies of collected materials. In spite of the widely known replacement of landraces by improved varieties, there are large areas in which landraces are preferred over ‘improved’ varieties in many crops. The lack of penetration improved varieties to the fields of many farmers in developing countries, was more than a curiosity. The reasons were largely unknown, or anecdotal at best. Clearly, ethnological, genetic and agronomic factors must be examined. A series of studies in Turkish wheats with Steve Brush and students in the mountainous transition zone in western Turkey revealed farmer preferences for their native wheats because of stability of production, bread-making properties, and value of the straw as fodder for their animals. The concept of this study was extended recently to the multicrop milpa system in Mexico, where maize, squash, beans, and wild plants are the principal components of a food system in large areas, mostly mountainous, of Mexico. The progenitors of these crops are sympatric, making an ideal opportunity for study of diversity and gene flow. With support of The McKnight Foundation, scientists and students from eight research institutions in Mexico and U.S.A. undertook socio-economic, genetic, and plant breeding studies on this important cropping system which largely dominated by landrace varieties.

Qualset is a retired professor at the University of California, Davis, and recently retired as the founding director of the Genetic Resources Conservation Program, a statewide unit of the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. He continues to serve as Research Professor and conducts and coordinates research on plant genomics, in-situ and ex-situ conservation of cereal crops. He serves on various boards and committees, including the Board of Trustees of the International Rice Research Institute. With some 50 graduate students and other colleagues, nearly 20 varieties of wheat, triticale, and oat were released and more than 350 research papers, reviews, and reports were published. He also served terms as Department Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Foundation Seed and Plant Materials Service in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis. Cal received his BS in Agriculture at the University of Nebraska and MS and Ph.D. at UC Davis in Agronomy and Genetics, respectively.