Lumen Waite 100 - Flipbook - Page 53
WORDS › SARAH KEENIHAN | PICTURES › JACK FENBY
It can take years to be in the right
place at the right time. Waite has a
legacy – and a future – of turning
incidental discoveries into worldshifting knowledge.
Cauliflowers. That’s the crop Professor John Randles
focused on as an Honours student in agricultural science at
the University of Adelaide’s Waite campus.
It was the 1960s and methods for studying plant viruses were in their infancy, but Randles wanted to investigate
plant disease. The researcher’s data collection methods
were also low-tech at this time. You could call it a walk
in the park.
“Every two weeks, I’d put my gumboots on and stomp
about in the Hills, counting the number of cauliflower
plants affected by a particular virus,” Randles says. From
these simple beginnings, Randles and his colleagues slowly
built capability in plant virology. “We developed methods
for purifying plant viruses, for pulling them apart, for
visualising and identifying them in a whole range of
crops,” he says.
The project was the beginning of a more than five-decade career on plant disease – one which would have far
broader influence than the health of cauliflowers in the Adelaide Hills.
In the early 1970s, John was sent to the Philippines as a
consultant with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of
LUMEN
the United Nations to investigate cadang-cadang – a disease killing coconut palms. Cadang-cadang had killed 40
million coconut palms in the Philippines and caused US$4
billion in economic losses. Thankfully, John had the right
toolkit to be of assistance.
“With a virus hypothesis in mind, we applied all the techniques we had previously developed,” John says. “This allowed us to identify it wasn’t actually a virus, but rather an
entity known as a viroid that was responsible.”
Viroids are smaller than viruses and made of RNA. John
was the first to show these tiny culprits were the causal agent of cadang-cadang. It was an exciting moment of
discovery built on a decade of exploratory research. The
applications of the knowledge were global.
“We subsequently found viroids in coconut palms in
Guam, and in another economically important crop
in the Oceania region – palm oil,” John says. “It’s been
a fascinating adventure, all stemming from an ‘a-ha’
moment in 1974.”
Like the generations of researchers who came before
them, current Waite academics are pursuing their own ‘aha’ moments. This has often occurred through the freedom
of enquiry known as blue-sky research, but one Waite-based
program is extending its focus beyond even that seemingly
limitless boundary.
Backed by $35 million in federal government funding,
an additional $15 million cash and $40 million of in-kind
support from academic, government and industry partners,
the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S)
has a bold mission.