Agriculture

Martinus Th. “Rien” van Genuchten

Affiliation at the time of the award:

The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Award citation:

“for his groundbreaking work in understanding water flow and predicting contaminant transport in soils”.

Prize share:

None

Martinus Theodorus Van Genuchten, born in Vught, Netherlands, received his early education at the Agricultural U, Wageningen, and his Doctorate in the United States, at the New Mexico State University. Van Genuchten has had an exemplary and influential career, with numerous collaborations across the globe. He further served as co-editor and deputy editor, of nine journals and launched the Vadose Zone Journal, dedicated to the science of the near-surface environment.

The vadose zone is the undersaturated portion of the subsurface that lies above the groundwater table. The soil and rock in the vadose zone are not fully saturated with water; that is, the pores within them contain air as well as water. The movement of water within the vadose zone is important to agriculture, contaminant transport, and flood control. It is intensively used for the cultivation of plants, construction of buildings, and disposal of waste, and crucial in determining the amount and quality of groundwater that is available for human use.

During his 40-year career, Professor Van Genuchten transformed the broad fields of soil physics and vadose zone hydrology, which are central to modern agricultural operations and climate science. He created a much-needed scientific basis for understanding fluid flow and contaminant transport processes in unsaturated soils, including their interactions with the atmosphere above and groundwater below. Contemporary vadose zone hydrology is unthinkable without his many contributions, which established links between agriculture, soil science, geology, environmental sciences, and civil engineering. Particularly important were his studies on the basic processes governing water and chemical transport in soil systems, with his work on the nonequilibrium transport of agricultural chemicals remaining a landmark.
He pioneered the representation of dual-porosity and dual-permeability models considering mobile and immobile liquid regions in unsaturated porous media, derived novel analytical and numerical solutions, and performed some of the most definitive laboratory and field experiments to test the models. His models profoundly improved predictions of complex field phenomena and motivated an avalanche of studies along similar lines to address water and chemical transport in natural soils and rocks. Because of their attractive mathematical properties and their simplicity, the “van Genuchten equations” are now universally used in numerical simulators of subsurface flow and transport processes.
Prof. van Genuchten is awarded the Wolf Prize for reshaping the disciplines of soil physics and vadose zone hydrology. He not only published hundreds of scientific journal papers but wrote user manuals of his many computer programs now being used worldwide. He brought enormous visibility and credibility to the agricultural sciences profession. He facilitated the formation of productive links between theoreticians and practitioners, young students and accomplished scientists, and institutions in developed and less-developed countries. For all his numerous contributions to agriculture, soil science, and hydrology, Prof. Genuchten receives the 2023 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.

Pamela Ronald

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of California, Davis, USA

Award citation:

“for pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice”.

Prize share:

None

Ronald, a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. She also serves as the director of grass genetics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Emeryville, California, and as the faculty director of the UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy.

One of the greatest challenges of our time is to feed the growing population without further destroying the environment. Because most of the world’s farmland is already under cultivation and fresh water is scarce, increased food production must largely take place more efficiently. To produce a successful crop each year, farmers must employ strategies to combat pests, diseases, and environmental stresses, which reduce global yields by 30-60% each year.

Ronald’s lab studies genes that control resistance to disease and tolerance of environmental stress with the goal of improving food security for the world’s poorest farmers. Together with her collaborators, she has engineered rice for resistance to disease and tolerance to flooding, which seriously threatens rice crops in Asia and Africa.

Pamela Ronald has spent three decades studying rice, a staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Her discoveries show an advanced understanding of fundamental biological processes and enhance sustainable agriculture and food security. Ronald’s team isolated a gene that allows rice to survive two weeks of flooding and increases yield by 60% compared with conventional varieties. Her research facilitated the development of flood-tolerant rice varieties now grown by more than 6 million subsistence farmers in India and Bangladesh, where 4 million tons of rice, enough to feed 30 million people, is lost each year to flooding.

Ronald’s isolation of the Xa21 immune receptor in 1995, the first member of this important class of receptors to be identified, revealed a new mechanism with which plants and animals detect and respond to infection. In 2015, her team isolated and characterized the receptor-ligand, a microbial immunogen, that triggers both developmental and immunological responses in the host. These breakthrough studies continue to have implications for studies of infectious diseases of both plants and animals.

Ronald is widely recognized for innovative and effective public engagement with the goal of advancing agricultural sustainability. Ronald’s lectures and writings, and in particular her book with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, established a new paradigm where biotechnologies and organic agriculture are integrated as a base for sustainable farming, and as a way of coexistence for environmentalists and technologists.

Caroline Dean

Affiliation at the time of the award:

John Innes Centre, England, UK

Award citation:

“for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.”

Prize share:

None

As winter gives way to spring, as if by clockwork, many plants bloom in all their glory in order to attract pollinators. These species delay their flowering until the onset of spring, when there are optimal conditions  for fertilization. It has been long known that plants delay flowering until they have experienced a period of prolonged cold, a process termed vernalization. Prof. Dean’s work on understanding the plant’s memory mechanisms and temperature sensing, has many implications for agriculture and extending crop range to ensure year-round supply.

Professor Dean (Born 1957) grew up in the north of England. After gaining both a BA and a PhD in Biology at the University of York, Caroline moved to California to research molecular biology. She began working at the John Innes Centre in 1988, where she works on the molecular basis of vernalization.

Dean’s research has provided several major breakthroughs that have direct impact on our understanding of a fundamental process in biology that is of critical importance to society, namely the molecular mechanism controlling the timing of flowering in higher plants. Her research was focused around two central questions in plant biology: Why do certain plants have to pass through winter before they bloom, and how do they remember that they have been exposed to cold temperatures weeks or months earlier? These are not merely academic problems, because the breeding of different varieties of cereals that either have or do not have this winter requirement has been a major cornerstone for increasing the yield of agricultural crops in temperate climates. Dean and her students cloned several of the most important genes controlling Arabidopsis flowering time in response to vernalization, the process by which plants recall temperature to regulate flowering in the correct season.

In attempts to understand the mechanisms by which the vernalization pathway operates, Dean and coworkers have discovered an epigenetic mechanism that regulates the pathway, linking RNA processing with small RNA silencing pathways and histone demethylation. Together with collaborators they then developed a quantitative molecular model explaining how plants “remember” winter. Her seminal research describes the mode by which plants extract signals from noisy temperature profiles, and how this is remembered through subsequent development. Dean has translated her basic research from Arabidopsis thaliana into crop biology as well, especially by breeding of various Brassicas that have flowering time alleles chosen by molecular methods based on her basic research. Dean’s work provides a molecular paradigm for environmentally-controlled epigenetic regulation with enormous ramifications for breeding crops in stressful and changing environments.

Caroline has been a strong advocate for women in science, and enthusiastic role model and mentor. Dean’s work and its implications for agriculture have gained increasing currency in the face of a changing climate, which have been of profound importance not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole.

David Zilberman

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Award citation:

“for developing economic models to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions”.

Prize Share:

None

David Zilberman has been a professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department in Berkeley since 1979 where he holds the Robinson Chair. He is the cofounder and co-director of the BEAHRS Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) and is the director of the Master of Development Practice (MDP). David writes both for professional journals and the general public and aims to integrate economic theory to real world problems in both developed and under developing countries. He is also an extension specialist, and co-editor of ARE Update. David is a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He has published in various fields on the Economics of agriculture, environment, technology and risk. David completed his B.A. in Economics and Statistics from Tel Aviv University in Israel and his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from U.C. Berkeley.

Dr. Zilberman has incorporated biophysical features of agroeconomic systems to develop economic models and econometric decision-making frameworks to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions in several important areas:

Water: He developed models of choice and impact of water conservation technologies, showing that they are yield-enhancing and usually water-saving, though when yield effects are especially high, they may lead to increased water use per unit of land. Introduction of water trading can facilitate adoption of conservation practices.

Pest Control: Zilberman revolutionized research on the economics of pest control by

(a) Introducing the damage control function to estimate the productivity of pest control strategies.

(b) Developing methods to assess the benefits of pesticide under regulation.

(c) Introducing a method to regulate environmental health risks of chemical pesticides.

Biotechnology: His studies challenge myths about genetically modified (GM) crops. He showed that the introduction of GM cotton has increased yields substantially in India and that GMOs have increased supplies of corn and soybean, reducing prices and benefitting the poor. His work provides a framework to assess the cost of delay in introducing new technologies due to prolonged regulatory processes. He estimated the social cost of regulation for golden rice and banning the introduction of biotechnologies to Africa.

Payment for Ecosystem Services: Zilberman developed better mechanisms to allocate government payment for agricultural services, and motivated the redesign of programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the US.

Technology Adoption: Zilberman’s work developed a sophisticated approach to analyze adoption of modern technologies in agriculture incorporating farmer behavior, heterogeneity, and dynamic processes of learning. This approach has been applied heavily.

Dr. Zilberman’s career presents a unique mixture of theoretical work, applied research and extension, and he is a leading protagonist in debates over water policy, environmental and resource policy in agriculture and the bioeconomy.

Gene Robinson

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of Illinois, USA

Award citation:

“for leading the genome revolution in the biology of honey bee populations”.

Prize share:

None

The honey bee plays a vital role sustaining agriculture and plant life on earth. About one-third of the food consumed by humanity is a direct product of pollination by honey bees of more than 100 important crops, including most of the world’s almonds, soybeans, buckwheat, and cotton. Their great importance to agriculture and their complex social structure make honey bees a critical subject for biological and agricultural research.

Gene Robinson, born in 1955, received a doctorate from Cornell University in 1986 and three years later joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where, since 2011 he has headed of the Carl W. Weiss Institute for Genomic Biology as well as the Institute for Bee Research, since 1990. Robinson is a pioneer in the application of genomics – the field of genetics that deals with the sum total of genetic material, the genome of living organisms – to study social behaviour. In addition, Robinson led the effort to sequence the genome (i.e., determining the order of the nucleic acids, the building blocks of the genetic code) of the honey bee. During his career, he has published (on his own, or together with colleagues) over 300 articles, trained 29 postdoctoral fellows and 23 PhD students. He has won prestigious awards from the American Entomological Association, the International Society for Animal Behaviour and the International Society for Behavioural Genetics.

Robinson led an international consortium with more than 170 researchers from 13 countries involved in the sequencing of the honey bee genome. As part of the honey bee genome study, Robinson led the team that discovered that the honey bee has a fully functioning methylation system. Methylation is a chemical process of great biological significance. It is the adding of a methyl group (CH3, a carbon atom connected to three hydrogen atoms) to any compound. The addition of methyl molecules to the DNA coil at different locations affects how an infinite number of the potential traits inherent in the hereditary load will actually be expressed. Robinson’s discovery has led to hundreds of studies examining the possibility of the use of insect epigenetics for insecticide. Epigenetics is the field that deals with genetic changes in the function of genes that do not involve altering the DNA sequences themselves. One of the possibilities for obtaining differences between two animals with the same DNA is the different locations of methyl groups across the DNA. This can be compared to two computers with the same hardware but with different software, which, therefore, function differently.

Robinson also used the honey bee to achieve a break-through with a genomic application in the study of social behaviour, and in doing so promoted this species, which is vital to agriculture, to an important and prominent position in neuroscience. Robinson eventually came to rephrase the problem of growing multi-annual crops in modern genomic terms. Alongside the basic biology of the honeybee, Gene Robinson is responsible for a useful study on the problem of colony breakdown disorder, i.e. the disappearance of bees from beehives or bee colonies, a phenomenon that threatens the global food supply. Gene Robinson made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the honeybee, an understanding that has shaped the present and future of the world of bee-keeping. In addition, his impressive discoveries have also influenced other disciplines, including the science of social behaviour and mental disorders. Robinson has a dominant and unique influence on the biology of the honey bee, and his work has not been matched in research in other animals of agricultural importance.

Trudy Frances Charlene Mackay

Affiliation at the time of the award:

North Carolina State University, NC, USA

Award Citation:

“For pioneering studies on the genetic architecture of complex traits and the discovery of fundamental principles of quantitative genetics with broad applications for agricultural improvements”.

Prize Share:

None

It is now well recognized that the majority of traits of economic importance in animal and plant breeding (and traits related to most human diseases as well) are influenced by a large number of genes acting in complex regulatory networks. Trudy Mackay was among the first to realize this and throughout her career has used quantitative genetics to provide fundamental insight in the complex interplay between genes acting on complex traits as well as in understanding the interaction with the environment. Moreover, she was among the first to realize that the rapid developments in genomics allowed the integration of quantitative genetics with molecular details of genes interacting within complex regulatory networks.

Early in her career she already recognized the many possibilities a novel model organism like Drosophila offers towards this end. She developed a number of clever strategies like the use of transposable P-elements and high resolution mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL) by complementation testing in this model species. This allowed her to uncover fundamental genetic principles studying intriguing traits like life span, behavioral responses and alcohol tolerance. Principles proven to be applicable in a wide range of species and in areas from agriculture to human genetics. More recent, recognizing the possibilities whole genome sequence data would offer, she initiated the development of the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel, which has proven of invaluable importance to further unravel the architecture of complex genetic traits.

Trudy Mackay has been a key person in building the intellectual framework for modern quantitative genetics and she has explained these principles in numerous excellent reviews and by contributing to the major textbook in the field, “Introduction to Quantitative Genetics” by Falconer and Mackay. More recently she has been pioneering the concept of system genetics and enabled the first whole genome analysis using genomic selection, a fundamental tool that has revolutionized animal breeding. Combining genomic information with genomic selection is expected to further revolutionize improvement programs in animal as well as plant breeding.

Linda J. Saif

Affiliation at the time of the award:

The Ohio State University, USA

Award citation:

“for advancing animal and human health through research in virology and immunology”.

Prize share:

None

Dr. Saif, an exceptional virologist and immunologist, has focused her career on diseases that are of critical importance to agriculture, food safety and human health. Her discoveries of novel enteric and respiratory viruses of food animals and humans have led to her extensive contributions of fundamental knowledge of the gut-mammary immunologic axis and has provided new ways to design vaccines and vaccination strategies. Dr. Saif has discovered new paradigms of the complex way the immune system protects animals against intestinal infections. She has also discovered new viruses that cause intestinal diseases in livestock and subsequent ways to control them. Collectively, Dr. Saif’s scientific contributions have contributed immensely to the improvement of global food safety, food production as well as animal and human health. Dr. Saif has also served with diligence as a scientific advisor and mentor for a large number of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to become prominent scientists and leading animal health experts in developed and developing countries around the world.