Rufus Chaney 
2013 Hall of Fame Inductee 

Hi, I'm Rufus Chaney. I'm a Senior Research Agronomist and I've worked at Beltsville for 44 years. 

I grew up in the flat lands of northern Ohio ... 50 miles south of Lake Erie on a cash grain farm. I used to get dropped after school. They'd drop me off on a tractor and I'd work until dinner. That went on for many years. So it was, you know, an idyllic childhood in that sense and of course  then I had a better understanding of the nature of farm life.

When I was a youngster I had a number of teachers that were very stimulating. It's interesting that they weren't chemistry, which I ended up in, but a speech teacher, English and speech who made everybody do as much as they could as well as they could. When I got to college, I had a number of mentors of people that encouraged me very much and then graduate school some really important professors that gave you a better understanding of, or helped you reach a better understanding of, fundamentals of soil-plant processes and plant biochemistry and so on–all of which are tools that someone like me has to have. 

I came to ARS with a fresh PhD on a postdoc. I came to Beltsville for a one year postdoc and I've been here, again, 44 years. I had know idea I'd end up staying but certainly I was happy to be able to work in the areas that I started working in. I started working on how plants take up iron, fundamental biochemistry, chemistry of it and was able to apply my biochemical training to the more agronomic experience of the people that were here before me and together we were able to make some important new understandings and subsequently I've helped sort out the causes of iron deficiency chlorosis of soybeans in the Midwest. A number of states that you can have zero yield if you have the wrong variety of soybean and so I helped work out methods to screen, to identify that reliably and then if you understand the cause then you can integrate the rest of the knowledge of the soil-plant interaction to help understand what's going on in the field. So, I got a really good start on working on iron uptake, iron deficiency and so on.

You know it's really hard to choose any single most exciting discovery. I've certainly had several. One was being able to ... after 30 years of research, to be able to characterize the fundamental reason why rice causes cadmium to be absorbed by humans . The only people who've been  poisoned by soil cadmium are subsistence rice farmers. But why was it that way and not wheat and soybeans and vegetables? Because some vegetables can take up cadmium better than rice. Ended up, I was able to do experiments with nutrition colleagues where we were able to prove that it was a deficiency of iron and zinc in rice that promoted the intestine to absorb cadmium 10 times better than it would with other foods. My first discoveries on iron uptake were very important at the time because people didn't know and I was able to combine a reagent I brought with me from Perdue. The background information that my mentors at Beltsville had obtained before and come up with an immediate explanation of what they didn't understand about the biochemistry of how plants took up iron. And then using the reagent to make an absolute proof that plants had to reduce ferric to ferrous in order to uptake iron from normal supplies of nutrient solutions. That then led to a complete change in understanding of how plant uptake of iron and some other micronutrient. It's the kind of thing that if you do that in your early career it gives you a jump start, it gives you a good chance. 

I think solving problems is one of the ... perhaps the most important single thing that we do   problems come in different forms. One of the problems that I worked on was cadmium limitation of sunflower kernels shipped to Germany and other European countries. Some of the uncontaminated fields caused kernels to have higher cadmium levels then the Germans wanted and only by conducting an extensive research program in cooperation with North Dakota State, we were able to understand why it happened and then provide the industry with tools to make sure they didn't have any further problems with being able to selling the kernels that they could produce. We also characterized genetics and bred low cadmium genome types and so on. But that bigger accomplishment of bioavailability of cadmium and rice being unique is perhaps overall the most important. You have to integrate the whole picture of production practices and genetics and bioavailability in order again to, again, protect the food safety, food security. 

There were a few positions that I could have been happy with in industry but not very many  because it's always profit-centered, any solution that works is good enough. You don't need to understand the truth in order to solve their problem. In ARS, we solve problems by doing good science. I could have gone to a university but universities you spend a 3rd of your time writing proposals, a 3rd of your time teaching and a 3rd of your time trying to do some research. Here we do research, although I have to find money now, we do research with 100% of our time, research and application, advising parties both government and private industry and so on, about what we found in our research.

I've had remarkable opportunities to collaborate with many different parties. I ended up cooperating collaborating with EPA, University of Maryland, Cornell, Penn State, Minnesota, North Dakota, University of California Riverside, many many places, many many graduate students that I was a co-supervisor of.

I have several fundamental parts of applied ... for instance, I invented the idea of phytoextraction or phytomining where a plant actually accumulates 2% nickel in its shoots. You can mow it like hay, bale it, burn it, and it's the highest grade ore ever sold. There are another half dozen fundamental studies I'd like to do. Either I'll do a few more while I'm here or I'll work with graduate students at universities after I retire. One of the other things I may do, I've had a lot of success what I call going to a site which has been barren and dead soil for 50 years or more–super fund sites, hazard waste–and apply agronomy. When you go to a 300 acre site that has been barren for 50 years and you simply apply the science that you know about heavy metals  and a month later it's green and the entire rest of the site is still absolutely barren. There are some that are high in lead that we can't fix so it's a playground but we can fix it so that it's safe for wildlife. I expect that I'll be able to either work with a consultancy with EPA and their hiring staff, see more application of this. 

The Science Hall of Fame at ARS is something that you don't sit around thinking about. I'm proud to have been honored with this. It's not something that I strove for. I was fortunate enough to get promoted to the senior scientific research service. So, it was a pleasant surprise. My impact over the years allowed me to be selected. I've always said that ARS' success is based on impact of our work. Not just enough to just publish that you did one little basic research finding. If you don't solve problems you don't have impact. Sometimes a creative basic research has a huge impact but it's not nearly is important in rating our scientists as somebody who solves a practicable problem whose breeding provides growers with a whole new opportunity and so on. So, I kept striving for impact and it paid off.