Conversations from the Hall of Fame

Donald K. Barnes, plant geneticist, interviewed 2004

(Time: ~10:37 minutes)

I was a research seed geneticist and also research leader at the Plant Science Research Unit in St. Paul, Minnesota. I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Why Science? 

I grew up as a gardener's son on a big estate and so we were on the national and international garden tours and that was the place where I got my initial exposure to plants and growing things. 

My dad was a great instructor. He always answered questions and talked about how neat it would be to go back to school for him and if he did that he'd become a scientists and he made it all sound so interesting that when I retired 8 or 9 years ago I realized that I had kind of lived my dad's life. Lived the life that he would have wanted to live. 

He always talked about agricultural research and about the neat research they did at Beltsville and how when I was on the staff here he was really thrilled to get a special tour of the research station here.

Education

I did my undergraduate at the University of Minnesota and I also did my masters there and I did my doctorate at Penn. State. My undergraduate work I studied agronomy and soil science and my masters I studied plant breeding and plant pathology and my doctorate I studied genetics and plant pathology. And most of the time I worked with forage legumes, especially alfalfa. 

Coming to ARS 

At the time I started out I was at the Tropical Research Station in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and there I worked on sorghum and also domesticating a big tropical legume called Tephrosia and that had rotenone in the leaves and stems and my job was to see if we could increase the level rotenone to make it an economical crop to be grown in the south eastern US and then I also started the sorghum research and we grew the initial world collection of sorghum down Mayaguez.

I moved to Beltsville and there we developed resistance to the alfalfa weevil. Actually our laboratory that we operated in was only about a mile from here. And then after the alfalfa weevil I moved back to Minnesota and there we worked on a number of diseases.

Significance of the Research 

The alfalfa crop as we now grow it in the US has only a minimal crop loss to due to diseases and insects and this saves American agriculture probably nearly a billion dollars a year at the same cost to the grower. And we also did research on nematodes and then during my later years we worked on nitrogen fixation. 

Future of the Work

New uses of some of our crops especially like the legumes that would reduce the nitrogen needs of agriculture and would benefit ecology and water use. We also need to look for new uses of crops that will reduce the cost of energy. 

Advice to New Scientists

You need to look on the agency as a great pool of scientists. Each of those many have something they could offer you either in suggestions of how to do research or to actually do cooperative studies with you with your colleague scientists. We would plan graduate student research so they had an opportunity to work on a broad spectrum of research. Research is not something that ought to be narrowed down, it ought to be broad and the scientists need to be comfortable at  cooperating with others. 

Every time I started a new project, I would make ideas up in my mind how I thought this would work out and sometimes I was pretty close and other times I missed the mark by a long time. 

You have to start loose and expect the unexpected. Because the unexpected are the thing that will probably mean the most in the long run. It's kind of like everything was meant to be and all those who I  had opportunities to cooperate with those opportunities made each of us a better scientist and it allowed us to have probably a greater impact on the world of research with which we live with.

It's been a great organization, it is a great organization.