September 10, 2007September 10, 2007 by Luigi Guarino

Prof. Jack Hawkes

Prof. Jack Hawkes, a pioneer and a giant of the science — and practice — of plant genetic resources conservation and use, is dead at 92.

2 Replies to “Prof. Jack Hawkes”

Jeremy says:

September 11, 2007 at 6:28 am

And of course it was potatoes on which Hawkes made his name.

Reply
Pingback: Jack Hawkes: Obituary at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

1. Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
2. Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
3. Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
4. If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
5. Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
6. The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from the university’s cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cocoa’s traditional growing belt.
7. And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.
Somewhat Related
1. The history of farming in a few objects We blogged before about the BBC’s A History of the...
2. How endangered are Shropshire sheep? You may have seen stories in the past week or...
3. Diversity in a fungal symbiont affects rice performance Nigel Chaffey over at Annals of Botany is really extraordinarily...
Published on August 16, 2026

Somewhat Related

2 Replies to “Prof. Jack Hawkes”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply