Bringing together researchers and breeders

It all started with a bravura Annals of Botany blog post from Pat Heslop Harrison from a scientific conference in Assisi: “Italian Genetics Societies in Assisi: staple foods and orphan crops via epigenomics and systems biology.”

That got posted to Facebook, where I commented on it by extracting what I found a particularly trenchant sentence:

I failed to notice substantial contributions to discussions or presentations from breeders or seed organizations, the end users of so much of the research discussed.

There were more comments in other media, apparently, and Pat felt the need to follow up. He’s done that both on his blog and on Facebook. And what he says is, again, well worth reading in full. Here’s a taster:

Unfortunately the difficulty making links of researchers with the seed companies and breeders is found in almost all of Europe, perhaps with the exception of the Netherlands.

There are other exceptions around the world:

India is brilliant in doing these things, with farmers’ cooperatives, tissue culture/propagation companies, extension workers (running trials etc), always at the meetings and willing to show you their lines, approaches, and discuss applications of what you say (see, for example, my blog from last year). USA is different with the land-grant universities taking research all the way to finished varieties.

And Africa? Anyway, I’d really like to know that the breeders think, so I’ve sent the various links to GIPB. But I can see that centralizing this discussion may prove tricky. Share fair, anyone? Well, maybe.