Life Given To Chytridiales

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31007, 12 March 1966, Page 16

Life Given To Chytridiales

Professor J. S. Karling has devoted his life to chytridiales—all 1000 species of them. They are soil fungi which help to decomposed organic matter—composting in a common-garden activity and the simplification of complex organic molecules in the scientific sense, which Professor Karling considers vital to the future of mankind.

Professor Karling is Wright distinguished research professor at Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, and has been in New Zealand for eight months as a Fulbright prest;ge fellow working with the Soil Bureau, Plant Diseases Division and Botany Division of the Denartment of Scientific and Industrial Research end also the Department of Agriculture and the univer sities. He has spent this

week with the D.S.I.R. at Lincoln, the University of Canterbury, and Lincoln College, and plans to come back before he leaves for home. Research Only For 28 years Dr. Karling was professor of botany at Columbia University, in 1948 he moved to Purdue to found the School of Biological Sciences, and in 1960 resigned teaching to be the first holder of his present research post which allows him maximum freedom—“ Three times round the world in the last two years.” Professor Karling's travels have taken him to India, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, and South America as well as Europe all in search of chytridiales. In New Zealand be had to isolate these fungi himself because nobody was working on them. “Obviously your scientists have had to give first attention to fungi which cause plant diseases of economic importance,” he said. “There is so much waste on

this earth,” said Professor Karling. “Man, animals, and plants leave wastes which have to be broken down to simple compounds of elements before they can again be utilised. My fungi perform the transformation cycle of the elements of all life.”

Professor Karling’s quest is identification of all species and the conditions in which they thrive or fail, changes in them caused by soil types, their prevalence in all kinds of vegetation, and their influence on soil fertility. “This knowledge is vital in sustaining life and productivity everywhere on earth,” he said.

With this background Professor Karling is among the eminent scientists urging concentration on the biological or life sciences. He said the modern approach was to demonstrate the unity of living things in biology, then their diversity in botany, zoology, and bacteriology, and finally the continuity of evolution in genetics.