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Professor Johannes van Staden has been recognised as one of the world’s most cited researchers of the past two decades. Photo
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Professor Johannes van Staden, director of the Research Centre for Plant Growth and Development on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is one of only seven South African scientists named by ISIHighlyCited.com as being among the world’s most influential researchers of the past 20 years.
Van Staden’s interest in plants goes back to childhood. “I’ve always had a garden — ever since I was six years old.
“I grew up in the Little Karoo,” recalls Van Staden, who was born in Outdtshoorn. “I came from a very poor family. I started a garden to sell the produce. A tickey or a sixpence was quite a bit of money for a young boy back then.”
After World War 2 Van Staden’s father lost his bakery business in Oudtshoorn and the family moved to Pietermaritzburg where his father worked for a time at the Allerton Provincial Veterinary Laboratory.
“I was in school in Pietermaritzburg for six months,” says Van Staden. “But my father suffered from asthma and Pietermaritzburg was terrible for him. It’s a terrible place for chest problems.” So the family moved and Van Staden found himself variously attending schools in Vryheid, Dundee and Bethlehem. “Then we went back to the Little Karoo — to Ladismith.”
As a schoolboy Van Staden was not considering a career involving plants. “I wanted to study law but then you needed Latin and they didn’t teach that in Ladismith. They didn’t teach the physical sciences either, so I didn’t take chemistry. But when I went to university I opted for science — and I battled like crazy.”
Van Staden graduated from the University of Stellenbosch in 1963. He lectured in botany for five years at the University College of the Western Cape before moving to the then University of Natal in 1967. “And then I worked my way up through the ranks.”
“I’m a plant physiologist,” says Van Staden, and his research interests cover a wide range of subjects, including hormones and their role in the regulation of plant growth, germination, flowering and plant senescence — the study of ageing in plants. He has also published on proteas, algal biotechnology; plant biotechnology and molecular biology and lately extensively on the screening of traditional medicinal plants for medicinal properties and active compounds.
“I have been criticised that I work in too many fields but in biology you can’t do good research unless you have a good base,” says Van Staden. “Broad-based scientists — a dying breed — come into their own in later years.”
Van Staden obtained his Ph.D in Botany in 1970 and, while he was based at the university in Pietermaritzburg, his career took on an international dimension that has seen him work as a researcher at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth; as a research fellow at the University of California, Davis; and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (twice) as well as a visiting lecturer at the National Australian University, Canberra.
Van Staden is still in demand internationally and is currently working with the Danes looking at the use of medicinal plants in combating many diseases. In addition there’s a germination project in Poland as well as a Hungarian research programme looking at micro-algae. “Algae will be the salvation of the earth,” he says. “They can be used to produce biofuels — they are full of oil.”
Van Staden is good at predicting the future. Back in the sixties he was working with proteas in the Cape. “In 1967 I wrote a small paper on planting proteas in pots. I was told it was rubbish and it was rejected.”
Time has vindicated his view. “I was in the Western Cape recently and there was a grower producing proteas as pot plants. He told me when he first started selling last year, he sold 3 000 pots in a week. This year he sold 60 000 and he reckoned he could sell 600 000 if he had them.
“They make sense as pot plants. After all, if you buy a bunch they last only a few days. But if you buy a pot they last longer and when they die you will have a plant — and it will flower again next year.”
Flowers have huge export potential for South Africa and Van Staden’s work on plant senescence has direct application for the cut flower industry. “The longer a plant lives the better, because of the distances they have to be shipped to Europe,” he says. “If you pick a flower it begins to die. In South Africa we can only sell flowers profitably if we can get them to market quickly or get them to last longer so you can ship slower at reduced cost.”
Aging in plants is heavily influenced by plant hormones. “Most growth processes in plants are regulated by hormones just as in animals and humans,” says Van Staden. Hormones employed to prevent ageing in plants are used in the form of sprays applied either directly onto the plants or into the soil.
While much of Van Staden’s work has direct practical application, he is not interested in commercialising it himself. “My field is generating new knowledge,” he says and he forthrightly articulates his philosophy concerning such knowledge: “A university is funded by public money, if you generate knowledge from that you should publish the results. I don’t care two hoots who uses the applications. Whoever takes the ideas and manufactures from them — is not up to me.”
Speaking about medicinal plants, Van Staden says there are two key issues: the destruction of biodiversity and the natural environment and, conversely, the need to improve biodiversity and the role small-scale farming can play in this.
“When it comes to medicinal plants you have to ask two questions,” he says. “What do they do? And are they effective? When it comes to traditional knowledge we have to ask: is it rational? And is there an active ingredient?
“You can tell me that you can cure malaria with a eucalypt; that’s fine, but I need to show how a physiological effect occurs and then isolate the specific compound that causes that. It sounds easy enough but it can take years. But if you don’t look, you don’t find — it’s like a lottery, there’s a small chance but you’ve got to try, and someone has to win.”
The commercial farming of medicinal plants could save those plants still left in the wild. “If you can grow a plant under controlled conditions, say in a flask, you can still harvest them but not out in the field.
“In China I saw a medicinal plant garden — acres and acres of it. There were small factories and the plants grew round the factory so they could harvest and process on the spot. It’s a small industry but with big profit margins and this way you don’t harvest the plants into extinction.”
And what about Van Staden’s own garden? “I have a different garden — I plant what I like,” he says. “I’m not saying you should plant anything, willy-nilly — you must use plants effectively. People say you must plant only indigenous — but that’s a terrible concept. People say get rid of all the wattles but think of how many people use wattles for housing. Compare a wattle and mud house with one made of corrugated iron — which one is the less polluting? Imagine if all the wattle, pine and eucalypt plantations went — do people realise what poverty would prevail in this province? People don’t realise how many people benefit from or work in forestry.”
Back to Van Staden’s garden. “I believe in low maintenance, but also exotic, gardens. I’ve a little bit of everything — there are some nice indigenous plants — bulbs, bromeliads and orchids. There’s nothing more soothing than a nice garden with nice colours.”
More information:
A footnote on citations
Hundreds of thousands of articles are published annually in scholarly journals and most contain citations in the form of footnotes or references acknowledging the authors’ debts to the previously published research of others.
ISIHighlyCited.com, a website produced by Thomson Scientific, a United States-based information company, has identified those researchers whose collected publications have received the highest number of citations over the past two decades.
South Africa ranks 24 out of 47 countries represented on the list, tying with Ireland and Taiwan, and all the listed South Africans had recorded at least 1 000 citations in their fields over this period.
Only three of the seven South Africans named are attached to universities, Professor Johannes van Staden being one of them. The other two are from the University of Cape Town: Professor George Ekama, Department of Civil Engineering and Professor John Field of the Marine Research Institute. The other four listed, Professor Wally Marasas, Dr Gordon Shephard, Dr Pieter Thiel and Dr Eric Sydenham, are all connected to the Medical Research Council’s Promec Unit, a multi-disciplinary research team.
“Those attached to universities have lecturing as their main function while lecturers do research almost as a part-time activity and working against terrible odds,” says Van Staden.
Despite those odds, Van Staden has produced over 950 papers published in internationally approved journals and he admits to being “quite thrilled” at the honour from ISIHighlyCited.com.
“It’s a recognition by peers and followers — the people who read my papers have found in them something useful.
“I have always enjoyed lecturing and have a good rapport with students. For some reason I have always attracted excellent students as post-graduates and they are a major contributing factor to our success at UKZN.”
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