Historian’s cut: IRRI’s introverted “mad” scientist (full interview)

Interviewer’s note: In observing IRRI Director General Robert S. Zeigler’s last week at the Institute (6-12 December 2015) before retirement, Rice Today publishes the full 4-hour interview that he granted on 28 August 2015. Excerpts from this interview were previously published in the October-December 2015 issue of Rice Today. The full version of the interview is now available in a special print edition of the magazine.

Bob Zeigler, an internationally respected plant pathologist with more than 30 years of experience in agricultural research in the developing world, has been the director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) for the last 10+ years—the second longest tenure for an IRRI DG, after only the Institute’s founding DG, Robert F. Chandler, Jr. (1960-72). As DG, Bob set the Institute’s strategic direction and has also been a passionate spokesperson on a wide range of issues that affect rice growers and consumers worldwide. He retires in mid-December 2015. Proclaiming himself an introvert, he gave this IRRI pioneer interview with his customary wit and candor. In addition to his early years, he covers his professional life, which has spanned time spent in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.

Bob has had a productive research career on diseases of rice that focused on host-plant resistance, pathogen and vector population genetics, and their interactions to develop durable resistance and sustainable disease management practices. As Bob’s career moved increasingly towards research management, his interests expanded to include broader crop management issues, the social forces shaping the agricultural environment, and finally the economic and political arena that frames food security and poverty issues. He has published more than 100 scientific works in these areas and often serves as an expert resource on rice security in the regional and global media.

Agricultural beginnings on Pennsylvania dairy farms
When I was a kid growing up, both my parents came from farming families—they were dairy farmers. My father’s farm was in southeastern Pennsylvania; my mother’s in southwestern Pennsylvania. I was probably mostly influenced by my mother’s side of the family. They were pretty much very small dairy farmers, scraping to get by. I didn’t realize it at that time that they were very poor; I thought that’s what everybody was. The men worked in the bituminous coal mines of Cambria County. They got up at 4 o’clock in the morning, milked the cows, did a full shift in the coal mines, came back to milk the cows, raised their families. That was the way things were and I thought that was normal.

I just had the greatest admiration for those people. On weekends and during the summertime, I worked with them on the farms. I remember my jacket—I would have a lightweight jacket in the spring and in the fall and it took on the smell of the dairy barn. Then, I would wear that to school the following week with great pride that I smelled like a barn. I never understood why the girls would say, “Ewww, you smell like a barn!” I would say, “Yeah, that’s great; I smell like a barn, ain’t that the greatest perfume.” That probably explains a lot about my great history of dating as time went by.

And so, those were my formative years, which instilled in me a very deep admiration for farming and the pride people take in their farms. That somehow rubbed off on me and that’s something I’ve never lost.

A fourth grader’s wish: to be a mad scientist
Science always grabbed my attention as a kid. I was probably just wired that way. I loved plants. My earliest memories are of me working with my mother. She always had a vegetable garden and I just loved it when the plants came up, especially the first flowers in the spring. It just gave me a sense of indescribable joy and a love of nature, life, plants, and gardens that I have to this day.

That led to a curiosity that transferred into science. I liked the 1950s’ science fiction movies, The Killer Shrews and The Bride of Frankenstein. Then, there were all the comic book superheroes such as the Flash, Atom, Green Lantern, Superman, and Batman. They had in them the good and the evil of science all wrapped throughout. I took the good and thought it was exciting. This was pretty instrumental in shaping how I view the world, I think, in retrospect. The mad scientist role was a career model! I could be a mad scientist.

I had chemistry sets back in the 1950s and ’60s. You could buy unbelievable sets that were toxic and explosive. My favorite pastime was to see if I could blow things up—a natural child’s pastime. I had very early on had an orientation towards science, plants, and discovery. The mad scientist role, I think, was that one could do things with science that were not normal.

Biology was mind-blowing
We had moved from State College, Pennsylvania, the home of Penn State University where my father was employed, to Urbana, where my father took a new job at the University of Illinois. My mother was a very devout Roman Catholic. She agreed to move from Pennsylvania to Illinois only if I could go to a Catholic school. So, I did; it was great. Before that, I was a terrible student—and I mean terrible! I was probably in the lowest quarter of students in terms of performance—barely passing. When we moved to Illinois, I had a fresh start. And in this Catholic school [St. Mary’s in Champaign, Illinois], I went into the 8th grade where there was only one classroom for 25 of us. It was a pretty ordinary level of education and I did extremely well. I got my feet on the ground. I did extremely well at the Catholic school. I made friends that I have to this day. I was the worst student in terms of religion. We antagonized the mother superior in that class to the extent that, a few years later, she quit being a nun. I’d like to think that, to some extent, we had some responsibility for that.

When I rejoined the regular public school system in 9th grade [Urbana High School], I was put in the dumb track—a track for the kids who were not very well prepared. That meant, in 9th grade, instead of taking biology, I had to take general science. All the smart kids took biology in 9th grade and in 10th grade they went on to other things. But, the dumb kids took general science in 9th grade and biology in 10th grade, which turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. The general science curriculum in 9th grade, even though it was for dumb kids, was actually very broad and quite rigorous—and I loved it.

I got the broad general science, physics, and chemistry; I did not touch biology. And I excelled. I was by far away the brightest kid in the class since most of the others were juvenile delinquents. Then, in 10th grade, I took biology and again the biology that was offered in the 10th grade, even though it was for the dumb kids—to use that politically incorrect term—the curriculum was actually much more rigorous. I was exposed to biology in a way that was just mind-blowing and I loved it. By being tracked with the dummies, I ended up actually being exposed to a much more rigorous curriculum, and I thought this is fantastic.

I really got turned on by science in a way that was academic as opposed to the mad-scientist comic book/science fiction movies. I thought, “Hey this stuff is really deeply neat.” It just helped change the way I saw things in the world.

I could have gone with the hoodlums or with the kids who were really smart. It was going to be one extreme or the other. Eventually, I fell in with the really smart kids because they were sort of social outcasts and so was I.

When I was in high school with these really smart kids, we were part of a boy scout explorer course. One of our great activities was to go backpacking. We would take summer trips out to the Rocky Mountains and to glacier parks and spend two weeks hiking through these mountains, and that, to me, was mind-blowing and eye opening. Oddly enough, once I got turned on by biology and general science, my whole attitude towards learning changed, and I thought all this stuff were pretty cool. Somehow, I made the switch and got my brain so I could function within a normal school environment.

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Molecular biology vs. plant ecology
I ended up going to the University of Illinois, based on what I did in high school. After admission there, I had an interview with an advisor who saw something in me. He recommended that I go into an Honors Biology Program. That really changed the course of my life. It was not the general biology pre-med class with 300 students; instead, around 10 of us were taught by four professors. It was a large land grant school with thousands and thousands of students. It was akin to going to a school like Harvard with small classes and outstanding teachers.

Molecular biology was the thing at that time. The faculty there was really on the cutting edge and I was told, “Bob, you have got to go into molecular biology.” Being the iconoclastic, irreverent rebel that I was, I decided that I would go into plant ecology, the exact opposite of molecular biology. Ecology, which is a fascinating field, would bring together a lot of different things for me.

When I finished undergraduate school, I had experience working in a laboratory with Larry N. Vanderhoef, who eventually became the Director of Research at the University of Maryland and then the Chancellor of the University of California, Davis. I worked at his lab one-on-one with him, a brilliant, really nice guy. My conclusion, at that time, was that I did not want to go on to graduate school.

I took a plant ecology field trip to Mexico and was blown away again. I had never seen the ocean before. Mexico showed me a different culture with snow-capped mountains and tropical beaches. In the cities, I could drink beer even though I was only 20 years old. I didn’t have to worry about an ID; fantastic food—my God, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! I came back from that trip transformed. As a result, I joined the U.S. Peace Corps and was sent to Africa—Zaire, specifically, because of my French ability. How I learned French in the first place is interesting.

Learning French the Plato way
I took French in 7th grade, probably at a low point of my academic performance, and got a D minus. I took Spanish in 9th and 10th grades and just did horribly, absolutely horribly. I couldn’t understand English grammar; I didn’t understand French or Spanish grammar.

In 10th grade, my teacher said, “Bob, I’ll make a deal with you. If you don’t take another Spanish class in high school, I will pass you. I will give you a D.” I said, “God, what a deal!” I won’t fail and I won’t have to take anymore Spanish. I had won the lottery on this one. What’s interesting is how this thing came together—and really funny. Because I was in the Honors Biology Program at Illinois, my program would not fit the normal schedule of courses.

Because I was in a Liberal Arts program, I had a language requirement. I had to take French; that was the deal for some reason, even though I almost failed it in high school. I ended up taking the only French program that would fit mine, which had an “X” beside it. I found out later that it meant “experimental.” I showed up in this French class and the class was told, “Guys, this is an experimental French class—the first in the history of the world that’s going to be taught by a computer. It’s called the Plato system. We’re going to teach you French in a way it’s never been taught before. You will never see a written word of French in the first year; you’re only going to hear French and you’ll be learning it orally. You will have a lectured class, but you won’t be seeing any written French. You will have interaction with the computer and a very sophisticated taping system.” I just loved it.

I ended up spending untold hours on weekends and evenings in the laboratories working on French because I was really curious. It was not being taught having to learn nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I still have a hard time picking up which is which, but this program was completely different and I just loved it, and did extremely well. The irony of all this was that having essentially failed French in 7th grade and Spanish in 9th and 10th grades, I ended up working in my career in environments where I had to speak fluent Spanish and French. And I learned them both, thanks to this entirely new way of teaching—which was opened up, to some extent, because of my weird attitude to be a mad scientist.

A transformation in the U.S. Peace Corps—interest in plant disease
I went to the Peace Corps and got sent to the Congo, Zaire at that time. I was placed in a little school, Collége Musim, out in Bandundu Province about 200 kilometers north of Kikwit [arrow on map]. If you “Google” Kikwit, you will learn about the Kikwit strain of Ebola that arose in May 1995, way after my time. At Collége Musim, I taught math, chemistry, physics, and biology to 9th through 12th grade students—60 kids to a class—and in French! I was intrigued and I loved living in fascinating rural Africa. A transformative event was an outbreak of bacterial blight that wiped out the cassava crop [the third largest source of food carbohydrates in the tropics, after rice and maize]. I knew a little bit about blight because of the southern corn leaf blight that caused losses in the 1970s in the Midwest [United States]. Here, the main food for the people in my area was wiped out. This was causing local starvation. We had to close our school; there was not enough to feed my students. It really struck me that a plant disease, hitting a staple crop, could have such impact and nobody could do anything about it. I heard rumors that some guys from an international center had gone to Kikwit to look at the outbreak of bacterial blight. It was James Cock from CIAT [International Center for Tropical Agriculture], whom I ended up working with years later. Anyway, that got me interested in agriculture and disease.

Later, when I was a graduate student at Oregon State University, I took a forest pathology course because I wanted to study the interaction of dwarf mistletoe parasitism, fire, and community dynamics. This continued my turn-on to plant disease. The complexity of plant disease in ecosystems, my exposure to its impact on cassava, and the real eye-opening experience of living and working in a developing country [through the Peace Corps] all directed my career from then on.

I joined the Peace Corps with a sense of adventure. I’d like to think that I wanted to improve the world and serve mankind. But to be blunt about it, I was 20 years old and I wanted to see the world and let somebody else pay for it. Of course, I took it very seriously. I prepared the courses that I taught very seriously and cared for the students as best as I could. But I was a 20-year-old kid. I traveled around Africa in the back of trucks, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and visited game parks. I lived on just a couple of dollars a day and it was just fine.

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Designing a fire plan for Crater Lake National Park
After I came back from the Peace Corps, I went to graduate school at Oregon State University and studied plant ecology. I examined the fire history of Crater Lake National Park, a beautiful place. My thesis project was based on the premise that the [U.S.] national park system should retain the forest in its pristine state.

People have been putting out forest fires since 1900 even though fire is a part of the natural environment. An interesting question: should we actually introduce forest fires? If the answer is yes, how do we go about it to capture the pristine state? We needed data. I petitioned my professor, Don Zobel, to do a study on lodgepole pine forests (photo below, right), which is the primary forest species in Crater Lake Park, to determine its pristine state. How might it have changed because of fire suppression and what did we need to do to reconstitute the pristine state of the forest there?

Don said, “Your thesis is to re-create the past and determine what we need to do to protect the forest and create the path to the future.” That involved quite detailed studies on age, community, and structure to try to predict how things have changed over the last 70-80 years. It was fascinating.

Crissan, my wife, worked with me very closely. She collected the data in the field—quite thankless, hard work. Eventually, we got it done and we came up with a fire plan for Crater Lake National Park [Zeigler, R.S. 1978. The vegetation dynamics of Pinus contorta forest, Crater Lake National Park. M.S. Thesis, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR.]. We wrote it up, my professor (Don Zobel) and I. Don, a great, wonderful adviser, said, “We need to determine when this should be re-evaluated to see if it has been effective or not.” He asked, “Bob, how old are you, 25? Okay, let’s say in 75 years. You’ll be dead by then!” And sure enough, that’s what they did [re-evaluation slated for 75 years later].

But here’s the crux of this story. About 4-5 years ago, Crissan and I were driving back to Portland and we stopped at Crater Lake. We love stopping there. I open the door and smell a marvelous mixture of pumice dust, pines, and mountain air, and BOOM! I am sent right back to my youth. We came up to some parked cars and stopped. Some park rangers were there talking to visitors. We looked over the edge where, far below on the forest floor, was a raging forest fire. It was pretty big and crowning up. Some people shouted, “Why aren’t you putting out that fire?” One of the rangers answered, “No, this is part of the forest management program’s scientifically-based management program for Crater Lake National Park, based on a set of very, very important studies done in the 1970s that recommended …” I thought, wow, she was talking about me and my work! Oh my God, one does not get to experience that very often. What a coincidence that I was there in the crowd. I went up and talked to the ranger later and told her, “I’m the guy who did that study.” She looked at me and rolled her eyes, saying, “That’s interesting, thank you very much! Nice that you are back.” From the expression on her face, she probably thought that I was really some old visiting crank.

No ambition to be a director general
It’s funny. I never, ever had an ambition to be a director general. I, like most young, hungry scientists, loved nothing more than to make fun of the DG and to complain. My God, what we said: “Obviously, the director general does not know a damn thing; what is he thinking, etc.” I was very much an iconoclast who felt that people in authority were pretty much incompetent and didn’t know what they were doing. I made no secret about it and said it quite openly. Surprisingly, I still had a job [as a plant pathologist at both the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia and IRRI]. There were a number of people who said they wanted to be a DG. I won’t say their names, but none of them became one; that’s interesting.

The first time the notion of DG was ever mentioned to me was in this office. I was giving an exit interview to Ron Cantrell [then IRRI DG, 1998-2004]. I was going off to Kansas State University to be the head of the Plant Pathology Department. I didn’t think I’d ever be back in an international center again. I thought I’d be moving into U.S. academia, focusing on agriculture there. Ron mentioned in passing that he saw a great future for me and, some day, I could even be sitting in this chair. I thought, “What, are you crazy?”

At that time [1998], CGIAR DGs were gods and I certainly didn’t have any god-impression about myself. But lo and behold, 6 years later, I had left Kansas and was heading the CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Program based at CIMMYT [in Mexico]. There, one of my colleagues, who was a good friend of Ron Cantrell, told me that Ronnie was resigning from IRRI and that he and Bob Havener [former IRRI interim DG in 1997] said they thought that one of the strong candidates for the position would be me. Anyway, to make a long story short, it ended up being me. But it’s something I never sought.

Regarding the power and responsibility of a DG, the power is overstated and the responsibility is underappreciated. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, I can tell you that. It’s also the hardest job I ever had. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It takes physical and emotional tolls on you. But, for a place like IRRI, assuming you do the job well, the opportunity that turns IRRI resources into making a difference in the world is something you can’t walk away from. If you’re given the opportunity and you’re a serious person, how can you say no.

Not “one of the boys” anymore
I was certainly one of the boys when I was here [as plant a pathologist at IRRI, 1992-98]. We had some wild, raucous times that will be best described by others.

Advantages. There were real advantages for coming back [as DG] after 6-7 years, and one was that I knew rice. I am the only director general of the Institute who actually has had a career in rice. I understood the rice plant; I understood the challenges around rice biology, agronomy, and crop protection. I had an administrative career in rice at CIAT and at IRRI. I also have a pretty good appreciation of IRRI’s culture, for better or worse. I knew where a lot of skeletons were buried. I knew ALL of the tricks that people pull on senior management because I had pulled them all myself in previous incarnations. I had a good relationship with most of our partners across the region. I had an appreciation for the real potential of rice in Africa.

Disadvantages. There were also some disadvantages, one being that I was friends with people [from the previous stint at IRRI in1992-98] and that friendship could get in the way of doing my job—and that was really hard. I had to let people go who I used to play tennis with and socialize with; that’s no picnic. Likewise, the direct expectations from me that people could draw on a past relationship to get favors done made me uncomfortable, to put it mildly. It was particularly hard for my wife. There were expectations that we could magically transform real problems or challenges at the Institute. As I looked more and more into what were the underlying problems that manifested themselves as dysfunctions in the Institute, I saw that there was some huge transformations that had to take place—and this took years. Some of them are still underway 10 years later. That was really hard because people didn’t appreciate the insights you have as director general and the way you see the Institute.

People think they can hide things from you, provide you with distorted views—maybe they can. But I know more than people think I know and it could be very painful sometimes and very, very lonely. I found that I became less, far less, social than I was in the past at the Institute and that’s because I can only make so many hard decisions without it taking a toll, and I had to defend myself. On the other hand, I tried my very best to make sure that the Institute itself, not the DG, is as sensitive and responsive as possible.

One of the things I tried to do, and I hope I’ve been somewhat successful, was to take the personality cult, the “god” cult, out of the director: that we talk about the institution and not the DG.

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Greatest challenges as IRRI DG
Convincing donors to contribute. One strength is the unassailable nature of IRRI’s mission. Keeping in mind what IRRI was about, why we’re here, our track record, and our ability to contribute made dealing with the challenges much easier. There are the usual challenges—one, making sure that the money comes in. I still love explaining to donors how important rice is and what IRRI’s role is in the future of the world and what we have to contribute.

CGIAR nightmare. The CGIAR brings out the worst in people. Some people you deal with one on one are really nice, serious, and dedicated. But, when you get them into the context of the CGIAR, they’re just horrible, myself included. I think I turned into the meanest SOB you’d never want to meet when I put on my CGIAR hat.

I never thought about it in those terms until right now. This morning, I had to write a message related to the CGIAR that I didn’t want to write. I just find myself, in many cases, having to deal with people who somehow survived in positions way beyond their capacity. It’s just one endless stream of frustrations. That’s a real big challenge—to stay positive and keep IRRI working and moving forward in the CGIAR environment.

Being an introvert. There is the challenge of me being an introvert. I am generally happier by myself. People may be surprised to hear that, but I’m a very strong introvert. Meeting the challenge of being outwardly projecting was something I had to learn to do, including being gregarious and dealing with people in social situations. The idea of going to a cocktail party, to me, is hell on earth. If I go into a room of strangers to schmooze, I look desperately for one person I know. I may have a conversation with that person the whole night, maybe not talking to another person. That’s just the way I am. I have to act like I’m not and it IS an act. Dealing with difficult personnel problems was always a big challenge for me.

Discovery—one of the greatest joys
Oh the discovery! Realizing that you found something new is a thrill that can’t be described. I’ve worked on the hoja blanca virus, the bacterial pathogens of rice, the pseudomonas complex, and rice blast disease [see below]. In each, I like to think I made some significant discoveries and advances. The realization, when it hits you—that you have an insight that explains something that was unexplained before—there’s nothing like it. It’s a rush, I mean goose bumps; hair stands on end! It’s just a thrill. I think any scientist will tell you that thrill of discovery—of enlightenment—when you had that flash of understanding—indescribable. I had a few of those and, my God, they’re something else. Personally, it takes your whole being to a new level.

As a director general or research manager, one of the things that I found to be really exciting is taking pleasure from other people’s discoveries. When they make breakthroughs and advances, I get that same thrill.

Just a few weeks after I had arrived at IRRI [in 2005], I was talking with [IRRI breeders] Dave Mackill and Abdel Ismail (right and left in photo) and they mentioned something about flood-tolerant rice. I had been a program leader of the rainfed-lowland system in the early 1990s. One of the things we were interested in was flood tolerance. Dave knew that, saying, “Bob let’s go out to the field, I want to show you something.” In a tank right next to the Hemmi Building that had been drained a few weeks earlier were both live and dead plants. Plants that didn’t have the SUB1 gene [for flood tolerance] were dead; those that had it were alive. Even though I had nothing to do with this discovery, I was blown away [photo below right shows something similar to what Bob saw that day]. I had the goose bumps and said, “This is fantastic; this is transformational! We have something that people have been looking for ever since they started to improve rice and this is it; we’ve got it, we’ve got to go with it.” That really led to the complete rejuvenation of all our work on stress-tolerant rice.

I think IRRI’s work on C4 rice [transferring the photosynthetic efficiency of maize into rice] is another transformational piece of work, and I got equally excited about that. I think the long-term trials [Long-Term Continuous Cropping Experiment] are just beginning to show the impact that deep understanding [over 53 years] will have. I go down the list of work that we do in social sciences, remote sensing, crop and water management. It’s an endless list of really high-quality research that really gets me excited. The excitement of being a part of IRRI and being able to go and represent what our people do at the highest level is—I have no words—it’s something special and it makes up for any of the minor inconveniences of being a DG. The thrill of being part of something so exciting, so important, never gets old.

More goose bumps!
Maize varieties in Burundi. My first set of goose bumps came with the performance of some of the improved maize varieties that I was working with in Burundi [when Bob was a technical adviser in the Burundi Maize Program, Institut des Sciences Agronomique du Burundi, employed by the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, 1982-85]—looking at how they performed in farmers’ fields. Oh God! And the excitement that the farmers had when they saw the harvest of what a decent variety of a high-quality seed could do; that was something.

Hoja blanca virus in Latin America. I discovered, through the data, the genetics of insect-susceptibility of the vector of the hoja blanca virus in rice. I realized that it was a disease of insects, as well as a disease of plants, and that the genetics determining whether an insect [planthopper] was able to transmit the virus to the rice plant was, in fact, a resistance-gene in the insect. We have a patho-system of the insect and the rice plant with the same virus. Both the insect and the rice plant have disease resistance mechanisms in them.

It gave me goose bumps when I realized that dynamic—the prevalence of resistance to the virus of the insect population and the prevalence of resistance in the host plant population to the same virus—and their interplay and how that explained the cyclical epidemics of the disease I’ve seen in rice fields. I wrote a paper on that with CIAT virologist Francisco Morales [Genetic determination of replication of rice hoja blanca virus within its planthopper vector, Sogatodes oryzicola, Phytopathology 80(6):559-666; figure at left from that paper]. I think it was probably the most elegant piece of work I’ve ever done. Nobody ever reads the paper; nobody ever cites it [editor’s note: actually it has been cited 23 times], but it was a deep insight and that gave me goose bumps.

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Rice blast pathogen in Latin America. More goose bumps came when I was at CIAT working on the rice blast pathogen [Magnaporthe grisea] and getting an insight into the nature of the asexual propagation of the fungus. I worked with [CIAT colleagues] John Hamer, Morris Levy, and Joe Tohme. Understanding the lineages of the pathogen and how populations were structured and how you could actually predict what kind of resistance genes could be combined to develop stable resistance to rice blast—that was a goose bump moment!

I was sitting in my CIAT office thinking about it. Then, it came to me in a flash; it explained everything! I ran over to Joe Tohme’s office and wrote it all out on a whiteboard on his wall. I called it the “umbrella theory” because it encompassed everything about how one could manage resistance in the rice blast pathogen-plant complex. What it meant for the durability of resistance genes, what determined whether a gene was durable, etc. It was wonderful, beautiful, and elegant. Mostly true to this day, I think, as we gradually moved forward. Joe left it on his board for 18 months; never erased it. He said it took him six months to understand it, but I understood it right from the beginning. It was crystal clear—clear as can be.

And then, I found evidence for a sexual stage in the rice blast fungus in the Himalayan mountains of India [Population structure and dynamics of Magnaporthe grisea in the Indian Himalayas]. That was pretty cool, I tell you—beautiful, beautiful, beautiful; biologically beautiful structures, stunningly beautiful structures! In the context of these mixed systems in the Himalayas, Rebecca Nelson [plant pathologist] said I was involved in micro-tourism; that was exciting!

And the best of all [as mentioned above] was the goose bumps around seeing the stress-tolerant rice varieties and watching them perform in farmers’ fields. My, that’s the ultimate rush—seeing that kind of impact. It will change the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the better. There’s no better rush than that. If you’re a drug addict, I feel sorry for you because you are missing the real rush!

On hindsight
I would have done a lot of things differently. I would have managed my marriage differently, for sure. I would have had expectations. I would have been much more careful about the kind of pressures that people put on me and my wife personally. Demands that were unrealistic and unachievable took their toll. I would do that differently. I would have probably managed some of our country relations differently, but again I’m an introvert and the idea of going around and glad-handing was just painful for me.

No apologies for the Green Revolution
I believe that those who developed the modern rice and wheat varieties in the 1960s and ’70s and then recommended routine pesticide applications, etc., did not know that they were advocating bad practices. In that sense, an apology is not necessary. You make an apology for things that you do wrong when you knew they were wrong. And you judge the actions of people in the context of their time. We certainly openly recognize it was a mistake, and we have learned from it.

If you look at how IRRI’s research program has evolved from that learning, early on, we started to question the impact of those early Green Revolution practices and took corrective action. This resulted in ground-breaking studies on the biosphere within the rice paddy, arthropod complexity, and the impact of insecticides.

Do we regret? I don’t know. It was a different time and place. It’s pretty hard to second-guess these kinds of things. Apologize? No! Recognize that those practices were destructive to the environment? Absolutely. Make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen again? Absolutely. Be watchful and vigilant of those who misuse tools for short-term gain? Absolutely.

A story worth telling again—exact date for the beginning of the 2nd Green Revolution
I wasn’t there, but I’ve told the story anyway several times. It was 31 July 2008, three years after being in the field with Dave Mackill and Abdel Ismail [Sub1 experiment mentioned above] and saying we really got to push this forward. We were moving hell and high water to get the Sub1 seed to eastern India where we knew the biggest impact of this flood-tolerant rice would be. We had collaborators in eastern Uttar Pradesh near Faizabad where we had done lots of work in the Rainfed Lowland Rice Research Consortium back in the 1990s. They delivered the flood-tolerant materials to these farmers, just 5 kilos of seed. They planted out a few plots in farmers’ fields; Mr. [Asha Ram] Pal was one of them. The crop came up, then, BOOM! A flood came when the plants were just a few weeks old. The water receded, the field looked like hell, but the plants recovered. Then, a few weeks later, BOOM! A second flood came; the flood waters receded and the crop really looked bad.

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Dave Mackill and Umesh Singh [India-based IRRI breeder] were there in the field with Mr. Pal. They saw little bits of green on the plants; but they looked pretty bad. The neighbors were laughing. When you go to the farmers’ fields and you’re a guy from IRRI, you draw a crowd—always! This crowd of farmers was saying, “Man, tear it out; you’re not going to get anything.” Well, Umesh and Dave asked the farmer to just let it go and see what happens. So, he left the crop there [top picture at right].

A few months later, they go back to visit the field and here’s this unbelievable rice crop full of panicles [bottom picture at right]. I put forth that the beginning of the second Green Revolution (GR2.0) was on that date when Mr. Pal did not plow up that sickly-looking crop, which was ostensibly destroyed by [two] floods. Indeed, it recovered, demonstrating that the new technologies could prevent catastrophe. A farmer can get a decent rice crop [even with seasonal flooding]. That was the beginning of GR2.0. And it is also going to be GR2.0 that will allow us—and broader society—to withstand the onslaughts of climate change. It’s going to be driven by the technology that was demonstrated there in Mr. Pal’s rice field in 2008.

What was the first Green Revolution?
The first Green Revolution (GR1.0) took care of immediate problems of food and security, primarily in Asia, secondarily in Latin America. For better or for worse, it tended to focus on those areas that were more favored with irrigation and drainage and access to fertilizer and the market. Farmers who benefitted from GR1.0 tended to become wealthier. People say that the GR1.0 only benefitted the wealthy. Frankly, to use a technical term, that’s a lot of “BS”. Those who originally benefitted from GR1.0 were dirt poor to begin with. They became relatively wealthy because of GR1.0’s technology. That was the first transformation. Their kids went to school then they got good jobs and sent money back to the farms. Those farms then became relatively wealthy. That was the product of GR1.0. It did not favor the wealthy.

GR2.0 focuses on those farmers who, because of their circumstances, could not adopt the GR1.0 technologies. Those farmers primarily faced drought and floods. If the modern varieties [of that time] were subjected to droughts or floods, they would not perform. GR2.0 is incorporating tolerance of abiotic stresses through the wonderful, wonderful tools of molecular biology, genetics, and computational biology. It has enabled us to identify, manipulate, and incorporate traits such as tolerance of flash flooding and stagnant flooding, drought, and salinity. GR1.0 did not address these stresses that plague very, very difficult environments where the poorest of the poor live. These very, very poor people will be benefitting from the next wave of technologies, a new class of technology.

The semidwarf plant type drove GR1.0. Traits that will allow high yield potential to be expressed under difficult environments are driving GR2.0. Coincidentally, GR2.0 matches almost identically the challenges that eventually climate change is going to throw at us. Across the world, even in the more favorable rice-growing environments, we’re going to see problems of drought, flooding, salinity, and heat. All of those traits, which we’ve been working on now to benefit those people in marginal environments, are going to be equally useful in what used to be favorable environments so that, as climate change impacts the agricultural sector in rice-growing environments, we will be prepared for it. I think that this convenient convergence is going to be a big salvation for the next couple of generations.

I don’t know if anybody will really appreciate the vision and the work that our colleagues are doing NOW in rice research. When people are food secure in 2040 and 2050, they should look back and say, “It is because of the work of those guys in Los Baños, in eastern India, and in Southeast Asia in 2010, 2015, and 2020 that we have food today.” And I look forward to (although I won’t be around; I’ll be dead and gone) to people recognizing that the work we’ve been doing today, much unheralded, in fact, is laying the foundation for establishing food security in the decades to come.

Would the “Consortium” concept work?
After I joined IRRI in 1992, I led the Rainfed-Lowland Program and Consortium. The consortium was a brand new idea of bringing national programs together with IRRI and creating a common research platform or program. I had been trying to do that sort of thing in Latin America and the idea of coming to Asia to do it, I thought, was just an outstanding opportunity. This was a really, really good idea. If we did not engage with national programs, the ability to have an impact would be miniscule.

I remember the first meeting we had. I think we were up in Tarlac [Philippines] and I was sharing a room with J.K. Ladha [long-time IRRI scientist at left in photo with President Obama when Obama visited India in January 2015]. J.K. asked me, “Bob, tell me honestly, do you really believe this is going to work?” That is the kind of question that J.K. always asked. I answered that I think it will work and it is actually a good idea. He thought that was crazy and that it would not work. Whether it did or not, it is hard to say. But as we moved forward, attitudes around partnerships became more sophisticated. GRiSP [the Global Rice Science Partnership] is an offshoot of that same philosophy. I’ve always thought, from the very beginning, that the international centers had to work together with the national systems.

Right away when I started my career after finishing my PhD, Pete Jennings [IRRI’s first rice breeder in the early 1960s] told me, “Bob, if you want to make an impact and have a meaningful career, work in a national system. If you spend your whole life working at CGIAR centers, you will have a very twisted view of the world.” For various reasons, I ended up working in Burundi in a maize program, of all things. During that period as the head of the national program, staff from the CIMMYT [International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center] and IITA [International Institute of Tropical Agriculture] maize programs came through and visited with me and the national program scientists. They told me what crappy work the other center was doing. The CIMMYT people complained about the IITA people and vice versa. I thought you guys are full of it. I didn’t care what you think of the other guy; all I want is the best maize material I could get. That cemented in my mind the attitude of what an international center has got to do for a national system, that is, get them good materials and not to tell them how great it is to be IRRI, or CIAT, or AfricaRice. That was a pretty important lesson for me. I was greatly embarrassed for the whole CGIAR when I saw that kind of attitude.

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In the 1990s, pulling together a group of incredible minds

I remember hearing about the first inkling of biofortified rice when Robin Graham [Department of Crop and Atmospheric Sciences, School of Agriculture and Wine, University of Adelaide] came to IRRI in 1992 or 1993 to talk to us about high-iron rice. If we could increase the iron content of rice, we could have an incredible impact on the diets and well-being of many people. I thought that was the best idea I’d ever heard. Robin went on to say, “The problem is getting farmers to adopt it.” Well, I thought, with high-iron rice, we might get early vigor, better weed competition—we could work on that. In the discussion, all [of IRRI’s research] program leaders were there: myself, Prabhu Pingali, Paul Teng, and Ken Cassman—a real band of rogues, all of them great leaders in their own right as their careers went on.

Prabhu thought biofortified rice was a waste of time, adding, “All studies show that, as incomes rise, people spend more money on fruits and vegetables and the micronutrient problems will go away. As economies grow, we won’t have any more problems.” I sat there for a minute then said, “Prabhu, if you’re saying that the way to solve the problems of the poor is to make them rich, I’m sure that the poor will agree with you. But in the meantime, we’re going to have poor people for the foreseeable future; maybe we should do something in the interim before your economic magic takes hold. Twenty to thirty years later, we still have hundreds of millions of people who are poor and the micronutrient-enriched rice and other staple foods will begin to make a big difference in their lives. I still remind Prabhu of that.

It was a great time in the 1990s at IRRI. We had a tremendous intellectual energy in the likes of Prabhu, Ken, Paul [other IRRI researchers of the time] Martin Kropff, Guy Kirk, Achim Dobermann, and Glenn Denning—all had incredible minds. Klaus Lampe [IRRI DG, 1988-95; photo left] deserves credit [for bringing us together]. We were all difficult people—we fought, we argued, and we carried on, but we were driven by the same passion to make great contributions. All of us have gone on to make our marks. That was a real crucible in the 1990s. Ask any of these people and they will say that was a special time. Klaus brought that bunch together, created the magic, and instilled in us a tremendous sense of what could be done by bringing science to bear.

Are we condemning smallholders to a life of poverty?
It was also special time for me when I was in Latin America. It was the glory days of the CGIAR— the 1980s. It was very interesting to begin the work on rice in Latin America with Peter Jennings [photo right, circa 1963]. Jennings was really the father of the Green Revolution in rice; never properly recognized, in my opinion, for political reasons. He upset people and, just for the pleasure of it, if somebody was an idiot by his standards, he made sure that they knew what he thought and that everybody else in hearing distance knew as well. He didn’t make a lot of close friends. He and I had our difficulties as well at times. But I always respected his intellect, which was quite keen and I also respected his personality, which was quirky.

It was interesting working on rice in Latin America. The Green Revolution there had really run its course dramatically and Peter had a lot to do with it—driving it through. He brought the semidwarfs of Asia to Latin America and transformed rice production there. The modern varieties drove out upland production—that is, the marginal rice areas in Latin America were basically taken out. The small marginal subsistence rice farmers quit being rice farmers, left the countryside, and moved into the cities. For a certain sector within the CGIAR, rice was seen as a terrible crop. It was grown on relatively large mechanized farms of about 20 hectares—large by Asian standards, but small by Latin American standards. It was seen as a rich man’s crop and, in the context of CIAT, an international center that should be working for the poorest of the poor, researchers should not be working on rice.

But there was the outsize personality of Peter Jennings and the Rockefeller Foundation who said rice is a staple and CIAT should be working on rice. I took that up and bought into it, hook, line, and sinker. My argument was that rice in Latin America fed the urban poor. Because if you look at the food economy of the major cities of Latin America, rice was becoming increasingly important and that the only beneficiary of the work we were doing was not the farmer, it was the consumer.

I got into an argument with Pete about that. Somehow I was making an argument that he perceived as being against the farmer. I said, “We’ve got to consider other interests.” He asked, “What interests are there other than those of the farmer?” I said, “Well, the consumer.” The argument stopped there. A couple of weeks later, he came back and said, “You know Zig, I’ve been thinking about this and you have got a point. We should be thinking about the consumer as well.” I thought, really—I’d just won an argument with Peter Jennings!

At any rate, that argument didn’t hold very well because there were people at CIAT who really felt that only the small-scale farmer should be benefited. Anything benefiting wealthy land owners was evil. And we still see that problem in the CGIAR system today—I see it even in the Gates Foundation. If we focus only on the smallholders, expecting them to stay small, are we going to be condemning these people to a life of poverty? Is that what it is? What about the many, many hundreds of millions of people who live in the cities who depend on affordable and good-quality rice?

We really have to rethink where we’re going. I have fights and fights and fights and, honest to God, I cannot understand why people don’t see that logic—that it’s the price and affordability of high-quality food that is most important. Farmers have to make a decent living at it and the consumers have to be able to afford it. Our research has to recognize that we can’t have in our mind some idealized version of the small farmer who’s living in a blissful relationship with nature. That’s fantasy! Farmers work really, really hard.

When I visit farmers in the field, I ask them what they want their children to be. It is very rare that a farmer says, “I want my child to be a rice farmer.” [Photos above right and video clip show Bob asking farmers this question in Bangladesh]. A farmer usually says, “I want my child to be a lawyer, doctor, teacher, and businessman, or join the air force.” Rarely, rarely, rarely, do they want their children to be rice farmers. When I suggest that they should consider it, they laugh at me. [See exception to this trend further below on Web pages 14-15 when Bob visited Thailand recently.]

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National and International staff—wheels or gears of a brilliant machine
I don’t want to say anything that sounds like a platitude, but I don’t think there is any question that the greatness of IRRI is due to its Philippine national staff (NRS). The contributions of the NRS are incomparable, just incomparable. IRRI discovered a model that I didn’t fully appreciate until last year (after 9 years of being DG and 7 years additional as scientist in the past). IRRI created and discovered this model completely by accident. I was reviewing with Christine Croombes [director of IRRI’s Human Resource Services] our staff profiles. We noticed that the turnover time of international staff (IRS), on the average, is about 7 years and turnover time of the NRS is closer to 20 years.

It just clicked in my mind that we have a machine that is moving forward with different parts turning at different speeds in that, we have IRS turning at a much faster rate, bringing in new thinking from outside via postdoctoral fellows and entry-level scientists. They come for 7 years or so and move on—maybe they come back later, maybe they don’t. But they come in, constantly injecting new ideas.

We have another part of the machine that is turning over much more slowly. It’s taking up that knowledge and innovation that is coming in from the young international scientists, but containing and retaining the past experience and accumulated knowledge. That system—of interaction and timing involving the NRS having the institutional memory, the experience, the knowledge of the historical nature of an experiment, and the context within which we are working and constantly interjecting and interacting with new scientists coming onboard—is a brilliant model of renovation, rejuvenation, and conservation. You couldn’t have designed a better system. But it wasn’t designed; it was pure luck. But it is a brilliant, brilliant mechanism. I think, among so many other things, this explains much of IRRI’s great success. It’s that contribution, the commitment, the devotion, and the longevity of the NRS with the excitement and innovation of new IRS coming and going. It’s quite a feat and I’ll have to think about it some more and get some numbers behind it and maybe I’ll write it up.

As I said, this is an insight that hit me just a year ago. It’s like one of those blinding scientific discoveries—you go ohhh, of course, it is so obvious. But nobody has said that before. The nature of IRRI and its success are utterly dependent on that model. But that model would never work without the Filipino culture, its tremendous work ethic [Bob’s secretarial staff at right in photo], tremendous loyalty, tremendous sense of family, and tremendous sense of community and commitment.

IRRI proudly proclaims its Filipino roots
The Philippines has valued IRRI as it has become part of its cultural heritage. We have been welcomed; we have been a source of pride; we have worked to maintain the highest standards so that we are something that the Philippines can be proud of. We have proudly proclaimed our Filipino roots and heritage while maintaining our international status. The Government of the Philippines has been unbelievably supportive through the years, regardless of the political winds and has recognized IRRI as an important part of the Filipino reputation. We could never have accomplished anything close to what we have done without that level of support from the Philippine Government. Never have they compromised their responsibilities internationally in terms of phytosanitary issues and they have always made it possible for IRRI to function as effectively as possible.

The Philippines wisely created PhilRice [Philippine Rice Research Institute], a national rice program, even though IRRI was here. IRRI and PhilRice have been able to work together closely. UPLB [University of the Philippines at Los Baños] has been a generous and gracious landlord. There is nothing I can say that could overstate the contribution of the Philippine Government. Lately, it has started to make financial contributions in areas where IRRI and the Department of Agriculture overlap and that is certainly welcome.

Interacting with the NARES, a humbling experience
It’s been a great pleasure to interact with folks all across the world in the national agricultural research and extension systems [NARES]. Very few people get that opportunity. A DG at IRRI is treated really well. One of the things that’s really nice, if you go to a country where rice is grown, an IRRI DG is received with great respect and sometimes fanfare. One of the things I had to learn and act upon very early was that, when I went to a country and was met at the airport with fanfare, sometimes with a motorcade from the airport to the hotel, I had to say to myself, “You are being received as the director general of IRRI; it is not because you are Bob Zeigler. Don’t let it go to your head. As soon as you are not DG anymore, it’s going to be back to regular, old Bob.”

In all countries, without exception, if the DG of IRRI expresses an opinion about something that is related to rice and agriculture, it is treated seriously; people pay attention. That is a pretty awesome responsibility. With the NARES, IRRI has to be very careful. The “flavor of the week” sort of thing does apply because, if you say something, people take it seriously.

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We’ve had the great pleasure of working with scientists from virtually every rice-growing country in the world, and these people take their job really seriously. I go to visit—it doesn’t matter what country—these people are proud to be working on rice. They know that what they’re doing is really, really important; they value the relationship with IRRI and it’s just a pleasure beyond compare. IRRI, over the decades, has shaped, in many cases, the national systems and we have helped them in various ways—some small, some large—to have the kind of impact that they’ve had. To me, it’s a sense of pride, as well as it is humbling, to work with the national partners. These guys really want to do the work. They’re the ones out there every day. We come and go, but they’re the ones who “carry the water” and improve the crops.

The funding roller coaster
Funding—it’s going to be a roller coaster ride; that’s the nature of the beast. I knew when I took the job that we were on a downward slope. I knew that IRRI’s mission and mandate was such that we could turn it around. And I knew that, later when the Institute and its budget were growing, it would not last forever. We would reach a peak and then have a downturn. Achim Dobermann, DDG-Research at the time, and Norm MacDonald, DDG-Management Services, knew that it would happen and that we would have to confront it. It would not be pleasant, but it was a necessary part of life. Plants grow, the leaves become old and they drop. It is the nature of a dynamic organization. We change with some aspects of growth ending while others are beginning. That translates into funding that goes up and down. All of that is very easy to say, but when it comes to the execution, it is not fun.

Our [recent] sudden financial hit came in 2015. It was unexpected and I’m still trying to figure out what happened. I have no good answer. Just this morning, I sent a message out trying to figure out why in the hell did we actually have to take that huge cut? I’m suspicious; but regardless, it happened and frankly, I was confronted with a choice. I don’t know how public this is. The choice was to draw down our reserves and not make any adjustments to the program to keep everything stable and wait until next year, hoping things got better. If they didn’t, then make the cuts after I’m gone. I thought we’re taking a big negative hit; we’re going to have to adjust to it at some point. It’s reality. If we don’t do it now, it’ll be worse later. This is my last year. I’ve got two choices: I can just coast and have a fine old time, pretending everything is fine and let my successor [Matthew Morell] deal with it when it would be much, much worse. Or deal with it now and help prepare the Institute for a future that will be very exciting and very positive.

Painted like that, it’s pretty obvious that if you have any sense of responsibility, you’ll deal with the problem now. It still means we had to let go of a hundred staff members and make other adjustments. My sense was to do it. Let’s prepare the Institute, make the hard decisions now, clean the decks as much as we can, prepare the holes, and get things in the best shape we can. When my successor comes onboard, he should have a clean slate to build upon.

I think I had a pretty good reputation with staff. People know that I care about them; people know that I care about the Institute; people know that I tried to do the best for the Institute. In my last year, it would be easier to swallow this kind of adjustment than to have some poor sap come in after 10 years of Bob [to deal with it]. I think that would be a terrible thing to do to someone. Some of my counterparts in other centers, who will go unnamed, did just that and the poor guy who came in afterwards had to make some very hard decisions, making him look bad. I just think that’s totally irresponsible.

I don’t want to put lipstick on a pig, but when you have a problem that confronts you, you better turn it into an opportunity. You don’t do across-the-board cuts, you don’t do lazy thinking. You try to make the institution stronger. I guess most people understood that. My sense is that people believe that we have done what we could in the best interests of everybody in the Institute, and that the Institute is much stronger than it would have been had we not acted that way. That’s my illusion, at least, and that was certainly my intention.

The Doomsday Vault, Svalbard, Norway—fantastic PR
The Svalbard vault has a repository for most of the genetic resources of domesticated plant species. We have them there in case something goes terribly wrong; we can go back to our genetic resources. Really, think about it. If things got so bad that the only recourse is a vault above the Arctic Circle, in the middle of the ocean, underground in a coal mine, who’s going to go up there to get it? How will they know what to do with it?

However, it’s very symbolic and very important that the significance of genetic resources was brought to the general public’s attention. With articles in Time magazine, Newsweek [in which Bob is interviewed], CNN, the Economist, and CBS 60 Minutes, the public relations value of it is tremendous—the practical value of it, history will tell. But bringing the issue to the attention of the general public, we might say, is priceless. That’s my politically correct answer. [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before ICARDA scientists asked to retrieve crop seeds originating from the Middle East that are stored in the vault].

Polar bears and the Arctic dinner at Svalbard
I have this anecdote from my Svalbard visit in February 2008. This place is right in the middle of nowhere—it is the definition of the middle of nowhere. People walk around the town with rifles because polar bears are everywhere. The place is a dauntingly dangerous place. In most hotels, there is a stuffed polar bear, over 15 feet tall, towering in the lobby. Every year people get killed by polar bears. Anyway, we were at the opening of the Svalbard Doomsday vault. The international press, CNN, BBC, and other media were there. I was there, my wife [Crissan] was there.

There was this big opening with the Prime Minister of Norway [Jens Stoltenberg], he gave a talk. Also there were people such as Pat Mooney and every environmental group, such as the Cartagena people—you know “let’s preserve our natural resources” people, half of which are vegetarians. It was just a fantastic meeting of minds of those who were most concerned about the world’s plant genetic resources.

The prime minister, after he finished his speech, said, “I want to invite you all to an Arctic dinner.” I thought, “that’s great, an Arctic dinner, that sounds good.” Now, if you think about it, what do you eat in the Arctic? No edible plants grow there—it’s all animals. We go to this big spread. This wonderful group of folks files through. And there’s this spread of meat—nothing but red meat. You’ve got seal and Arctic hare. The big centerpiece is whale! I thought these people were going to faint on the spot. There were not any greens or vegetables. It was all meat, red meat—and whale. I thought that was just the most priceless thing in the world. These people—the idea that they were expected to eat this.

I thought, “What the heck, I’ll try whale; I’ve never eaten whale.” There was this big whale rib eye and I had a piece cut for me. I was expecting it to be oily and fishy. I took one bite of that whale meat and I understood why the Norwegians and the Japanese still have their whale fishing fleets. It was better than the best piece of Kobe beef you could ever have in your life. Of course, it didn’t taste fishy, it’s a mammal!

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I thought, “Oh dear, we’ve got a problem here.” It was so funny to see these wonderful eco-friendly people there for the opening of the doomsday vault facing the reality of what a traditional Arctic dinner was. It was funny for me because so many of us—myself included—project our own fantasies on what we would like to think is the perfect world. We like to think of traditional people living in harmony; we like to think of small farmers having wonderful lives in the countryside with multiple cropping systems, etc. We project our fantasies on people and then we work, I think sometimes, to try to make their lives be like our fantasies. And that’s a very self-centered and selfish thing. I think that we often do a disservice to them an
d to ourselves. As people who are involved in so-called development, we need to make sure that we don’t project our desires onto someone else and to try change their lives to what we would like ours to be as success or as impact.

The vegetarians at Svalbard were really hungry. I got a complete belly laugh when the next morning, at the hotel, we had a buffet for breakfast. It was the leftovers from the dinner the night before—they probably just put it outside, because it is cold out there. I was going through the line and I turned to the woman next to me who was looking thinner and thinner. She had this little plate, I think she had some granola on it, and there was this big pile of whale meat in front of her. And I turned to her and I said, “You know this is just one of life’s great quandaries”, and she asked, “What’s that?” I said, “What do you do with leftover whale?” The entire line of people burst out laughing; some had a sense of humor. But, there were people who were very hungry at the end of that trip—no salads, no veggies, no tofu.

Matthew Morell—ideally suited to be the next IRRI DG
I am extremely happy that Matthew Morell has been selected [as the next DG of IRRI]. He will have his work cut out for him and he’ll do things differently than I have. But Matthew, like so many people who come to work for IRRI, get bitten by the bug and get consumed by the passion of this Institute. It’s an Institute unlike any other. You don’t just work for IRRI; you become a part of IRRI and IRRI becomes a part of you. Matthew is becoming that kind of IRRI person and I think he is ideally suited to be the next director general. Like all of us, he’ll have his ups and downs; he’ll make mistakes. But I’m confident that Matthew will continue to maintain the Institute’s focus.

The core of the Institute will continue to be genetic resources (that’s just the nature of the beast). But Matthew and our colleagues understand the complementarity and critical nature of crop management, crop protection, social sciences, and socioeconomic dimensions—all of which enable the Institute’s impact to continue.

Advice for Matthew
I was asked to give Matthew advice [photo at left during our joint Zeigler-Morell seminar, 27 August 2015]. I think the thing that worked the best for me is to have self-confidence. You’ve gone through a career, gained experience; you’ve been to many places; you’ve seen many things; you are the person who is ultimately responsible for what happens at IRRI. [Former U.S. President] Harry S. Truman [photo below] said, “The buck stops here.” It has become a platitude, but the fact is, you can’t blame anybody else when something goes wrong. If things go right, other people get the credit.

Get as much advice as you can from people you respect. But when you make a decision, you have to be comfortable with it. Follow your judgment; never, ever make a decision that you fundamentally think is wrong, but other people pressure you to go that way. You’re selected for the position for a reason. Your people have confidence in you. You just have to follow your gut.

IRRI’s big challenge
The big challenge will be how we relate to the private sector. There’s no question that the private sector is increasingly interested in rice and it’s going to be our challenge to maintain our public institution persona while taking advantage of the situation. I think it’s our job to co-opt and help direct the way the private sector moves in a way that the maximum number of people benefits—the small farmer, medium-sized farmer, poor middle-class consumers—all of them will benefit from IRRI’s work. We have the ability to manipulate how the private sector interacts. We have the ability to help countries come up with policies that maximize the impact of our work. That’s the challenge of the Institute.

I’m quite optimistic that the Institute will continue to be relevant and when I take my last breath—whenever that is—IRRI will still be a strong and relevant institution. These are exciting times to be a part of IRRI, be a part of rice research; no doubts in my mind about that. I’ve been UNBELIEVABLY fortunate to have been a part of IRRI for almost 18 years. For seven of them, I had a real job as a scientist. And over 10 years as director general, I consider that a blessing. How I came to achieve it or deserve it, I’m not going to ask any questions, but I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity.

Challenges in plant pathology
In terms of the future in plant pathology, I expect that, over the next decade or so, we are going to have a profound understanding of how plant pathogens interact with the host plant. Based on that understanding, we will be able to very effectively manage plant diseases to the point where they are irrelevant in terms of production losses. I don’t want to sound like we have the secrets of all technologies and that we can solve every problem, but we basically completely understand how the bacterial pathogens interact with plants and we can manage them accordingly.

Although the fungi and nematodes are far more complex, I think the basis of pathogenesis and susceptibility will be worked out to the extent that we will be able to basically have any disease epidemic of any consequence be merely historical records. I think that we should be able to manage them. It’s going to take a decade or two, but these are very exciting times that involve the information that we accumulate, the genomes, the understanding of more subtle ways in which epigenetics control gene expression, and the very subtle interactions with the environment. I don’t want to sound like I’m a complete naive technophile, but the handwriting is on the wall. We will be able to manage many of these situations in a way that was only a dream 5 or 10 years ago.

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On the drawing board for rice improvement
The biggest change on the drawing board for rice improvement is probably genome editing. We have sequenced 3,000 rice genomes and will probably sequence another 10,000 in the next several years. For the available sequences, we have the phenotypes of those materials. We will have opened up the wild relatives of the entire genus Oryza, which will be available for analysis and manipulation. With the development of the CRISPR/Cas9 [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/protein-9 nuclease] complex for gene editing, there is nothing that will prevent us from moving genes from within the genebank containing different Oryza sativa, domesticated rice, and wild relatives of Oryza species, to improve and to tailor rice varieties for all kinds of beneficial traits. That will be much easier than classical breeding, but it will have the same impact as classical breeding. They will not be GMOs or transgenic.

We have before us the ability to stitch together any ole kind of rice plant that we want. That’s going to be the reality 10 years from now. That’s going to completely transform the rice sector. Traits, which we [previously] spent decades identifying and working with, will bloom at our will. That, I think, is what will happen with rice.

Crissan—the better half
Crissan [with Bob and daughters Clare (center) and Ali and son Nick] has always been an unbelievable supporter. We got married and moved to Seattle and then went down to Oregon State University. As I already mentioned, she worked with me in the field collecting data at Crater Lake National Park for my master’s degree. We moved off to [Cornell at] Ithaca and she worked there as a waitress while I was doing my graduate work. We had a baby [Nick] and we lived in a trailer park. She was always incredibly supportive of the work that I did. She was willing to go to Burundi. Oh, and when I went down to Cali [Colombia] to work on my PhD, we lived in a working-class neighborhood in Palmira; it was very difficult and challenging. We had no money, but survived. She went back to do a master’s degree on her own with our new baby at the University of Illinois. We moved to Burundi, had baby no. 2 [Clare] in a little mission hospital there, no light; baby born as I was holding a flashlight in my mouth by the light of the full moon. We went to Colombia to work at CIAT.

There is no way I could possibly have done what I did without Crissan’s support. She was a tremendous sounding board. I moved into administration, being an introvert, not very well suited to people management and leadership. When things went really dark, she was there and helped build me up, supported me, and provided the extroverted social aspect dimension of our family, which, in retrospect, was required to move along and to progress into what turned out to be a career path—although I never knew it was a career path.

She was always willing to play that role even though sometimes it meant subjugating her own personal interests and desires. It took a toll of course. She provided me with a perspective on some of the human aspects of science, administration, and management that I was woefully unaware of. She certainly provided dimensions of perspectives that I desperately needed. She bore a lot of frustration when things didn’t go as quickly as they should have here at IRRI for me as DG. She bore the brunt of a lot of that and, at some point, it also took a toll. She was genuinely interested in making sure that what we did worked.

We raised our children together. She’s, of course, given my travels, had much more of the responsibility of that than I did. I could not even begin being the kind of person I am without her and without what she has done and what she has sacrificed and what she has contributed. It sounds trite and like platitudes, but fundamentally, I would be very different and would have accomplished far less without the difference Crissan has made in me and in my life.

The reason why we’re settling in Oregon after IRRI is we went from Seattle to Corvallis in 1975 to do my master’s work, and we’ve been going back with our kids to Oregon virtually every year since. It’s the only home we have in the U.S. We did live 5 years in Manhattan, Kansas; those were the longest years in my wife’s life.

Being at the helm of IRRI—no other job like it
The IRRI experience is number 1 in my career—without a doubt. The job as IRRI Director General is unlike any other job you can ever possibly want. Science, its value in human terms, the impact you can have positively on the environment—you can transform the way the whole planet will function decades from now, a century from now. What happens at IRRI is relevant.

My God, you can’t ask for anything better or more humbling. If you work for IRRI, and you work hard, do your best, you will never have to worry about whether you’ve wasted your life. Every morning, when you look in the mirror, you won’t regret what is looking back at you. That’s worth a hell of a lot.

Rocking chair in retirement?
I have a rocking chair and will put a little blanket over my knees and just rock in front of the fire. But seriously, I’ll stay active. I like to think that some of my experience will be of use. I will spend some time supporting the objectives of the Asia Rice Foundation USA as its executive director. ARFUSA is a group of former mostly U.S.-based IRRI staff members who have all worked and lived in countries where rice is vital for food and earning a livelihood. I think it will be nice to help support IRRI and that will be one way to do it. I will stay away from IRRI. Matthew and IRRI management don’t need me nosing around and looking over people’s shoulders.

I would like to have the opportunity to bring some of my experience to smaller companies in the private sector if they’re interested in developing countries; perhaps bring some insights there. I would like to be professionally engaged about half the time. I’ve got a grandchild and will have several more, I’m sure, in the coming years. Then I’ll spend some time with them and be the doting archetype grandparent who spoils the grandchildren and generally makes life more difficult.

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Lightening round
Note: Bob was supposed to give “short” responses as I mentioned various issues and topics in rapid-fire fashion. He failed at this more often than not.

Future of food security in the world. Assuming we allow the broad use of technology, I think it’s very comfortable.

CGIAR. Possibly in its death throes unless very hard decisions can be made around focus within the system.

Golden Rice and related GMOs. I hope Golden Rice will be adopted regardless of the development of the concept of using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for betterment of mankind and the poorest of the poor as the beneficiaries. It exposes the emptiness of the criticisms that GMOs and technology can only be bad. I think, in the end, Golden Rice will go down in history as being a transcendental application of genetic engineering.

Climate change. We will adapt to climate change whether we like it or not. The nature of our adaptation—who wins and who loses—is entirely up to us. We won’t be short of food supplies because of climate change if we use our technology wisely.

Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals. I think it’s very important that we articulate where we need to be going and should be going. There’s always a risk that we spend far too many resources on elaborating these goals because once they are elaborated, we walk away from them; don’t implement them.

System of Rice Intensification (SRI). A tremendous example of the power of communication and dedication of what one individual [Norman Uphoff] can do to get an idea to move forward. It is a great example of the power of getting messages to the farmers and getting farmers to pay attention to their crops, particularly in remote areas. In that sense, it is a great positive contribution.

Private sector. Farmers are the ultimate private sector. They are entrepreneurs. They are business people. By not paying attention to the private sector, we’re not paying attention to farmers. We need to understand that people are driven by some kind of profit motive and the sooner we recognize that and the better we incorporate that, the more effective our work will be.

Public sector. It is unbelievably important to overcome market failures. There are certain areas of work that are so difficult and the benefits of which are so diffused that the collective private sector will not engage. The public sector, for its own good, again may be avoiding the tragedy of the commons. People must come together and recognize that, for the benefit of all, some kinds of work need to be undertaken and that all should pay for it. That’s the public sector.

Kansas State University. It is one of the great land grant institutions. Some great folks are there doing some great work, plagued by really, really bad senior leadership for a long time—unfortunate, sad, but true. It is the home, I think, of one of the great agriculture deans whom I’ve ever interacted with, Mark A. Johnson [now president of the University of Nevada, Reno]. He is an unbelievably intelligent, visionary, thoughtful person who helped me to understand a lot about conservative mentality. Mark is a good Republican. I’m an old-school leftie, but I got along with him tremendously. I have the greatest respect for him. As a good Republican, he likes to hire liberals because he wants to have all the good ideas around him. He has a good sense of humor. He is a tremendous visionary.

Cornell University. I wouldn’t be anywhere without Cornell. It was a great stepping stone for me. The name, Cornell, carries a tremendous weight with it. Unfortunately, it seems to have lost its way a little bit in terms of international agriculture, living a bit too much off its reputation. I think it will probably come back. Dave Thurston [professor of international agriculture and plant pathology there] was a wonderful guy and adviser; he opened many doors for me. I have many colleagues there. I could not have been anywhere close to where I am today without the experience at Cornell.

Oregon State University. Oregon State opened my eyes to what graduate education could be. Don Zobel was my major professor. I was unbelievably fortunate to take a forest pathology class from Lew Roth [photo]. He was one of the great fathers of forest pathology. Among all the people I’ve ever worked with, he excited me about the beauty of what plant-pathogen interaction is. I was newly-married then—a wonderful, wonderful time to be alive and be exposed to what education can be.

University of Illinois. It was greatly underappreciated, at the time, by me. I took it for granted. Turns out I got just an outstanding education. As I mentioned earlier, by just probably pure luck, I ended up with a set of courses and educational experiences that was probably equivalent to the best of the smaller Ivy League schools such as Harvard, or Yale. I didn’t appreciate what I was getting at Illinois.

I mentioned earlier I took the world’s first French course there taught by a computer. I was back there to give a talk a few years ago. They got so much money coming from alumni—for buildings and other things. I walked into the lobby of the Computer Science building where they had transformed a huge atrium into a museum. As part of the museum, on display, was one of the consoles that I had sat at to take my first French class taught using the Plato system. It’s pretty disappointing when you go into a museum and one of the displays is something that you used.

Burundi. Working in Burundi with a national program for the first time gave me my first real responsibility—where they really couldn’t look to anybody else. I had a young family there. My telex number was 3; of course, everyone remembers what telex is—right? It was during the hiatus between two unbelievably grizzly series of genocides or massacres in the early 1970s and then the late 1990s. We were there during a very peaceful time.

It was very magical for my wife and me. We really enjoyed it tremendously and made close friends there. It was, to me, a sense that you could conduct agricultural research that was scientifically meaningful and relevant to farmers. I did some work that convinced me that science and development were not at opposite ends. You could ask important questions that are relevant to the needs of the small farmers. I love the country. Our regional rice research and development hub (new building in photo) was placed in Burundi for very good technical reasons. I won’t deny that I was easily convinced to put IRRI’s hub there because I think I owe a personal debt to Burundi because I learned so much when I was there and I think that the people and the farmers deserve the benefits of what we can do in rice. I would like to see a similar thing for the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], which is where I got my start in development.

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Africa. You can’t generalize Africa. I get crazy when people say Africans want this, Africans want that—come on; it is an extraordinarily diverse continent. It has suffered tremendous problems with postcolonial stress. It was absolutely shameless, shameless cynicism on the part of West. The communists and the noncommunists during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s had their proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo and the so-called nationalist groups slaughtered one another when they were basically fighting wars that were between the U.S. and Russia since these superpowers didn’t want to fight head-on. Many parts of Africa are coming out of a pretty rough history. There’s great opportunity there. I see great growth happening there.

State of the world. I’m pretty optimistic about the state of the world. It’s not going to be the kind of world that we hold in our own romantic dreams, but I think that, all in all, in one or two generations, it’s my dream and hope that any person born will have the opportunity to live a life that they see as fulfilling and satisfying. I do believe that the arrow of history, to use an old term, is moving in the direction that the value of human life, human rights, sanctity of the ability of the people to live life peacefully and contentedly in an environment that’s comfortable and I supposed sustainable—I think that dream will be realized. It won’t be in my lifetime. It won’t be in my children’s lifetime, but maybe in the lifetimes of my grandchildren or great grandchildren. There’ll be ups and downs. That’s how I see things going.

Marginal environments. That’s a subjective term. If the environment doesn’t support agriculture and you call it a marginal environment, maybe you should not be doing agriculture there. Some of these marginal environments are extraordinarily rich ecosystems and I think that they should be left out of agriculture. I think “marginal” environment is a judgment term based on agricultural productivity.

Cambodia’s “Killing Fields” (photo at right). A very stark reminder of what people can do to each other in the name of truth; same thing in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Germany in World War II, and in the expansion of the U.S. into native American territories. Every single one of them was done in the name of God, truth, and justice and right. I think if anybody tells you that they are right and they know the way to go, you should run as fast as you can in any other direction. Because if they think they are so right and you disagree with them, you’re in trouble. [Read Glenn Denning’s narrative of IRRI’s involvement in Cambodia after the Killing Fields.]

The Media. We have to be able to communicate. I think it’s important to have a means of communication and the more media we have, the better we are. I believe that the more we cast light on things and the more mechanisms we use to get our ideas across, the better we will all be. Some will be misused; some will be manipulated; some will distort and communicate twisted ideas to further the interest of only a small group. But at the end of the day, the more communication we have, the better off we are.

Role of women. Unfortunately, I think it’s true that women, as part of society, have been subjugated, have been marginalized, and have been taken almost as property, as reproductive animals. I think if we look at some of the attitudes across many, many, many different cultures, it’s only the recent decoupling of the control of reproduction that women have been able to assume more control over their lives. It’s very clear that as women become more educated and are freed up from societal requirements—that they are first and foremost for reproduction—they are treated as people and then an unbelievable richness and wealth of opportunity will emerge.

When I was coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, women’s movement maintained that there was no difference between men and women. I raised two daughters and I can tell you that women and men are different. Thank God! And I think that difference is biological in basis and there are different ways that women perceive the world. I think that threats and opportunities are perceived differently by men and women. And I think that, by not recognizing that, we actually discard the tremendous source of wisdom and perspective. I’m not saying that women are smarter or better or not than men, but even seeing my little girls from early on before I tried to raise them as good liberal persons, it is just different. I’m convinced that it’s hardwiring and there’s nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, I think it’s a damn good thing. As our societies move, I hope against hope that women are engaged absolutely as leaders and as full participants in our society, all of our societies.

Yes, they will have children. Yes, they will be mothers, thank goodness. But I think that the role of women has got to be much more as a leadership role than it has been in the past. If we look at the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Germany, Israel, these are places where women have provided unbelievable leadership. I think that is just a tiny example of what women have to offer. As societies, we are foolish to discard that or to belittle that or somehow to push it aside.

Birds of IRRI; 93-species field guide. Well, since my ringtone is a quacking duck; I’m a lame duck. I think it’s an outstanding contribution. It’s an example of the environmental sensitivity of IRRI and how we view our agricultural practices being sustainable. I think it’s a great, great addition and only a couple of decades overdue, but better late than never.

Bill Gates. Bill came to visit IRRI [8 April 2015; at right in photo] and it was really an exciting time. I found him to be a very, very engaging guy. I was concerned that he would be difficult to talk to. All my fears were completely unfounded. I found him completely well-informed and really interested in what we’re doing and happy to engage with our scientists.

Among the smartest people in the world and certainly the most financially successful person in the world, he genuinely wanted to learn from our scientists. He recognized that the people he was talking to knew more about the science than he did. He wanted to learn from them and he was properly humble before them and I was really impressed.

I really admire the transformation he went through in his life. He started out as a pretty brass, hard-driving, hard-nosed business person, and once he was very, very, very, very successful, he and his wife decided that maybe they should turn their energies towards philanthropy, wanting to make a huge difference. And I think that’s tremendous. I admire the guy greatly and I consider myself very fortunate to have had an opportunity to spend a day with him. I learned a lot.

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IRRI’s greatest achievement ever. IRRI–IRRI is the greatest achievement ever. It is an institution, which is focused on developing knowledge, technology, and human resources towards improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people. That’s IRRI’s greatest achievement.

Bill Clinton. Duncan Macintosh, who was IRRI’s public relations guy and spokesperson for quite a while, was forever trying to get me lined up with the big heavy hitters of the world of philanthropy, not realizing that it was a losing task when you have an introvert like me. But anyway, Duncan somehow got us into a Clinton Global Initiative event in Hong Kong. Suddenly, I was on the stage with Bill himself. It was basically a photo op, so I thought it would be nice to have a chat with him. While shaking his hand, I began asking him a few questions. He looks at me with that “who the hell are you?” look, suggesting that I just smile and get the picture taken. Oh, so that’s how it works.

Jet Li. During another philanthropy event that Duncan got me into, this time in Singapore, I was standing around at this cocktail party. After half a glass of champagne, I saw this Chinese guy looking awkward and uncomfortable, just like me, standing in a corner. So, I slid over to him and started chatting. He’s living in Singapore; we talked about our kids. His were going to the international school there. Suddenly, somebody came up and started taking our pictures. So, I thought someone finally noticed that the director general of the International Rice Research Institute was in the room! Then the event’s host came up and said to my new friend, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re here all by yourself.” Hey, he is with me!

Anyway, it turns out that he is Jet Li [the famous martial arts actor] who was the guest of honor and who had just started the One Foundation. He’s sort of a model of the new Asian philanthropy. After the event, we ended up having dinner together in the city. He’s a really very nice guy. We had a lot of fun because people kept coming up to us for HIS autograph. He saw the humor in this. But anyway, you get the chance in this job to meet some of the rich and the famous and the majority of them are pretty decent, regular people.

Vietnam. A fascinating country. I spent a significant part of my life trying to avoid going to Vietnam. It is irony or poetic justice, I suppose, that I found myself drawn to Vietnam and IRRI has made a huge difference there. IRRI’s relationship with Vietnam is very special. We were engaged with them all during the terrible years of the war, both the North and the South. IRRI’s nonpolitical status was cemented, I think, in that kind of relationship.

The minister of Vietnam, of whom I have the greatest admiration, Minister Phat [Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) Cao Duc Phat; at right in photo], was telling me over dinner once that, during the bombings of Hanoi, he was sent to the countryside to work in the rice fields. He said he loved working in the rice fields, adding that, if it wasn’t for the Americans bombing Hanoi, he would never have come to love rice and the rice fields and the importance of rice for the people. He would have never fully appreciated it. To me, that is a man of great wisdom who can take a horrible hardship and transform it into a positive lesson. He held no grudge against me because I’m an American, but shook my hand and thanked me for being the DG of IRRI. That’s what Vietnam means to me.

India. Several times a year, if I have no reason to go to India, I make up one. It’s such an important rice-growing country where IRRI’s contribution has been so enormous and continues to be enormous. They are great, great people to work with, both the scientists and government officials [in photo with India president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam]. I find the richness of the culture absolutely fascinating and take the opportunity to interact with farmers of many different subcultures—really a very, very special place in my heart.

Professionally, it was a great place to work. I had the opportunity to do some work up in the Himalayas working on rice blast disease. That’s where Rebecca Nelson accused me of going up to the Himalayas to practice micro-tourism to study fungi, a quip on the ecotourism that people do. I resented that, since I felt that I was only going there only for the highest professional purposes. Thank you very much. IRRI’s impact in India has been enormous ever since the introduction of the semidwarf varieties and will be equally enormous and perhaps greater as our stress-tolerant varieties move through stress-prone environments in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Bangladesh. One of my first trips when I became a research scientist at IRRI in the 1990s was up to northeastern Bangladesh—just fascinating. There were unbelievable levels of poverty, but the people were the most pleasant you may ever want to meet, very welcoming and open. IRRI, just like with India, has a phenomenal reputation. Farmers (photo) know of IRRI. In fact in Bangladesh, the term for any improved crop cultivar is “IRRI.” So, if there’s a new potato variety released, farmers call it the IRRI potato. If there’s a new sweet potato or wheat variety, it’s called an IRRI sweet potato or IRRI wheat. I love telling this to my colleagues in the other centers. Like in India, Bangladeshi farmers are very open to new technology. If it works they’ll take it up.

Thailand. Early in the 1990s when, as an IRRI scientist I visited northeastern Thailand, I never thought that rainfed lowland farmers in this region would ever get out of abject poverty. I said in other parts of this interview that, whenever I go to farmers’ fields and ask them what they want for their children, few ever say they want their children to be a rice farmer. But in northeastern Thailand, when I was up there a few months ago visiting with farmers (photos at left and next page), it was quite a different situation. First thing, I remarked, is how unbelievably the area had grown in terms of wealth and material good for the farmers. Every farmer had a two-wheel tractor; every farmer seemed to have a pick-up truck. There’s electricity. The roads were paved. Villages and towns have schools.

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When I asked the farmers how many of them wanted their kids to be rice farmers, every single one raised their hands. They want at least one of their kids to keep the farm going. They expected that the children would work in Ubon or Bangkok, but they wanted to keep the farming going and the kids liked to come back on the weekend at harvest time to help on the farm.

It was a very different attitude from what I’ve found elsewhere in Asia [See Web page 7]. What’s the difference? Well, in fact, those farmers can make good living growing rice. There has been a lot of bad press around Thai government policies providing high rice prices for farmers that was a ploy to buy votes or to get the farmers in the rural sector to support a certain politician. That’s probably true. But on the other hand, that money did go to the Northeast; that money did go into farmers’ pockets; that money did improve the livelihoods of farmers. People ask, “Why is a certain politician still popular in Thailand?” I reply, “Take a trip to the Northeast and see why somebody is popular.” Now, economists will say these are bad policies and that there is good evidence that this has led to corruption. All of that is probably true, but the fact of the matter is that the farmers benefit and it’s obvious to anybody who’s been going to that area over the past 20-30 years. So, maybe some people can benefit from corrupt politicians. Stranger things have happened, I can tell you that.

Japan. I was first introduced to Japan through our then board chair, Kei Otsuka. He was the guy who can be held responsible for the Zeigler “mistake.” He was the chair when they hired me. We spent a lot of time trying to successfully cultivate additional support to IRRI from Japan. Japan has been a long-time supporter of IRRI—one of our most important donors over the years. In recent years, they cut back their general assistance. Although IRRI suffered from that, we’re still highly viewed within the Japanese government as a reputable institution. Kei and I worked together to find alternative sources of funding from Japan and we were quite successful. They’ve given us quite a bit of support outside the normal channels.

It’s a pleasure working with Japanese scientists and institutions. We have always had a number of Japanese scientists working at IRRI. Those folks end up being great ambassadors for us back in Japan. They’ve been just outstanding scientists. Peter Jennings credits the creation of the ideal plant type of IR8, not to himself but to his Japanese colleague, Akira Tanaka (at left in photo with him). According to Peter, this physiologist was the real brains behind IR8’s plant type. In addition to Tanaka in the early days, we also had Shouichi Yoshida, the physiologist who replaced Tanaka in 1966, and Kenzo Hemmi, the internationally acclaimed agriculturist who served as chair of the IRRI BOT in 1984-88.

China. This country has always been a bit of an enigma for us. As China was opening up in the early 1970s, IRRI was among the first institutions that had any kind of contact as the Cultural Revolution began tailing off as things started to stabilize and open up. IRRI was one of the first key institutions to come in to exchange germplasm. In the 1980s, the China National Rice Research Institute (CNRRI) was modeled after IRRI and we made significant intellectual contributions into its design early on. The restorer lines that make the hybrid rice program in China possible came from IRRI. Without those restorer lines, there would have been no hybrid rice in China. This was something that was not generally acknowledged until about 10 years ago. So, we’ve had very, very good relations with particularly CNRRI and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), and a number of the provincial Academies of Science. Our scientific relationship with China has been very productive.

As China has become increasingly wealthy, we have been trying to convince the Chinese that maybe they could give some financial contributions to IRRI, but so far, we have not been very successful. Having said that, IRRI has maintained its scientific relationship at very high levels. In 2014, the Institute’s 3K RGP team (in photo) with CAAS and the Beijing Genomics Institute have sequenced 3,000 rice genomes—just a phenomenal achievement. This is going to be a source of discovery in rice science, rice biology, rice genetics, and rice improvement that will be yielding results for decades to come. It’s a pretty exciting time for rice scientists. I’m reasonably comfortable saying that if IRRI had not been involved, the project never would have happened and again I’m very justifiably proud of the leadership that IRRI has shown in many of these areas, not just sequencing of 3,000 genomes. It’s just one example of our global leadership.

St. Louis Cardinals [Bob’s favorite U.S. baseball team]. The Cards are something. The Cards are the real thing. It’s the Cardinals and the Yankees and the Dodgers that are baseball. Maybe Boston, but they are a bunch of losers. And those Ohio teams [Indians and Reds], you can tell them to take a walk [a dig at the interviewer who is from Ohio]. It’s the Cards; they are the real thing. Harry Caray [sportscaster] before he was with the [Chicago] Cubs, Stan ‘the Man” Musial, Lou Brock, come on, these guys are the rocks of baseball. And those hot Midwest nights—humidity, crickets, listening to a ballgame on the radio, pennant race, St. Louis Cardinals; it doesn’t get much better than that.

Fox News and Walter Cronkite. FNC is a serious, serious, serious flaw in the American psyche. It is a cynical approach by some to manipulate the fears of others. I just think it’s a great tragedy. Look at journalists like Walter Cronkite who had the trust of the American people, who was a patriot, and who communicated the news in a way that informed the public and that people could rely on. Now, look at the same media being distorted by the characters on Fox News. It breaks my heart, breaks my heart.

Growing up Catholic. You got to blame somebody. So, I blame the Church. I sometimes say I’m a recovering Catholic. I always read the news stories about the Pope and what’s going on at the Vatican. [Bob actually attended several meetings—most recently the Working Group on Bread, Brain, Education and Poverty—in the Vatican in his capacity as IRRI DG as the photo shows him flanked by two Swiss guards.] I’m not particularly religious anymore. I think if there’s a God, He and I’ll sort it out when I’m dead; if not, we won’t. The Church, frankly, is primarily interested in promoting the interest of the Church, which is too bad because there are some good people. The current Pope [Francis], I think, is a great, great guy and he is trying to use the tools and the instruments of the Church in a very, very good way. I wish him the very best If there’s anything I can do, I’m happy to help. Growing up Catholic, you have a lot of guilt. However, my time attending a Catholic school was transformational for me; I’m grateful for that.

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Water. It brings to mind a line from Johnny Cash in his album At Folsom Prison. He gets a glass of water from the warden and he takes a sip—‘Brahhh, yup, that’s water alright,’ implying that it’s better to drink something else. That was the first thing that came to mind when you said “water,” unfortunately, that’s my answer. Yes, water, rice—all aspects of life!

Convenient convergence and an inconvenient divergence. Yes, that’s my line and it’s a good one, I think. I used it with my first realization that the work we are doing for the poorest of the poor—developing rice varieties tolerant of drought, flooding, heat, salinity—is exactly the same kind of work we need to adapt to climate change. The convergence of the agenda of meeting the needs of the poorest of the poor while addressing the future challenges of climate change, I thought, was a very convenient convergence of agendas. And it should enable us to generate support from a multitude of donors with different agendas.

Unfortunately, shortly after I came up with that term, Al Gore [U.S. vice president and presidential candidate] came up with “An Inconvenient Truth.” I had “Convenient Convergence” and he had “Inconvenient Truth.” I withdrew my Convenient Convergence for a while, but now it’s time to resuscitate it. I think it’s a sound concept.

[Editor’s note: I came up with “inconvenient divergence” where population continues to increase as productive agricultural land continues to decrease. Bob: Yes, and I say that we counter that by making the productivity of the area of land increase and that’s a challenge for us.]

Rockefeller Foundation. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant visionaries—founding IRRI, working in health, providing a philanthropic example for the Gates Foundation, not to mention the guys coming out of the Foundation who were giants in our lifetime: Norman Borlaug, Peter Jennings, David Thurston, to name a few. Then, there is the Foundation’s Rice Biotechnology Program, which has transformed the way biotechnology research operates. Single-handedly, they did that, making rice a model system. Other colleagues coming out of the Foundation—Bob Herdt, Gary Toennissen, John O’Toole—I admire to this day. They have rendered an unbelievable service and should be recognized; I hope they will be.

Being 65. I’m not 65. I’m 64 and my wife hasn’t left me yet! At 64, I feel about the same as being 24 or 25. I just move a little slower.

Being Santa Claus at IRRI Christmas parties. Being Santa Claus or meeting him? It was fun. I enjoyed it. I could be irreverent. There is nothing that more I love than being irreverent. [That’s Maria Hettel getting a gift from Santa Bob in December 1996.]

Being a grandfather [with new granddaughter Willow in the photo]. Unbelievable. Everybody says it’s a great experience, but until you become a grandpa you don’t know. It’s transformation, and I look forward to years and years of being a doting grandfather and it gives me a thrill that I did not think was possible.

Scuba diving at Arthur’s Place [in Anilao, Batangas, Philippines]. It opened an entire new world. I really love seeing a whole other part of the planet and appreciating it, pretty humbling in terms of the diversity of life and how, for all of that life, we are completely irrelevant. There’s nothing like swimming around in a tropical coral reef with the fish and the unbelievable biological diversity and realizing that all of that life predates human civilization by millions and millions of years. Aside from the pollutants and the temperature change that we might induce, we are completely irrelevant and it’s humbling—and beautiful, sublimely beautiful.

Spending time on a jet plane. I spend far too much time on jet planes. I watched too many bad movies. I tried to do too much work and didn’t sleep nearly enough. I never ever talk to my seatmates. [That’s true; on a flight to Jessore, Bangladesh, in September, Bob spoke barely a word to me.]

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After more than 22 years at IRRI, Gene Hettel, editor-in-chief of Rice Today and IRRI historian, retires shortly after Dr. Zeigler. Read Gene’s history blog about IRRI’s rich heritage—by the month or by the week.

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