'We don't know the potential of plants yet'

Liam Dolan, head of the 400-year-old University of Oxford’s botanic garden, says plant science is central to humanity’s future

‘YOU COULD have been a fish,” says Dr Liam Dolan, keeper of the University of Oxford’s Botanic Garden, the oldest botanic garden in the UK. Nice to meet you too, Dr Dolan.

“It all started with green pond slime,” continues the Dubliner. “It crawled out of the pond, on to the bank and then mined into the soil for nutrients, developing roots. The fish (the first vertebrates) only climbed out after it.” Dolan describes discovering this as his eureka moment.

“I realised there was no life on the continents until this green algae climbed out. That was the epiphany for me.”

Now as Oxford’s “Sherardian professor of botany, keeper of the garden and chair of the herbarium” – a long-winded title the humour of which is not lost on him – Dolan is a very busy man.

Having studied science at UCD, he says that good botany lecturers inspired him to focus on plants. After a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent five years at John Innes in Norwich, an epicentre for plant science.

In 2009, he took the job at Oxford, where he lectures in botany and oversees the near 400-year-old garden, which, with more than 7,000 species of plant, is more biologically diverse than a tropical rain forest.

Commissioned in 1621 and costing the equivalent of £3.5 million (€4.3 million), it began as a “physic garden” where plants were grown for their medicinal value.

Its original walls still stand today. However Dolan says of his predecessor, the garden’s first keeper, Jacob Bobart: “For the first seven years, they couldn’t afford to pay him so he sold plants down the high street.”

So what kind of medicines did it produce? “There was an early aspirin from the willow tree and concoctions made of crushed beetles,” he says.

Remarkably, until the 1700s medicine was based on texts written in the fourth century – and even these were based on the first-century manuscripts of a Greek physician, Dioscorides, he says.

“With the Enlightenment came Linneaus’ classification of organisms and this moved botany away from the garden and into the lab.”

In the past 15 years, plant science has undergone another revolution. “Scientists have concentrated on completing the DNA sequence of fewer and simpler organisms,” he says. “The findings can then be applied to other plants.”

Dolan’s own area of research entails understanding the genetics of root systems to help boost nutrient absorption by crops to deliver bigger yields.

For Dolan, this has never been more important: “Humanity faces serious challenges over the next 50-100 years. The Earth’s population is likely to double by 2050.

“The planet will have to feed more people, without any increase in area on which to grow food. We can’t pull down forests and wreck the planet. We have to learn to use land more efficiently, and to increase yields.”

He says that the 2008 riots in Egypt over the soaring cost of food could be a taste of what’s to come.

So do our governments know enough about all of this? “The riots sobered people up,” says Dolan. “Whether they’re doing enough or not is unclear.

“Europe is being slow, as we don’t have a food crisis, but countries like China are more likely to be affected, so their plant science research is making huge headway.”

What of the hot potato of genetically modified food? “If anything, GM has made us more informed about where our food comes from, and that’s a good thing,” he says. “They’ve been growing and eating it in North America and Asia for over 10 years and there are no examples of ill effects.” He says that while organic might be workable for wealthy nations, to produce the quantity of food that our world will need means looking at alternatives.

Dolan sees the patenting of GM crops as the bigger issue. “At what cost will patented crops be made available to developing countries?”

Above all, Dolan is passionate about plants. Referring to a new breed of lupin found high in the Andes, he says there are species old and new whose potential for medicine and science is yet to be discovered.

The value of the yew tree, also the oldest tree in the Oxford garden, planted in 1645, only came to light in the 1960s when it was found to contain taxol, now used in the treatment of breast cancer.

“We just don’t know the potential of all plants yet,” says Dolan. “That’s why not one should be allowed to become extinct.”