S.E. Kingsland's “A Lab For All Seasons”

Sharon E. Kingsland is well known and respected by ecologists and historians of science for her many papers and several books on the history of ecology. Her most recent book is A Lab For All Seasons: the laboratory revolution in modern botany and the rise of physiological plant ecology, Yale University Press. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 investigates the origin and development of the Phytotron; Part 2, the spread of the phytotron idea in its development around the world; and Part 3, the emergence and synthesis of ecology resulting in physiological ecology. This book is actually several books in one and many pages are often a gold mine of discussion of smaller topics. You can open the book at almost any page and find interesting information. Because of the diversity of topics, this book has an excellent index that helps you find many of these small topics. The book is a must read if you are interested in the development of ecology in the early postwar years. For anyone wishing an in-depth look at the individuals and the research endeavors in physiological ecology (in its widest sense), you will be amply rewarded.

Phytotrons are the name given to complex environmental chambers developed at Caltech in the 1930s and onward by Fritz Went and many others. You have to be of a certain age, remembering the post-World War II era and the emergence of the modern research university in the 1950s and 60s, to understand the excitement and potential that the development of a phytotron caused in the emerging experimental science of ecology. The phytotron raised the possibility of being able to create a chamber of diverse sizes to “create weather” where you could manipulate different combinations of environmental variables in a reproducible experimental design. In fact, you might eventually be able to have the weather differ in parts of a single phytotron.

The idea of a phytotron can be traced to Fritz Went's single-minded enthusiasm and his European research lineage from his father back to Julius Sachs' ideas in “Experimental Plant Physiology” (German edition, 1874 and English addition, 1882). One of Sachs' illuminating ideas was that plants had growth substances that moved through the plant affecting processes. Later, these were called auxins or plant hormones. This and other ideas provided a foundation that would require experiments in controlled environments. Thus, some kind of device, which allowed controlling of the plants' environment in a reproducible manner, could take both ecology and physiology from a descriptive and correlational methods into a more controlled and experimental discipline. From the very beginning the development of phytotrons pushed the engineering design capacities of the times and the conceptual ideas of what was to be physiological ecology. It made Fritz Went what today we would call a science entrepreneur.

The first half of Kingsland's book is about how Fritz Went energized many people everywhere in the world to develop larger and more sophisticated phytotrons. If you did not have a phytotron, you were just not part of what was happening. Part 2 involves a lengthy discussion of two case studies of the development of phytotrons in the Soviet Union and in Hungary. The Hungarian experience is an interesting entanglement of Lysenkoism and the DNA-central dogma of Watson and Crick with the dissenting ideas of Barry Commoner in the United States of Watson and Crick's ideas. The Cold War hype meant that even the Soviets built phytotrons, which undermined Lysenko's Lamarckian evolution idea by encouraging more rigorous experimental testing of Lysenko's ideas (which had frustrated the development of modern genetics in the Soviet Union). It is interesting to think that the glamour of the name “phytotron,” a version of the word cyclotron, was able to bridge the Cold War barriers between the West and the communist regimes.

The phytotron pushed the technology of the time and often was limited by the expense in building such complicated and innovative machines. One also has to remember the number of problems there were. Phytotrons were a plumber's nightmare. Kingsland hints at the problems in design and execution, which was to continue even into the 1980s with the infamous first version of Biosphere 2. The phytotrons taught us that we had to collaborate more closely with engineers and have better conceptual arguments of what we were trying to do in terms of lighting, humidity, the heat, and water budgets in the chambers, not just the factors but the processes they are a part of.

Went left Caltech in 1958 to go to the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1963, he organized the building of a Climatron, not a phytotron, but a large glasshouse that displayed plants growing in different climate regions. In addition, Went developed a small plant growth chamber and another mobile laboratory like the one he had developed at Caltech. In 1965, he moved again to head a new laboratory in the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada-Reno. Fritz Went's moves are an indication of his salesmanship and his ability to raise money, particularly from the NSF and other private and government organizations. Went's replacement at Missouri was David M. Gates, the son of the early ecologist Frank Gates. David Gates was trained in physics and in land surface energy exchanges; he was to become well known for his research on biophysical ecology. It was Gates' research in the connection between the physical environment and organisms, which provided a theoretical and practical structure for parts of physiological ecology.

Part 3 of Kingsland's book develops the synthesis of physiology with ecology that produced the emerging field of physiological ecology. The two significant synthesizers were Fritz Went and Dwight Billings. Fritz Went, the developer of the phytotron, was interested in physiology and secondarily in ecology. Dwight Billings was interested in the ecology of individuals and secondarily at first in a physiological viewpoint. Billings came from the Duke University tradition of plant ecology epitomized by Henry Oosting, a student of William Cooper. Fortunately, Duke University was a powerhouse in botany with several well-known plant physiologists, for example, Paul Kramer. Went and Billings were cheerleaders for both field and laboratory research, and it was this combination which catalyzed the emerging field of physiological ecology. Physiological ecology was seen by many ecologists as escaping the metaphysical arguments of community ecology and stressing a more mechanistic approach to understanding of the physiological connection to interactions between organisms and the physical environment.

The rest of Part 3 of Kingsland's book is an interesting set of case studies, which had significant impact on the growth of physiological ecology. For example, Cornelius H. Muller at the University of California, Santa Barbara disliked Bonner and Gray's chemical hypothesis that plants would produce toxic aerosols that affected their interactions. Muller became the chief spokesman of the critical approach called allelopathy. Allelopathy was a part of chemical ecology developed by Jean Langenheim. This research furthered the interest in the adaptive role of secondary metabolites in plant interactions. This included research on smog in Los Angeles and other natural pollutions. Jack Scholtz's experiments with potted plants in growth chambers showed that if he shredded leaves on one plant, other plants would elevate their chemical defenses. The plants were not connected. This was seen as so bizarre that his papers in scientific journals were repeated in the National Enquirer without change!

Another important research area was the transfer of nutrients and carbon between decomposing litter and plant roots in ecosystems by mycorrhiza. Kingsland spends, rightfully, quite a bit of time on the research of Nellie Stark and her pioneering work across several parts of ecology having to do with how plants can grow in areas of poor soils. This is one of the areas in which a large amount of effort was spent in deciding whether research projects in the field were actually explaining the transfer between decomposing litter and trees by fungi. This is a reoccurring problem that ecology has had in gaining enough convincing evidence for some general process. Often, the arguments are that this is fine in some particular situation but may not be a general explanation.

Part 3 of Kingsland's book is the most interesting because it covers so many diverse topics and individuals in their approaches, all of which are trying to connect and synthesize different parts of ecology. All of these case studies that Kingsland covers do not fit together easily into a smooth story, but it certainly leads to the complicated problems we have today in understanding the operations of earth systems. Kingsland is very good at showing how at the same time many different and at some times contrasting ideas are occurring in ecology. The difficulty is often how to see whether they are really related and whether they are worth further observations and experiments.

Read this book and keep it handy for reference of the history of physiological plant ecology.