Plant Pathology in Space?

Contributed by Holly Withrow.

While scanning materials for the Cultivating a Revolution digitization project, I discovered in a folder of papers from the Plant Pathology Department of North Carolina State University dated from the 1960s a paper suggesting that NASA should focus a little more on Plant Pathology.

The unnamed author suggests that while NASA should rightly focus on how man fares in space, they should also focus on other forms of life - specifically parasites of the plants that man depends on for food.  The effects of atmospheric differences on the plants and their parasites should be evaluated to see how well they could survive on, for instance, the moon.  They also suggest that this is not only important for the sake of nutrition, but also to consider in the case of biological warfare in space.  The author even attached some studies on pathogenesis in plants that he thought would be especially useful.

Of course at this point, NASA has researched some aspects of plants in space, but how exciting it seems for someone from an agricultural program in North Carolina in the 1960s to already be considering the impact of agricultural research on space exploration.  Someone was definitely thinking ahead!

To find out more about historical documents from the Department of Plant Pathology , check out the Cultivating a Revolution project.