Commentary

Botany-Zoology Merger at EIU?

Editor:

Hi. My name is Kevin Franken. I'm a senior Environmental Biology major here at Eastern Illinois University. Currently, there is a proposal to merge the Botany and Zoology Departments into the Department of Biological Sciences. The vast majority of the Botany faculty here oppose it because they fear the high-quality Botany program here will suffer (and for many other reasons). In past mergers at other universities, it has been said that Botany faculty and course offerings decline after such mergers.

What I'm looking for is data/evidence to support that idea. Do you or anyone you know have access to such data or can get a hold of such data showing a decline of Botany faculty and course offerings after a merger with a Zoology Department? If you have such information, please show the Botany faculty numbers and course offerings before the merger and after. If yes, could you send that information to me via e-mail or regular mail? My fellow students and I are trying to bring evidence to our Student Senate, Faculty Senate, and administration. Such information would be very useful.

Do you have any advice for our movement here? Do you know any names/e-mails of faculty at other universities who I could contact regarding this?

Also, EIU currently offers BS degrees in Botany and Zoology and Environmental Biology, if the merger goes through, only a BS in Biological Sciences will be offered, with an option in Environmental Biology, and a concentration in Botany (and other areas). I don't think a degree in Botany is the same thing as a concentration in Botany, do you?

Thank you for your time.

Kevin Franken
103 Taylor Hall
Charleston, IL 61920
217-581-2003
<kfranken@hotmail.com>

In Memoriam:

John J. Wurdack, 1921-1998

John J. Wurdack, Curator Emeritus of Botany, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, died of cancer May 13, 1998 in Lanham, Maryland.

John was well known as a specialist in the systematics of neotropical Melastomataceae, preparing book-length treatments of the family for the floras of Venezuela (1973), Ecuador (1980), and the Guianas (1993). He published more than 130 scientific papers and an amazing 905 taxa of flowering plants, including 19 genera and 701 species.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he received a B.S. (1942) from the University of Pittsburgh. In late 1942 he was inducted into the U.S. Army and during World War II was stationed at Parnamirim Air Field, Natal, Brazil, where he served as a sanitary engineer. In an era before jet airplanes, Natal was an important stop on the air ferry route to Africa, Europe, and Asia. After the war John was posted to Japan. Already interested in plants, he took advantage of opportunities to collect scientific specimens in Brazil and the Far East.

In 1948, he completed a B.S. in Sanitary Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He then turned his full attention to botany and began a decade long association with the New York Botanical Garden; first (1949-1952), as a technical assistant while he studied for his Ph.D. (granted by Columbia University in 1952), and then (1952-1960) as an Assistant and Associate Curator. It was during this period that he participated in a series of scientific expeditions organized by Basset Maguire, which took him to many of the remote mountains of the "Lost World" of Amazonian Venezuela. He traveled thousands of miles by river and on foot and became the first scientist to explore or to collect botanical specimens on a number of tepuis in the Venezuela Guayana. Most notably, in 1953 he was with Maguire and others when Cerro de la Neblina was first discovered, named, and climbed. Cerro de la Neblina, a large massif on the Venezuelan-Brazilian border, was one of the last major mountain ranges to be discovered in the world.

In 1960, he accepted an appointment as an Associate Curator in the U.S. National Museum (now National Museum of Natural History) and began a new phase in his career, working principally with the scientific collections in the U.S. National Herbarium and the tens of thousands of specimens sent to him as gifts for determination. Several times he made extended trips to Europe to study historical and type material. Typically this was done just as he was about to finish a major floristic project. He made one last extended collecting trip to Peru (1962) and then shorter, and less strenuous, trips to Venezuela and Jamaica. He had a playful disdain for "so called" modern expeditions where botanists seldom left their car (or helicopter) and he was fond of stating that botanical exploration was for younger botanists, certainly those who were less than forty, since the work demanded stamina. No doubt it did.

After his formal retirement as Curator in 1991, John continued his scientific research and came to the museum daily until medical complaints hospitalized him in December 1997. John was especially fond of Latin American visitors to the U.S. National Herbarium and always ready to invite them to lunch in the "Castle" to talk about South America. It is unfortunate that more of his stories were not recorded. Reminiscences of his student days in New York were published in Brittonia (48: 359-361. 1996) and letters describing his collecting in Venezuela are excerpted in the Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden (64: 1-28. 1990).

John obviously was held in high esteem by his peers, who have named more than 140 plants in his honor (including three genera). In 1997, a Festschrift was published to celebrate his career and 75th birthday. It was printed in Caracas, Venezuela, as BioLlania, Edición Especial No. 6 and almost 50 scientists world-wide contributed papers.

John was as passionate about plants at home as he was at work. He was a keen gardener, growing exotic and native species at his Beltsville, Maryland home. He also was a charter member of the Potomac Valley Chapter of the American Rock Garden Society.

John's wife, Marie L. Solt, died in 1978. He is survived by two sons, Kenneth of Chapel Hill (also a botanist), and Douglas of Silver Spring, Maryland.

Laurence J. Dorr,
Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.