This year’s
efforts of the board of directors have been largely devoted to organizing the
2019 congress in Glasgow together with the local organizers, Paul Birch and
John Jones, and the local organizing committee, representing all areas of
IS-MPMI in the UK. We have decided in several sessions on the plenary speakers
and the chairs of concurrent sessions. The goal has been to generate a mix of
established and junior speakers with broad international representation and a
good gender balance. Looking at the program, I think we have largely achieved
this. It has also been very rewarding to hear that almost without exception,
all the invited scientists have agreed to speak. I am also very happy to let
you know that the financial situation of our society is such that we will be
able to grant travel support to more junior scientists to attend the 2019 congress
in Glasgow. The website to apply for this funding will open in early 2019.
When
I took over the presidency from Sheng Yang He in Portland, it was time to
restructure the IS-MPMI Interactions
platform—our forum to communicate with you. I felt that we should not miss out
on the immense expertise of outstanding members of our society who have
recently retired. It’s my great pleasure to report that Fred Ausubel, Paola
Bonfante, Alan Colmer, Allan Downie, and Dan Klessig readily agreed to my
inquiry and will from now on form a team of senior advisors for Interactions that the editor-in-chief can
turn to for advice. Brad Day stepped down as editor-in-chief of Interactions, and Dennis Halterman enthusiastically
took over the position and is breaking new ground by soliciting participation
in particular of our younger members, who among other things have chosen
eminent scientists for interviews. I still see room for improvement, i.e., more
participation of our members. It would be great if you would tell us the topics
you would like to see printed and discussed so that we can focus our efforts on
content that matters to our members, in particular the junior members, to keep
them excited about science and engaged in our society.
IS-MPMI
is a truly international society, and we currently have about 1,000 members
from 43 countries. I would be very happy to see more participation by members
from all countries with respect to engagement in our society. IS-MPMI is an
open society, and views and suggestions from all members are welcome. We would
like to communicate with our members, and we appreciate your suggestions on how
best to accomplish this goal, especially career advancement for our young
members. We desire to foster a strong sense of community.
MPMI, the dedicated journal of our society, has been
running smoothly under the expert guidance of John McDowell as editor-in-chief.
John has made substantial efforts, together with his editorial team, to
increase the visibility of MPMI
during difficult times, in which more and more journals are launched and
compete for papers. His 3-year term will end in December 2018, and we are happy
to announce that Jeanne Harris will take over then. Let me take the opportunity
to thank John for all of his time and effort devoted to MPMI. Let me also take the opportunity to thank members of the board
of directors for their extremely valuable input during the many calls and for
their willingness to take on responsibility for IS-MPMI affairs and advancing
the functioning of our society. And a big thank-you to the staff for keeping
our input into the daily affairs of the society to a minimum.
With
respect to our science, I sense that times are changing: Model systems will certainly
continue to be of enormous value by elucidating the basic mechanisms of how
microbes interact with plants. When I attended my first IS-MPMI meeting in
Interlaken in 1990, I was incredibly proud to be allowed to talk about a system
that seemed odd at the time but since has become a model for biotrophic fungal–plant
interactions. I find it truly rewarding that it has survived and flourished for
three decades and continues to deliver unprecedented and exciting insights.
Such models are important and will continue to be so. However, with the advent
of new technologies, even difficult-to-handle systems of considerable
importance in agriculture are becoming tractable. We should return to these: obligate
and emerging pathogens, obligate symbionts, and the transplantation of entire
systems, such as nitrogen fixation, into crop plants.
As I write this letter, I am on vacation in my summerhouse
at the Baltic Sea. It is one of the driest summers on record, and it is
horrifying to see plants getting weak first due to the drought and then
succumbing to pathogens. Watching this happen not just in your own garden but
also in the neighboring fields tells you that the importance of our work will
grow if we want to solve worldwide problems of crop production under changing
climate conditions. We need to improve plant productivity and contribute to a
sustainable agriculture. The engineering of broad-spectrum and durable resistance
continues to be one of the big future challenges. The availability of genome
information of the most important crop species, together with modern genome
engineering techniques, is expected to spur new initiatives in this direction. Another
hurdle I see is that most of our results are obtained and validated in
controlled laboratory settings. In most cases, we do not know to what extent traits
we have introduced will work out under field conditions, where plants may be
exposed not to one but to several threats simultaneously or in succession
and/or to slowly changing environments, involving several factors. In this regard,
it is shocking that in July 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union
has ruled that gene-edited crops should be subject to the same regulations that
are applied to conventional genetically modified organisms—even if they do not
contain transgenes. This is a severe blow to the more translational research in
our field in all of Europe. I can only hope that those of you who are affected
by this ruling will not give up your fight against it.
I will end with a personal note: In one of his letters
to you, Sheng Yang He, previous president of our society, voiced that he feels unsatisfied
to witness young group leaders struggle to find a new niche and he suggested
several solutions. I agree with him that this continues to be a problem. But I
see an even deeper problem developing in science in general: Doing science may
lose some of its attraction. For me throughout my scientific career, doing
science, i.e., solving a scientific problem that you have picked yourself, has
been immense fun and highly rewarding. I see this at stake not while you work
on solving the problem but when you try to publish it. Our publishing culture,
in my view, has eroded to a point that it becomes increasingly impossible to
publish exciting new findings quickly, because you are asked to add more and
more detail during several rounds of revision, which delays publication to an
unacceptable length. Let me make clear that I am not talking about missing
controls and/or flaws in the data but about an almost deliberate delay by the
reviewers—who are our colleagues. I am afraid that such experiences will
seriously damage the interest in basic research and may turn away our most
promising young PhDs and post-docs from pursuing a scientific career. We will
pick up this discussion with the board of directors and the IS-MPMI community
to meet this challenge and develop an effective strategy, because the future also
of our scientific field critically depends on the young scientists and their
excitement, engagement, and fun in doing science and tackling the unknown.
I am very much looking forward to seeing many of you
in Glasgow next year.
Best wishes,
Regine Kahmann, President
