Introduction to our guests at the 51st Reunion of the University of Sydney BScAgr 1971 graduates - delivered by Jim Scott (March 22, 2022)
I am delighted to introduce to you, Professor Brent Kaiser, Professor of Legume Biology, in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney.
Brent is the Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub (ITRH) – Legumes for Sustainable Agriculture which is headquartered at Camden. He works at the Centre for Carbon, Water and Food near Camden – and near the Nepean River! One wonders if he has water views now from his office! And is he secretly planning to rename the Centre to correct the gross error of excluding Carbon’s neighbouring element, Nitrogen, from the name of the Centre?!
He is also the Director of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture – which emerged when the faculty of Agriculture was subsumed into the School of Life and Environmental Sciences which is located within the Faculty of Science!
Brent received a BSc (Agriculture) and MSc (Plant Physiology) degree from the University of Guelph (in Ontario, Canada - which is about as tropical a place as you can get in Canada!) and a PhD (Plant Molecular Biology) from an institution that teaches ‘agriculture’ within an environmental envelope - the Australian National University.
Brent is a molecular physiologist whose work focuses on plant nitrogen transport systems, specifically sustainable chickpeas.
Some of his interesting web pages include:
• Chickpeas: the wonder crop to boost the northern economy (I wonder what the late Bruce Davidson would think of that given his book ‘The Northern Myth’?) and
• Finger on the pulse!
He has published widely – and with more co-authors than you or I have had hot dinners! He reckons that world agriculture needs to get its legume act together!
He would get points from the late OG Carter for publishing about N transport in soybeans BUT – in deference to the late Professor Frank Crofts - his publications do not seem to include mention of subterranean clover OR oats plus nitrogen!
We welcome you here tonight Brent and look forward to your address later in the proceedings …
We also wish to extend a warm welcome to Dr Claire Kennedy
Claire is the Executive Officer of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture
She was awarded her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Sydney, for her thesis: “Powerful arms and fertile soil: English identity and the Law of Arms in early modern England”
She knows a lot about gentlemen and how to determine if they are indeed gentlemen. She also knows that we need ‘matters of fact’ when managing the land! Gentleman scientists have been lauded, for “taking no-one’s word for it” and “seeing for oneself”.
The role of the English gentleman was crucial to the origins of early modern science, in the establishment of truth in “matters of fact.” If gentlemen played a central role in the social construction of facts, she argues that the College of Arms played a central role in the construction of gentlemen. Through the process of Visitation, the heralds ascertained who was gentle, and who was not.
If you look closely at some of the biographical notes of our 1971 graduating cohort (in Triticum 1970 – which you can find displayed on the walls of this room), I am sure you will recognise Claire’s finding that, since early modern times, we have known that:
“Blood, along with mother's milk, and semen, were fungible fluids”, “products of the body's power to concoct its nutriment”, that could easily turn into one another. Surplus blood was shed in menstruation, or transformed into milk by women, or refined into semen by both men and women”.
Perhaps, after tonight’s dinner, Claire can contemplate on the degree to which the BScAgr graduates of 1971 were in fact gentlemen or, indeed gentlewomen, and if we have any regard for the truth or ‘matters of fact’.
We welcome your ‘visitation’ here with us, Claire!