New Honorary Member of <scp>BSPP</scp>

I grew up on a farm in a remote and beautiful corner of Scotland, where my favourite activity was feeding the pigs that roamed freely over a couple of overgrown fields. My grandfather, an expert naturalist who had trained as a forester, encouraged my early interest in wildlife, but I found school biology dull. Fortunately, a physics teacher who had worked in medical imaging encouraged me to consider science as a worthwhile career. At Cambridge University, two courses that shaped my career were Population Genetics and Evolution, where I discovered the power of natural selection, and Fungal Biology, which revealed the complex interactions of fungi with other organisms. After working in rural development in India, I joined the renowned Plant Breeding Institute as a PhD student with Martin Wolfe, a unique and visionary pathologist. As I wondered what I could do with barley mildew, one of my undergraduate lecturers, Martin Evans, gave me excellent advice: ‘Keep reading, keep thinking, and soon you'll ask questions that nobody else has thought of’. Eventually I did one of the first studies to apply DNA fingerprinting to pathogen evolution. I benefitted greatly from interactions with the outstanding scientists at PBI, including Roy Johnson, who invented the term ‘durable resistance’, and Peter Scott, who applied this concept to non-biotrophic diseases. (I am convinced that the coffee table is the most vital piece of scientific equipment.) In 1989, I was appointed as Martin's successor at what became the John Innes Centre. I got more valuable advice from Greg Sage, a barley breeder. ‘Don't bother with mildew’, he told me. ‘Breeders are on top of it. Work on something that matters’. I did not follow Greg's advice completely because fungicide resistance in mildew has been a continual, fascinating sideline and my colleague Chris Ridout cloned the first mildew gene involved in avirulence. It steered me, however, towards a disease that matters greatly, Septoria tritici blotch of wheat. I had the privilege of working with Gert Kema at Wageningen and talented colleagues at JIC, Lia Arraiano, Penny Brading and Laetitia Chartrain, to develop the genetics of Septoria resistance. I have worked on many other pathogens but I have always tried to consider any disease in its wider context: the whole plant phenotype, the method of crop management or the ecosystem of agriculture. It has been a great pleasure to work with many interesting colleagues, however badly the fungi have sometimes behaved. Some of my highlights include research with Mogens Hovmøller at Aarhus on global diversity and dispersal of wheat yellow rust, theoretical studies with a student, Aurélien Tellier, on the ecological factors that maintain genetic diversity, and work with Christina Cowger in North Carolina, showing that durable resistance really has almost always been durable. I have now ended up where I started, inspired by my grandfather's love of nature and especially forests. In 2013, Clive Brasier and Joan Webber at Forest Research invited me to collaborate with them on ash dieback. Since then, my colleague Elizabeth Orton and I have implemented lessons from crop breeding to produce disease-resistant ash. Recently, I have begun to apply the same ideas to resistance to Dutch elm disease, a project that, beyond my lifetime, I hope will restore elm in the natural environment. Away from the field and laboratory, an enjoyable aspect of my job has been teaching about quantitative genetics, statistics and disease resistance. I have especially enjoyed helping to produce the AHDB Recommended List of wheat varieties, because of the challenge of balancing disease resistance with all other important traits. I have had a major commitment to modernising JIC's plant growth facilities and have served on grant committees, conference committees and editorial boards including a long stint with Plant Pathology. I joined the BSPP Board for two periods, first as newsletter editor then ultimately as President, when a notable success was my Presidential Conference in 2012 on ‘Fitness Costs and Trade-Offs in Plant Disease’. To pass on some advice to pathologists of the future: keep thinking, do something that matters and do not forget the coffee breaks. I am deeply grateful to BSPP for the award of honorary membership. I feel especially privileged because my late mentors Martin, Roy and Peter were among my predecessors as honorary members.