But not only are plants important for

history. Of course, plants are an excellent

model for basic science. I'm going to give three
examples of scientists who used plants as their model systems. The first one here,
and I hope you can
recognize him, it's Charles Darwin. Now you all know Darwin from evolutionary
theory, but you'll be surprised to know that for much of his life,
Darwin carried out research on plants. And we're going to use Darwin quite
often and his works in this class. Actually the last 20, 30 years of his
life, Darwin only studied plants and plant movements. And Darwin was one of the
first people to
ask the question, what does a plant see? The second person here,
I think you might recognize him also, that's Gregor Mendel
the father of modern genetics. This monk and his peas really
founded the basis of all modern genetic research, which affects not only
agriculture, but also modern medicine. Barbara McClintock was a botanist. She got
her PhD in plant biology,
in botany. She did a huge amount of work in
cytogenetics, discovered many, many of the modern principles of genetics. Most
importantly, in the early 1950s, she
discovered something called transposons. Barbara McClintock discovered that
pieces of DNA can move in the genome. And this was going against the whole
paradigm that the genome was immutable, was unchangeable. Unfortunately, her work
wasn't accepted in that time. She was actually quite derided for her
ideas, and she stopped publishing on it. Now you could say maybe this
was because she was a woman. Maybe because the idea was so new. Maybe it's because
she
was a plant biologist. But the kicker to this is, in 1983,
she got the Nobel Prize for her finding. She's the only woman to receive
the Nobel Prize in medicine on her own without anyone
else joining in with her. Because we know that what she discovered
using corn in the early 50s is now the basis for
many of the cancers that humans get. So we can see here that plants are not
only important for history, they're not only important for what we breathe,
but they're important for all biology. And the reason for this is,
that plants are part of the tree of life. 2 billion years ago, and we'll get
into this a bit later in the class, both animals and plants originated
from the same unicellular organisms. So much of the biology that we find in
animals is also shared with plants. We'll be talking about that
quite a lot in this course. The other reason for studying plants is
that they are a unique biological system. If you look at all of these beautiful
plants that we see around us, the flowers, trees, cactuses, It's just wonderful.
It's amazing. How do make a flower? Or how do plants make flowers? How do we make
these
beautiful symmetrical things? How does a sequoia tree manage to get
the water from its roots up almost 100 meters into the ground? We look at this
flower
over a meter in diameter. Whereas this tree growing in
Yosemite National Park survives with very, very little water. How do they manage to
do this? These are incredible biological questions
that plant scientists are asking today, some of which we're going to
talk about during the course.