I enjoyed your July 30 article on the plight of we “old-fashioned” botanists in a “high-tech” world (“Endangered species: Botanist,” Page 1), but I would like to add some further perspective. The issue is not the sentimental one of how botanists dress, what kinds of cars they drive and how much dirt they have under their fingernails. The central issue is how their work serves science and the community.
There has been a precipitous decline in the number of academic departments that will hire people interested primarily in producing floras and monographs. The preference is to hire people who publish computer-generated diagrams of evolutionary relationships based on DNA sequencing and efficient new algorithms for constructing them.
This is overtly considered to be more exciting and progressive, and it is not the first time a new technology (a new toy!) has skewed the direction of research. But it most certainly does not serve the same needs or the same public and does not answer the same questions (What is this plant? Is it endangered?) as the “old-fashioned” floristic and field work. Classical studies are not obsolete; they have not been replaced by any new “methods.” They are simply out of fashion, in the most superficial and shortsighted way.
