The Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research Inc. (BTI) this month celebrates 25 years of affiliation with Cornell University.

To mark the occasion, BTI will hold an openhouse reception May 19 at 3:30 p.m. in the atrium of the BTI building on the Cornell campus. The open house will be followed by short lectures about the history and science of the institute.

Between 1924 and 1978, the institute was headquartered on a campus setting in Yonkers, N.Y. In the early 1970s, urban sprawl and soaring real estate tax rates caught up with the institute. The decision was made to move, and the late George L. McNew, then managing director of the independent institute, favored affiliating BTI with a university.

The institute narrowed its search for a new home to Cornell and Oregon State University at Corvallis. Roy Young, a vice president at Oregon State and one of McNew's former graduate students had persuaded Oregon Gov. Tom McCall to support the move, and the Oregon legislature passed a bill authorizing $6.75 million for the construction of headquarters and greenhouses in Oregon.

However, there was a time limit for BTI to accept the offer, according to an informal history written by the late S.E.A. "Mac" McCallan, a scientist at BTI. Neither New York Lt. Gov. Malcolm Wilson, a native of Yonkers, nor Ernest L. Boyer, chancellor of the State University of New York, wanted BTI to leave the state. In July 1973 Gov. Nelson Rockefeller introduced special legislation in the New York Legislature. A month later $8.5 million was authorized for the construction of a facility if the institute would agree to relocate to Cornell, New York's land-grant university and home to the New York State Agricultural Experiment Stations at Ithaca and Geneva.

BTI accepted New York's offer May 28, 1974, and the institute moved into a new home at Cornell's Ithaca campus four years later.

The idea for establishing BTI was planted when mining magnate William Boyce Thompson returned from a visit to Russia in 1917, just after the overthrow of the czarist regime. As a member of the American Red Cross delegation, he was able to see firsthand how the new government was unable to feed the hungry. He unsuccessfully urged President Woodrow Wilson to lend more aid to the Kerensky provisional government, which fell to the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Thompson's experience in Russia convinced him that agriculture, food supply and social justice were inherently linked. Thus, he believed that the study of plants would make practical contributions to human welfare.

Thompson endowed the institute with $10 million of his own money -- a fortune in the early 1920s. The institute officially opened Sept. 24, 1924.

BTI was established to study "why and how plants grow, why they languish or thrive, how their diseases may be conquered, how their development may be stimulated by the regulation of the elements which contribute to their life," Thompson wrote. He knew the United States and other countries would need this botanical-agricultural information to feed growing populations. The institute has and continues to study plant genetics, plant nutrition, disease resistance and making more-viable agricultural seeds.