Daniel F. Klessig, associate director of Rutgers University's Waksman Institute, has been named president of the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) for Plant Research Inc., located on the campus of Cornell University, effective Sept. 1, 2000.

Klessig succeeds Charles J. Arntzen, who will take a year's leave to do research at the Maricopa Research Station at Arizona State University and then will return to BTI as emeritus president and project leader.

Klessig's area of research is how plants protect themselves against microbial pathogens, which he studies using the tools of plant genetics and molecular and cellular biology. He has been a professor and an associate director at the Waksman Institute since 1985. Previously he was assistant professor (1980-1983) and associate professor (1983-1985) in the Department of Cellular, Viral and Molecular Biology at the University of Utah. From 1979 to 1980 he was a staff scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Klessig earned his bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1971. As a Marshall Scholar, he earned a B.Sc. (Hons.) in molecular biology from the University of Edinburgh in 1973. He earned his doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1978 under the direction of Ray Gesteland and James D. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. Klessig has been a Searle scholar (1982-1985) and a McKnight scholar (1983-1986).

Last year, BTI celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding and the 25th anniversary of its affiliation with Cornell and subsequent relocation to the Cornell campus in Ithaca from its original location in Yonkers, N.Y.

BTI was the product of international politics and a singular determination and vision. In 1917, after the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, mining magnate William Boyce Thompson visited Russia as a member of an American Red Cross delegation. He quickly urged President Woodrow Wilson to provide food aid to the provisional government, but his request was denied. After the government fell to the Bolsheviks, Thompson became convinced that agriculture, food supply and social justice were inherently linked.

Thompson wrote, "Any principles that you can establish for plants will help you to understand man in health and in disease. So by helping man study plants, I may perhaps be able to contribute something to the future of mankind."

With a $10 million endowment of his own money, Thompson formed the institute, which officially opened Sept. 24, 1924. He urged BTI scientists 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." Without such research, he said, farmers would struggle to feed the skyrocketing world population in the 20th century.

Today BTI employs about 140 researchers, including 21 senior scientists , many of them holding adjunct professor positions at Cornell. BTI has an endowment of about $76 million and receives about $2.8 million from federal agencies. Additionally, BTI receives about $1.5 million a year from nongovernmental and not-for-profit organizations and about $1.2 million from industry.

In BTI's laboratories plant researchers continue to live up to Thompson's vision by contributing to the green revolution that now feeds millions of people worldwide. The researchers focus on anti-cancer compounds in plants, on nutritionally rich foods and on vaccines incorporated into plants, such as bananas and potatoes. Researchers also are involved with environmental conservation, forest biology, plant genomics, plant nutrition and disease and pest resistance.