Probable Future of Auxinology 823 



learned about auxin only during their postdoctoral careers. I learned 

 about auxinology in graduate school. There are many people in at- 

 tendance at this conference who first learned about auxinology as 

 undergraduates. I predict that by 1985 students will learn about auxin 

 in high school or possibly even in junior high school. It will just be 

 everyday stuff. 



We have outlined one trend in auxinology: it is going to become 

 a part of classical biology. 



There is another trend that I think we can foresee. We must rec- 

 ognize the debt which plant physiology owes to the discovery of auxin 

 and to the development of the whole field of experimental auxinology. 

 In certain respects the development of auxinology has, I think, made 

 plant physiologists much more into cell biologists. It has interested 

 plant physiologists in things on a cellular level, in finding out how 

 the auxin works and finding out what this has to do with respiration 

 and so on. The study of auxin-controlled plant growth has resulted 

 in the accelerated development of plant physiology along the lines 

 of the study of plant behavior on a cellular level. This is one thing 

 that auxinology has done for plant physiology. A second thing auxin- 

 ology has done is that it has been responsible, perhaps more than any 

 other single force, for making botanists aware of the existence of 

 chemistry. Auxinology has really brought chemistry to plant physi- 

 ology and it has taken plant physiologists to chemistry. It has had 

 a very great effect in making plant physiology a more chemical and, 

 I will say, a more sophisticated subject. 



We all know that in 1935 it was first demonstrated that it is pos- 

 sible to make compounds synthetically which possess auxin activity 

 and which are therefore synthetic substitutes for naturally-occurring 

 auxin. This discovery resulted in a major gold rush in auxinology. 

 Chemists mysteriously appeared from everywhere — I don't know 

 where chemists appear from — there must be lots of chemists who are 

 technologically unemployed, and who, when some new field opens up, 

 rush in to fill the vacuum that has been created. Anyway, chemists 

 appeared from everywhere to synthesize tens of thousands of com- 

 pounds, which were then tested for possession or nonpossession of 

 auxin activity. As everyone knows, some of these compounds turned 

 out to have useful auxin activity, to be able to do things such as 

 be herbicides or be abscission inhibitors, and so on. And so to the 

 development of auxinology in this chemical way we owe, to a very 

 considerable extent, the development of agricultural chemical plant 

 physiology. And I think that we can foresee clearly that this trend 

 will continue far into the future, to a future far more distant than 

 I can foresee for you now. People will continue to make more and 



