824 /. Bonner 



more plant regulators. They will find compounds that tell plants to 

 grow, or tell plants not to grow, or tell plants to make sugar, or tell 

 them to please make amino acids. The day will inevitably come when 

 every aspect of the activity of every kind of plant will be supervised 

 by the giving to that plant of an appropriate chemical. The poor 

 little plant just won't have any private life of its own at all. 



However, I don't really refer to this as a long-range prospect for 

 auxinology. I think that what auxinology has done is to enunciate 

 and develop the concept of the supervision of plant activities by the 

 application of chemical substances and that the agricultural chemical 

 industry which is based upon this concept is now already very much 

 wider than the concept of auxinolog)^ itself. It started a whole new 

 field, and a field which has grown far beyond the bounds of auxin- 

 ology. Here, then, is another trend which we can foresee for the long- 

 range future. 



When we look into the shorter-range future, I think we can get 

 some glimpses of trends in auxinology, trends which are apparent 

 to everyone who has attended the present conference. In the first 

 place, it is quite apparent that some day, any decade now, we shall 

 finally succeed in finding out how the auxin does its work. This is 

 an immediate task of plant physiologists, and some day it will be 

 found out. It is really rather a disgrace to the profession of plant 

 physiology that the nature of auxin action has not yet been revealed. 

 This sad state of affairs is due to the fact that we embarked on the 

 study of how auxin does its work insufficiently prepared with basic 

 knowledge. We have known too little of the constitution of plant cells 

 and of the constitution of the cell wall, and we have been insufficiently 

 prepared with knowledge of the basic cell biology of the plant. We 

 have had, in fact, insufficient knowledge of the basic cell biology of 

 any kind of creature. But now as we get this new knowledge, we may 

 hope that we will be able to solve the problem of how the auxin does 

 its many kinds of work which are manifested in cell elongation, bud 

 and root inhibition, prevention of abscission, etc. And in its effort to 

 attain a solution to the problem of how auxin works we can, I think, 

 forecast that auxinology and indeed plant physiology generally will 

 become what I will call, pardon the expression, more sophisticated, 

 will become a more rigorotis science. It will become more physical, 

 more biophysical if you will, more biochemical. Plant physiologists to 

 come will become more enzymological because enzymology is a craft 

 which can obviously contribute to the solution of our problems. Plant 

 physiologists will indulge more in model making, in stochastic re- 

 search, that is, in the making of conceptual models which can then 

 be tested for correspondence with real life. Plant physiology will, in 



