About "Plants Without Borders"

It all started earlier this year, when Candice Thomas, an undergraduate majoring in biology, met cocoa farmer Roopchand Baschk, of Mayaro, Trinidad, through her home-town church. As a service project, the church had undertaken to build a new house for Baschk and his family. Thomas also happens to work in the laboratory of Mark Guiltinan, associate professor of plant molecular biology and director of Penn State’s cocoa biotechnology program. “So she came to me and said, ‘We’re a cocoa lab. What can we do for him?’” Guiltinan remembers. Making international connections is crucial to Guiltinan’s work as director of the Penn State cocoa program, which is funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S.D.A. Over the past few years, he has initiated cooperative research in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, all major cocoa producers. Last summer, he and members of his lab spent two weeks at the Union Vale Estate on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, field-testing cocoa plants they had cloned in the greenhouse in Pennsylvania. (Guiltinan’s dispatches from St. Lucia are archived on the Web at www.psu.edu/ur/NEWS/St_Lucia/.)

Guiltinan, Thomas, and other lab personnel began to kick around some ideas, and before long “Plants without Borders” was born. Says Guiltinan: “It’s an opportunity to do something that will really help farmers. And to expose students to international development work, get their feet wet. It’s also a good way for us to learn about local growing practices. We hope to do this a couple of times a year.” Trinidad is the pilot. In addition to Guiltinan and Thomas, the team making the trip includes research associate Siela Maximova, doctoral student Carter Miller, and undergraduate Nicholas Willis.