Voyager Lecture Series: The natural function of nicotine and other botanical tales of intrigue from Kayenta’s neighborhood

LECTURES & IDEAS

Voyager Lecture Series

Presentation by Ian T. Baldwin, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena Germany, and the DI Ranch, Motoqua, UT

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 // 7:30pm

Optional Social Hour With Like-Minded Friends, Light Snacks And Beverages @ 6:30pm

The Lorraine Boccardo Theater

Have you wondered why plants produce so many of the drugs that humans use and abuse (nicotine, cocaine, opium, THC, aspirin, etc.)?

These “why” questions have been addressed in studies that lack scientific rigor, being little more than modern versions of Rudyard Kipling’s “just-so-stories” (How leopards got their spots…).   Thanks to the long-term patient funding of the Max Planck Society in Germany, Ian T. Baldwin and his students have developed a fire-chasing native tobacco plant, Nicotiana attenuata, which grows in Kayenta’s botanical ‘hood, into a model for the rigorous scientific study of these “drug-related why questions”. For the past three decades, we have been silencing the genes in this plant that are responsible for the plant’s amazingly diverse chemistry (it makes more than 20,000 unique compounds) and conducting experiments at the Lytle and DI Ranches in the Beaver Dam wash to provide answers to these “drug-related why questions”.

This talk will provide many examples of the sophistication with which this plant uses its chemistry to solve ecological problems. The solutions that this plant has evolved matches the creativity of the human imagination. These science-grounded examples of the creativity of natural selection underscore why nature preserves, such as those at the Lytle and DI Ranches, are invaluable laboratories for the study of gene function.