Dr. Paul Murphy

Department of Crop and Soil Sciences

The Apple Never Falls Far From the Tree

ABSTRACT

I was raised in a community for which the advent of social media actually decreased the public exposure of private lives, social indiscretions and personal business.  Gossip, casually exchanged on daily trips to the grocery store, would nowadays require collation by a high rise of hackers in Volgograd.  Thus, my grandmother’s standard reaction to notable achievements, good or bad, of young members of the community was her favorite:

 ‘Ah, sure the apple never falls far from the tree’. 

This observation was based on local knowledge of parental lineages tracing to the early 1800’s that would elicit an attack of the vapors in the most jaded practitioner of genomic selection.  I was asked recently to condense the important lessons of my career in cultivar development.  I pondered the question to unearth some profound insight, but I’m really awful at that sort of thing.  I simply concluded that I had spent my career confirming my grandmother’s observations about heritability, and that she would have been a far better cultivar developer than me. 

This is a five-year post-tenue review seminar.  Issues related to small grains breeding in the southeastern US, some research and academic accomplishments and plans for the future will be presented.

The Zoom room opens at 3:30 and the seminar begins at 3:40.

Contact CropAndSoil@ncsu.edu for Zoom URL.