Ann. appl. Biol. (I972), 71, 187 (With Portrait) Printed in Great Britain

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ROBERT LANIER KNIGHT

Robert Knight died on 15 February 1972, shortly before he was due to retire from his second career. I knew him as a friend, and as a colleague throughout his first career as geneticist and cotton breeder on the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation staff in the Sudan.

Knight worked at Shambat near Khartoum, and there, with Clouston, he demonstrated the particularly favourable climatic conditions for testing the susceptibility of cotton varieties to bacterial blight, or ‘blackarm’ disease. Degrees of resistance were known, and Knight pro- ceeded to show, first that they were genetically controlled, and secondly that major genes that could be identified and studied were to be found in some Upland cottons. Knight believed that he could establish resistance in the susceptible Egyptian varieties grown in the Sudan by repeated backcrossing from these Uplands. Others were not convinced that this was a worth- while enterprise, but the single-minded determination that was so characteristic of the man carried the day and ensured the maintenance of the programme.

Uplands and Egyptians are specifically distinct, and this was the first demonstration of practical success in the transfer of useful genes from one species to another, and the establish- ment of a new variety closely similar to the old, but with new and valuable genes added. The Egyptian cottons grown in the Sudan today are of this parentage.

Knight was not content with this, and when I joined him at Shambat he was engaged in sifting all the cottons he could find for further resistance genes. I had sent the world cotton collection ahead of me, and Knight had planted it and, to my dismay, had sprayed it with blackarm. He knew what he was doing. No disaster followed, and we together used the resulting data to propound a theory of the origin and distribution of the disease, and of resistance to it. Besides its genetic interest, this exercise led to the discovery of highly resistant Upland cottons in West Africa, and to the breeding of the Albar stock on which so much of the rain-grown cotton of eastern Africa is now based.

Knight’s single-mindedness sometimes led him on to impatience. He could not believe that we in East Africa were unable to identify his major genes as easily as he could in Shambat. The exchange of correspondence, and of visits, illuminated the relation between climatic circum- stances and gene action in a way that we should never have achieved but for his enthusiastic commitment to thorough genetic analysis as we11 as to plant breeding achievement.

This was the Robert Knight I knew in his first career; a man to whom laughter came easily, determined, thorough, carrying his line of argument to the end and supporting it with evidence. When he left the Sudan he took up soft-fruit breeding as his second career.

At East Malling he applied the ideas and techniques he had evolved to a new series of crop species. This was more than transferring cotton techniques to raspberries. Knight’s mastery of the genetics behind his breeding was realized here to the full. He had always made sure that he knew wha the was doing in cotton breeding, and in that knowledge he was sure-footed in his transfer to fruit crops.

Breeding annual crops is a slow business. Breeding perennial fruits is so slow that the results of his work are only now coming forward. I t is sad that he did not live to see their full impact on the fruit-growing industry, but he knew that his first raspberries were being multiplied for issue. He also knew that his latest book was through the press. Of greater significance, however, is the wealth of good material he left to his successors.

J O S E P H H U T C H I N S O N