Thursday, Sept. 17, 1964 University Daily Kansan Page
New Center For Botany To Be Built
Plans for construction of a botanical research center that will emphasize study of Great Plains plants have been announced here.
Ronald L. McGregor, professor and chairman of botany, said a grant of $45,000 from the National Science Foundation plus matching funds from the University will be used for the new facility. The project has been approved by the State Board of Regents.
THE CENTER will provide research room for graduate students and faculty. It will house the 125,000 mounted plant specimens constituting the largest collection of its kind in the Great Plains and a fossil plant collection regarded as the outstanding in the Midwest.
The new building will be located near the three-year-old greenhouse and associated laboratory, on the Bisonte farm west of Highway 59 and 19th Street. The land is owned by the KU Endowment Association.
Prof. McGregor said the new facility will be of concrete block construction and will have about 5,400 square feet of usable space. Fourteen research rooms will be located conveniently around a library and museum area.
Research activities and the museum collections have been centered in Snow Hall. By moving them to the new facility, three large rooms in Snow, a total of about 1,700 square feet, will be freed for undergraduate classroom use.
Plans are being prepared by George M. Beal, professor and director of architectural services, and will be submitted to the state archtect for approval. Bids probably will be let by next December or January, with construction taking place through 1965. Prof. McGregor said.
NEED FOR THE new building resulted from growth in the botany department that has critically crowded current facilities.
When Prof. McGregor became chairman in 1957, the department had a full-time teaching and research faculty of five, and eight or nine graduate students. Today, ten are teaching full-time and 27 graduate students are expecting to study at KU through PnD. degrees
"We have reached the absolute capacity in number of graduate students," Prof. McGregor said. "Even if we had assistantships for new students this fall, we couldn't accept the students because we don't have the space."
The new center will facilitate a continuation and expansion of research at KU that encompasses all plant groups, including fungi, of the Great Plains and south to Mexico.
AS IN THE PAST, KU botanists will continue to emphasize a basic or "pre-applied" approach in their studies. This means they often conduct sub-cellular investigations that reveal how certain plants take in food, how they reproduce and the like. Such findings are necessary, for example, before an applied researcher at an agricultural experiment station can develop a compound to attack a harmful fungus.
The findings may have applications botanists are not seeking directly. Currently, basic research in the KU department may contribute to man's understanding and eventual conquering of cancer. Other basic research is providing new information about heredity.
Essential to the KU research and teaching program in botany are the specimens of plants and fossil materials to be located in the new center. The plant collection, now ranked in the upper group nationally, grew from 29,000 specimens to the present 125,000 in ten years.
The collection, available to citizens of the state, attracts students to the KU department and provides samples to the scientific world. Specimens now are on loan to 25 or 30 schools, including Purdue, Stanford, Harvard and Cornell, and are being used at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
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A sequence series of photos of Gale Sayers breaking 61 yards for a touchdown against Oklahoma appears on the front and inside front cover of "Football at Kansas 1964."
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