 have collaborated with our Honorari speaker. You might have worked with him when he was program leader and division head of ERI. Before we call on our guest speaker, here is our conference director, Dr. Abdel Baggi Ismail, to say a few words of introduction. Thanks, Gidina, thank you everybody. I feel he gave me a great, great pleasure to introduce Dr. David McKeon to give this evening address. David is probably one of the first leaders who takes a challenge to move from favorable areas. We have to make progress at that time probably because the 80s, I don't know if I should say the exact dates, but probably some time ago. He's probably one of the few people who really take the challenge and start looking for favorable areas. At that time, people really thinking these areas are not approachable, not easy to make any progress. But they have to get together with other police and you can see today how much progress we make in these areas. David has been here in the 80s, left in the 90s, spent about nine years. Went back to UC Davis spent another nine years and came back to ERI for another nine years and back to Davis right now. I don't know, hopefully we'll see him back here before the second nine years. Yeah. So David also is widely, he published quite widely in a number of areas. He worked in various areas, various areas including Cove, probably our all familiar with his work on submergence. He took this challenge of actually mapping someone and then tracking it all the way until it was cloned. And then he developed probably one of the most efficient marker system by crossing system probably for the first time for any other stress-free practice that went quite well. But of course, David worked with the right people. He involved Bob Roland in UC Davis and Julia Bell Sears and actually this kind of collaboration I think probably the main reason to bring the society to ERI. So I'm very proud to say that also. Dave wanted to give us a little history about what he has been doing in ERI and what is going on before the story of someone. So the title of his work is Blood, Colour, and Slicery at ERI before someone, Dave. Thank you very much for inviting me to give a presentation, to give the keynote presentation. It's really an honor at this society. When my friends asked me why I was going to Tunkid, I said I was invited to give a keynote presentation at the International Society of Plant Anerobiosis. And after I repeated it a few times, they were very impressed. I think my status was risen a little bit in their eyes after that. And then the next question was, can we go? So I think those of you who are ISBM members, you know this already, there was a time actually when not many people knew about ISBA. And now of course it's really in the mainstream. So everybody knows, you just have to say International Society of Plant Anerobiosis and they would go, yeah, we know that. So it's really quite an achievement. The issues that all of you are working on are really crucial and I think they're becoming more important every day. This is, I guess, obvious to everyone, but I kinda like to collect some of the articles which are coming out in the major journals like Nature, Science. It seems like every one or two months you'll get, oh, thank you. It seems like every one or two months you'll get an article saying about the increasing likelihood of more flooding. And so I think that this is a society and this is a group of people who really have something positive to offer. I don't wanna belittle the challenge of addressing climate change, obviously. That's a major problem that all of us are gonna face and that many people are gonna face. But I think this society and the research being done here really has huge potential to address that problem. By the way, I hope you didn't notice but I don't have any PowerPoint slides so no complaints, please. So this is really a challenge to give a talk without relying on slides. Well, I thought that it would be good to give a little bit of a background on what's been going on at Erie and one reason is that I think when you're talking to a very smart audience it's better to talk about something that they don't know that much about. So since I'm one of the older people here I think that's good for me. By the way, Bob already mentioned about the weather and I wanted to second his congratulations to Abdel for this great weather. And I think I actually know one reason why we're having such great weather and it reminds me of the time when we were first trying to do the testing of the sub-one varieties. And you saw some pictures I think in some of the presentations of the experiments done in the field, especially by Abdel and his team to evaluate these sub-one varieties and how impressive they looked. But those were in the tanks in our farm so we can control the water. So we knew that we had to show how these varieties perform in the farmer's field. And I already thought this is gonna be a huge challenge because you know you don't have any control over whether or not you get a flood. So you just have to kind of plant the experiment and hope for the best or the worst. And one colleague of mine, T.P. Tong, told me he has a solution for that. He said when you plant a trial where you want to have this emergent stress you put a sign on front of the trail saying drought tolerance research. And that will increase the likelihood that you're gonna get heavy rainfall. I think the people who work on drought tolerance probably know what I'm talking about. So I figured that having this many people who work on flooding tolerance in one location is a good guarantee that you're going to be having dry weather. So that's probably one of the reasons we have this great weather. I wanted to also follow up on Bob's comment in the first session on how great it is really to see so many young people attending, young scientists here. And that's really encouraging that a lot of people are thinking of this area. So that's another reason why I thought it would be interesting to just reflect on some of the things that have gone on at ILEE up to the point that we are now. And so I'm gonna try to do that without any slides. So just for your information, I started on my career at ILEE in 1982. So I'll give you the date. I was a teenager and maybe a little after that. And I wanted to actually start, however, at the very beginning of ILEE. Most of you know that ILEE started in 1960. And at that time, the farmers were basically growing tall, photoperiod-sensitive, low-yielding varieties that were not responsive to inputs. And there was a serious shortage, as Bob also mentioned, about rice production and food production and serious concern about famine. And so ILEE had a difficult job to address, but they got to work very quickly. And by the year 1966, they released the variety, IR8. And IR8 became the foundation of the Green Revolution. Now, of course, the focus was obviously on the favorable environments, because they wanted to make a quick impact. And that was seen as the best way to make an impact, to focus on these favorable environments. So I think by around early 1970s, maybe around 1973, they had estimated that about one out of four farmers were already growing these high-yielding varieties, like IR8 and some of the other semi-dwarf varieties that came out. And so when I look back, I think that's quite an amazing achievement. But IR8 had become very confident. And so their kind of response was, well, what's wrong with the other three people? Why aren't they growing these high-yielding varieties? And one of the reasons they came up with that they figured out was that their growing environments were just unfavorable and they really couldn't take advantage of these Green Revolution Rises. So IR8 started to focus more on these unfavorable environments. And the obvious one that they started with was on upland rice. I think it's pretty clear that upland rice is quite different from lowland rice. And so it's an unfavorable area. They have their own varieties. They have their own issues there. And so the feeling was that IR8 needed to have a program to address upland rice. And then the next very obvious candidate for addressing was the deepwater rice. So it's, again, very clear that deepwater rice is very different from shallow lowland rice. And so you can't grow the same varieties and use the same technology in the deepwater areas. So IR8 started a program on deepwater rice and that was mainly based in Thailand. And then I think gradually they realized that, well, you know, there's a lot of shallow areas that are actually unfavorable. These are the rain-fed lowlands. And that, in fact, was the biggest component of this area that were still growing traditional rice, these rain-fed lowland areas where they had problems like submergence and drought. So IR8 started to address the rain-fed lowland in addition to the upland and the deepwater. And they also realized that there was a lot of confusion over what these environments were, how to classify them, what kind of constraints they were. So they put a lot of attention on classifying these environments and trying to understand them better. And upland and deepwater, I think, were probably more straightforward in that respect because it was very clear what you were dealing with. I think in deepwater they were distinguishing between what they called deepwater, which was, I think, up to about a meter of water depth, sustained water depth, and then the floating rice, which was over a meter, the more extreme ones. But for the rain-fed lowland ecologies, they eventually classified about five major types. And this was based on frequency of the stresses like mainly drought and submergence, which were the defining characteristics as well as stagnant flooding, medium-deep water rise. So this was all pretty exciting to actually go into these unfairable areas, especially if you were an agroecologist or a social scientist. However, if you were a breeder, I think the idea was better stick with something more favorable because these unfairable environments are unfairable. So it's not an easy thing to deal with that. So the safe bet is to work on irrigated rice. And so you'd find that these, you know, the people who are more senior in the organization, they go to the irrigated areas. And then the younger people, like Dave McKill, you work on drought and submergence. And we also want drought and submergence together in the same variety because you can't have them separate since both stresses are common. And also the variety should have all the same characteristics as irrigated varieties. They should have high yield, disease resistance, and good grain quality. So I said, that's great, I'll do that. What else do you want me to do? So they gave me some other things to do too. Anyway, I was happy to work on that and I had a colleague, Dirk Henrys Lambers, who was the, so I was the Rainford Lowland person. He was the deep water breeder. He had worked in Thailand for a while and then shifted to Erie. And so we were kind of the, I guess, the bad boys who got assigned the deep water and the drought and submergence and flooding. But, you know, we were having fun and Dirk was really interested in the classification, the idea of classification of these rice growing environments. So he did a survey because he noticed there was a lot of confusion in how people describe what deep water rice is. So he found that for some people in some countries, they would say anything over 25 centimeters was deep water. In other countries, they would say, oh no, two meters involved is deep water. So what comes between shallow and deep water? That was another question. And so there were all kinds of terminologies for this stuff that comes in between the shallow and the deep water, like medium deep or stagnant flooding or semi deep. And my favorite was shallow deep water. So think about that. Anyway, Dirk told me also that he'd talked with farmers about these problems. And he said a lot of farmers have a difficult time to actually describe their problem, their water problem. So you could go and ask them, well, did you have intermittent flooding? Did you have medium deep stagnant flooding? Or was your semi deep? And they would just say, well, there's just too much water. So it's hard to quantify the problem. So he had a very interesting way to do this without actually having to sit by the farmer's field for the whole season. He had been studying the response of different varieties to these different kinds of excess water. And so he knew that there were some varieties that had the rapid elongation, deep water varieties. There were some that had submergent stars, like FR-13A was there. And there was, I think, one of the dwarf varieties that came from FR-13A was there. There was some normal irrigated variety and photocrite-sensitive variety and so forth. And he had another variety, which was called Baish Bish, I don't know if you've heard of it. It's from Bangladesh. This was what he called rapid elongation. He said, no matter how much water you put on it, it would go through it. Now, after it grew through that water, it just kind of fell over like a weed, but it could get through the water. So anyway, he had these eight varieties and he said, okay, give it to the farmer and say, you can just grow these eight varieties, maybe put a stick by each one so you know where they are. And then we're gonna come back later and see what did well. So he told me that in many of the cases when he went back to check on the varieties after the season, the one that did best was the FR-13A or the Submergence Tolerance. Those did very well. So his interpretation was that Submergence was a very common stress in these flood prone areas. And this was a common in the Philippines. In fact, I remember visiting a farmer's field up in the central zone where they did this. And then at the end of the season went back and sure enough, the farmer had bags of the seed for all the varieties, except the ones that didn't survive. And he had a excess water problem. And so there was one big bag and that was the Submergence Tolerance varieties. So I think one of the things that this did it really kind of gave us confidence that this trade actually works in farmer's fields, which is a big question. So I wanna talk a little bit about the breeding that we did for Submergence. Actually before I started on my work, there was a big milestone in the breeding of Submergence Tolerance at Erie. And that was the release of a variety in 1977 called IR42. So IR42 is probably the most sensitive variety ever developed for Submergence Tolerance. And this was very useful because now you can grow this variety in any experiment and you have an indication of whether there really was a Submergence stress. If the IR42 looks good, then that farmer didn't have Submergence. Just as simple as that. So this was quite a good accomplishment of the breeders. But I decided I would probably work on the other end of the spectrum. I think they've done that. So I work on the Tolerance side. Now fortunately, somebody had already crossed FR13A with semi-dwarf Fridays. How do you think semi-dwarf Fridays? And so when I got to Erie, they already had some of these descendants of these crosses. And they were semi-dwarf and they were Submergence Tolerance. But they still had the, unfortunately, the kind of awful characteristics of FR13A. They were still awful. They were ugly. Now, I didn't know that Bob was mentioning this in his talk. Dogs didn't like FR13A. I didn't know that, but it makes sense because it's horrible, it's horrible stuff. And it's really terrible for breeders to work with. Now, we had a little bit of improvement. We had a semi-dwarf, but he was still pretty ugly. So I started working with that and made some crosses, tried to get rid of the genes that code for ugliness. And we eventually made some progress on that and it took quite a while. I think there was some linkage between those genes. But eventually that was broken. And we had this, by the time I left Erie, as Abdul mentioned, 1991, we had this Friday IR49830. And that really combined high yield and Submergence Tolerance. It still had, not so, I mean, it was good enough for dogs, but it wasn't good enough for people, I think. So it wasn't quite up to the standard. But it made a lot of progress. And I think after I left Erie, Surupong, Sarcara came in and made a lot of crosses with that and some of the others and made some more progress on that. So I think that now everybody's pretty much heard all the story about the development, the mapping of the Sub-1 gene, cloning and so forth. And so that occurred mostly in the 1990s while I was in Davis and of course working with Pam and Julia and others. And I think that by the time I came back to Erie, as Abdul mentioned in 2001, we had some varieties which, I mean, we had some markers which were tightly linked to Sub-1. So we had the potential for developing Submergence Tolerance varieties. But the question really was how to apply this. And so one thing that became very clear to me after I came back was that a lot of farmers in these areas were growing just a few varieties. And of course, the one that everybody has heard of now is Swarna, this variety Swarna. I just wanted to mention something about that variety. It was developed in 1982, it was released in 1982 in Andhra Pradesh, India. And it was developed by a man named Dr. Sankara Rao. And I mentioned his name because he's kind of a unknown person in India, I think, and in the world of rice. But this was a totally amazing accomplishment of this man because this, you know, if you go back further, the variety that a lot of these farmers were going was Machuri and Machuri was a variety that was better than their traditional varieties, but it was still not very good in terms of yield. So everybody was trying to cross Machuri and develop new varieties of Machuri that were high yielding. And I was doing the same thing. And this guy was the one who succeeded. He developed this variety Swarna. And of course, nobody was very much interested in it because, you know, there was nobody really promoting it. This guy, he must have retired or something and the breeders had their other priorities. And they said, well, it's got a lot of problems. It's susceptible to disease and other things. But the farmers liked it. So this variety spread by farmer to farmer spread all throughout India into Bangladesh. And it's still spreading. It's still spreading in places like Nepal and other places. So it's quite amazing that by it's, you know, totally almost on its own, it's really spread to all these areas. Obviously it has a lot of very good characteristics. So that's really what we wanted to maintain with the first sub one varieties. And of course, we also have other mega varieties that are coming along in the pipeline that are actually not necessarily mega varieties but the general pipeline of breeding. So hopefully there'll be new mega varieties that are coming out of that. But at least these vehicles of mega varieties like Swarna and hopefully the other ones that are coming along are serving as a kind of way to get this technology out to the farmers as quick as possible. And we hope also that it doesn't take something like 20 or 30 years like Swarna, which is still spreading. So, you know, it's a great work being done in the Strasa project to disseminate this variety and others to the farmers in Asia. So I think that's pretty much what I wanted to say. And I know everybody's hungry and looking forward to the food. I don't have time to really talk about the medium deep and stagnant flooding, which this has been tremendous work on that. And also the AG, the anaerobic germination which you've heard about. But these programs are all making really great progress. And so I think there's really a lot of potential to keep going on with submergence, breeding and make more impacts on this. Now, finally, I'd just like to say that I've given a lot of pops on Sub-1. And, you know, the Sub-1 gene and the Sub-1 varieties have picked up some names in the popular media like waterproof rice and submarine rice. And probably one of the most popular ones is scuba rice. But I have to tell you, I never thought of the idea of coming to one of those talks with a diving gear and a scuba and a scuba tank. So I wanted to just say kudos to Moto, who showed up in his talk with a mask and snorkel. So I thought that was a fantastic idea. And maybe I have to think about bringing a scuba tank to one of my talks. But I was even more impressed with the picture of his lab members underwater. And what a wonderful idea for a conference photo. So, you know, we still have another day. Why don't you think about giving everybody out in pond and having a real kispa conference photo. So anyway, that's all I had to say. I hope you have a nice evening and thanks for listening to my talk.