The Future Welfare of Botany

Abstract

Each time I go to a meeting of botanists and hear them reporting to one another the many things they are finding out, I begin to worry that soon everything about botany will be known, and then what will botanists do? The objective of every scientist in every field is, in theory, to make himself obsolete, to find out everything about his subject so that scientists can worry about new and different things. How far are we from achieving this goal in the field of botany? Of course, the complete working out of a field of knowledge never really happens. We merely approach it asymptotically. A field of investigation in the natural sciences, as in botany, is a kind of a natural resource waiting to be exploited. Its exploitation follows the kinetics of the exploitation of other natural resources such as coal, oil, and iron ore.