At age 24, Sir Isaac Newton was musing in his mother’s English garden. An apple fell from a tree, striking him on the head. He pondered the force that caused the apple to fall, a question—legend has it—that led him to his theory of universal gravitation.

Now suppose Newton had asked a slightly different question, poses Subhash Minocha, professor of plant biology. What if he asked what force kept that apple stuck to the branch? Or why it came off?

“Newton would have been a botanist, instead of a physicist,” says Minocha. “Many scientific discoveries depend on the questions you ask. Some may come spontaneously—you’re walking through the woods and you discover a new plant—but most come by design with a specific problem in mind. Newton was troubled by the lack of an explanation for the planets’ orbits, and the apple inspired him to find the answer.”

The need to understand nature and how it functions is part of what defines our humanity, says Minocha. It was this innate drive that drew him into science when he was a young man studying at Government Higher Secondary School in Kaithal, a small town in the state of Haryana, India. Originally interested in medicine, his focus shifted to plants because he found them “simply fascinating,” and he attended Punjab University in India to pursue his interest.

“Initially, plants may look uninteresting to students because they’re passive in their appearance,” he says. “But they’re as active as animals in their functioning without ever moving from their place.”

There are so many questions about plants that need answering. How do they know when to drop their leaves? What genes regulate how they measure time? What is encoded in a seed that tells it when to germinate?

Minocha, who has been teaching and doing research at UNH for 28 years, studies these processes on the cellular level. New tools and methods have replaced older “manipulative” techniques, like cross-breeding, with cutting-edge molecular ones, like cloning and recombinant DNA. In collaboration with his wife, Dr. Rakesh Minocha, a research scientist with the USDA Forest Service, he leads a team of students answering some of the most fundamental questions about stress in plants.

“The way we do science has changed dramatically over the years,” he says. “Where we once had to manipulate the whole plant, we can now manipulate the genes themselves.”

This has led to complex ethical issues about how far science should go in terms of changing what some say nature intended. But, like the need to understand how things work, humans are also driven to make things better. Genetically engineered foods and stem cell research are but two products of that drive.

“Biotechnology has become one of the most controversial issues of our time,” says Minocha. “We can design prettier flowers, more nutritious foods, maybe even healthier children. That is wonderful and scary at the same time.”

But most of the general population is scientifically illiterate when it comes to dealing with these complex issues. Minocha feels a responsibility to educate people because “they must have an appreciation and understanding of science to be able to engage themselves intelligently in the debate.”

While UNH students are his primary audience, he also works with high school teachers, gives public lectures, and teaches the next generation of college students through a summer institute he directs called Project SMART (Science and Mathematics Achievement Through Research Training). These are the people, he says, who are or will be dealing with society’s complex scientific issues all the way from the Congressional floor to the local town meeting. He hopes what he imparts will help them guide the way.

Exciting times to be a scientist, Minocha admits. Exciting times to be.

—Sharon Keeler,
UNH News Bureau