From Plant Press, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2000.
On 31 December 1999, Joan W. Nowicke retired after 27 ½ years of service to the Smithsonian Institution, as curator in the Department since 1972. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, she is an internationally recognized palynologist specializing in pollen morphology and its relation to systematics. Her body of work has largely emphasized the palynotaxonomy of the Caryophyllales (Centrospermae), a highly distinctive order comprising ten core families and as many as 10,000 species, as well as the Berberidaceae, Ranunculaceae, Onagraceae and Euphorbiaceae. This corpus of research has embraced several intriguing, palynologically and taxonomically lesser-known groups of plants variously ascribed as the Pandaceae (the genus Panda considered euphorbiaceous), Achatocarpaceae, Gyrostemonaceae, Corynocarpaceae, Paeoniaceae, Hoplestigmataceae, Lardizabalaceae (Sargentodoxaceae), and the Madagascan Didiereaceae. She is commemorated by the Mexican genus Nowickea J. Martinez G. & J.A. McDonald (1989) (Phytolaccaceae).
Nowicke received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington University, St. Louis (1958), Master of Arts from the University of Missouri, Columbia (1962), and Ph.D. from Washington University in 1968. Shortly after graduation she held a postgraduate fellowship during which treatments of the Apocynaceae, Boraginaceae, Labiatae and Rhamnaceae for the Flora of Panama were prepared. Dr. Owing to Nowicke's extensive knowledge of pollen, she was recognized as an American media icon for a time in the 1980’s, due to research into the identity of the mysterious “Yellow Rain” of Southeast Asia. It was an era when America seemed to have military and political expectations in Cambodia and Laos. She co-authored two seminal papers on the subject which appeared in Nature 309(5965) (1984) and Scientific American 252(9) (1985). The “Yellow Rain” had been purported by some governments to be a form of chemical biological warfare in which pollen was used to disseminate mycotoxins. Palynological research conducted by Nowicke and colleagues determined that the yellow pollen component could be derived from common Asian taxa, and the rain-like distribution was the result of dense fecal showers from large Apis dorsata honeybees while in mass flight. Articles by numerous writers then took up this discovery, in the context of its bearing on the sensitive political issues involved, in the pages of diverse journals such as The Atlantic (October 1985), The New Yorker (11 February 1991), and Arms Control Today (September 1986).
In retirement Nowicke will be working on the completion of her comprehensive Euphorbiaceae Pollen Project, in association with Masamichi Takahashi of Japan, to examine the pollen morphology and exine structure, by TEM and SEM, of the subfamily Acalyphoideae, and relate the findings to the systematics of the group. Two articles covering several tribes have already appeared in the Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, vol. 102 (1998) and vol. 105 (1999), with part 3 in press, and part 4 in progress.
[by Robert DeFilipps]
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