Articles
AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
It all started in 1954 when L.C. Cochran, Gilbert Stout and Maurice Welsh were visiting European countries where fruit tree viruses had been described – plum pox in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, Pfeffinger and Eckelrader diseases of cherry in Switzerland and Holland, and apple mosaic, chat fruit and rubbery wood in England.
Dr.
S. Blumer arranged a meeting in Switzerland so that some of the Europeans concerned with these diseases could benefit from discussion with the transatlantic visitors who had much longer experience of fruit tree virus diseases.
No doubt the benefits of the annual tour of cherry orchards in the Okanagan and the Pacific North West, part of the IR2 programme, were described.
As a consequence of this meeting in 1954, since called the first symposium, an international conference was held in the Netherlands in the following year, immediately prior to the International Horticultural Congress.
This, the second symposium, was organized by C.A.R. Meijneke of the Plant Protection Service and D. Mulder of the Phytopathological Research Institute.
It laid the foundations of subsequent symposia by appointing a "European committee for cooperation in fruit tree virus research" consisting of R. Bovey (Switzerland), Meijneke, Mulder and myself, and took the first step in coordinating research by compiling a minimum range of indicators recommended for virus-testing Malus and Prunus cultivars.
In the essence of the cooperation we envisaged was sharing our experiences in this rapidly expanding field.
New discoveries were coming thick and fast – almost every experiment yielded exciting results; most of our long-established varieties were infected with virus, often with several, and publication was too slow a means of spreading the news.
After the third symposium (at East Malling, 1956) in successive years, which was more of an informal discussion of experimental methods and results than a conference, we had a 4-year interval for consolidation before the 1960 meeting in Denmark organized by Helge Ronde Kristensen and Arne Thomsen.
Since then, symposia have been held in Italy (1970), England (1973), West Germany (1976) and Hungary (1979).
The committee for cooperation in fruit tree virus research was enlarged usually by the inclusion of the organizing secretary of the previous symposium, some resignations preventing its membership from becoming too large.
A feature of these symposia has been the absence of any annual subscription so that the organization has had no funds and therefore no treasurer.
As the attendance at symposia grew, as more and more countries started to investigate fruit tree virus diseases and others enlarged their research staff, the expense of publishing proceedings became an increasingly difficult problem, and the cost augmented the fees required to cover expenses unless the government of the host country generously provided a grant.