SEB Bulletin July 2005
Obituary: William Peter Anderson
Peter Anderson, an important pioneer in the biophysical study of ion and water transport in the cells and tissues of plants, died in October 2004 at his home in Canberra, Australia, aged 64. Peter was born on 12 May 1940 in Turriff, Aberdeenshire, Scotland and obtained a BSc in Physics from the University of Aberdeen in 1962. He followed these foundation studies by a graduate diploma course in Biophysics and then a PhD, also on a biophysical topic, at the University of Edinburgh. In 1965 he joined the Nuffield Research Group, headed by Jack Dainty, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and there started his work on ion and water relations of plant roots.
The Nuffield Group, and its predecessor at Edinburgh, had pioneered the biophysical approach to ion and water transport in plant cells, concentrating initially on giant algal cells, such as the Characeae, which were more experimentally tractable. Peter and his colleagues extended the concepts and studies to higher plants and this remained his chosen field for the rest of his brief career at East Anglia, then for 5 years at the University of Liverpool and finally for a short 3 years at the Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra. Over this time, Peter published 27 research papers, mostly in the Journal of Experimental Botany, plus seven important review papers. All were key contributions to laying the biophysical foundations of membrane transport in higher plants. He also gave many important papers at major plant biophysical conferences.
Perhaps Peter's most important contribution to the spreading of biophysics among the plant ion transport community was his founding of the important series of International Workshops on Plant Membrane Transport. He initiated them in July 1972 with the first such workshop held at the University of Liverpool (see W.P. Anderson, Ion Transport in Plants, Academic Press, 1972). These meetings have been held every three years since then, the latest being in Montpellier in 2004. They have grown to be the most important meeting for plant membrane biologists and their success can be judged from the attendances; there were 61 participants at the Liverpool meeting and 466 at Montpellier.
Unfortunately, in the late 1970s Peter's health deteriorated and he was unable to continue his major work in plant physiology. This was a great loss, indeed a major tragedy, both for him personally and to the field of plant membrane transport in general. We can only speculate on what he might have contributed had he been able to fulfil his early promise and scientific productivity.
