Robert Phillip Adams (1939-2020)

I have assembled this biography of Bob Adams with the help of documentation from his book Junipers of the World, various online sources, and my personal experiences.

Robert Phillip Adams (known to most everyone as Bob) was born December 8, 1939 in Denison, Texas to Henry and Mabel Adams. He passed away in St. George, Utah on December 2, 2020. In his early teens his parents moved the family to DeKalb, Texas where they operated a dairy. He graduated from DeKalb High School in 1958 and went to Texarkana Junior College for 1 year. The summer after that, he went to the Texas Panhandle for a summer job, to earn money to go to the University of Texas. It was there in Gruver, Texas that he met Janice Etling. After graduating from the University of Texas in 1962 with an honors degree in mathematics and computer science, he and Janice were married and moved to Palo Alto, California; they were married for over 58 years. They had an active life as Christians, including mission work in Bristol and Sheffield, England; Te Anau and Alexandra, New Zealand; and in Zambia and Niger.

In Palo Alto, Bob put in a stint at the Control Data Corporation, which at that time was one of the major players in the computer industry. He soon returned to the University of Texas at Austin for his Ph.D. work. In 1969 he received that Ph.D., in Botany and Biochemistry, completing a dissertation on Chemosystematics and numerical studies in natural populations of Juniperus. It was a fateful choice; he was to later publish hundreds of publications dealing with junipers, studying Juniperus all over the world and describing many new taxa. He began this work in 1969 at Colorado State University, Botany and Plant Pathology Department, as an assistant professor until 1973 and an associate professor until 1977, when he left to spend 9 years directing a variety of University-Industry cooperatives based in Texas and Utah. Finally, in 1987, he arrived at Baylor University in Texas, there to remain. Until 2001 he directed the Plant Biotechnology Center at Baylor, then taking a year to work as director of the Pacific Center for Molecular Biodiversity at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. He returned to a post as a research professor in Baylor, where he remained active for the rest of his career. An important part of his research over the years involved inviting scientists from other countries to come visit his lab to learn new techniques for research. Scientists from China, Nepal, Iran, Lebanon, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan came to his Baylor University lab. He never stopped his research work, but relaxed it a bit from 2017 onwards, when he and Janice moved to St. George, Utah. I last heard from Bob on November 11, 2020, when he stepped down as editor of Phytologia to try and finish some manuscripts despite a grim prognosis for his lung cancer. He was gone four weeks later.

For my part, I "met" Bob, naturally enough, through the Gymnosperm Database, in early 2007. I had recently toured parts of Mexico and had some questions for him, and that led to a 13-year correspondence, including one shared publication (on Abies lasiocarpa). We never did meet in person, though. That's true of a lot of people I know in the conifer world.

The Preface to the last edition of Junipers of the World contains quite a bit more biography, and I will here quote it, so you can get a sense of Bob's voice as a writer:

My introduction to Juniperus (in a formal sense) occurred in 1966 at the University of Texas in Austin, TX. As an undergraduate, I majored in mathematics and minored in physics, then entered graduate school in botany, so I had much to learn. Prof. Billie L. Turner and I decided that it would be interesting to examine geographic variation in a species that has a widespread distribution in order to take advantage of my knowledge of computer graphic methods to analyze spatial patterns. One day, Prof. Turner (just "Billie" to his colleagues) said "You need to study a large plant so you can easily obtain samples at regular intervals." So he took me to the herbarium to examine some Cercis canadensis (red bud). But he concluded that "so many have been planted along the roadsides in Oklahoma, you would never be sure if you sampled a natural or a cultivated tree, but there is an interesting problem in Juniperus." Not long after that, Dr. Ernst von Rudloff came to the University of Texas and spent several months teaching graduate students to extract leaf essential oils and gas chromatography. And, of course, Juniperus has lots of diversity in its essential oils that could be exploited in geographic studies. A sabbatical in 1976 at the National Research Council of Canada with Dr. von Rudloff and Lawrence Hogge was extremely valuable in introducing me to mass spectroscopy of terpenoids. I was fortunate to obtain a position at Colorado State University, and secure a NSF grant to study the junipers of Mexico/ Guatemala. Tom Zanoni (now at New York Botanic Garden) came and worked on those junipers (and, from whom, I learned some much needed classical nomenclature). Other students, Walt Kelly, James Kistler, etc. continued work on Juniperus.

But the really big opportunity to study Juniperus, world-wide, came in the late 1980's. Sometimes a "window of opportunity" becomes available in science. Such a "window" opened in the late 1980's with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Heretofore, collaborations and field collections were limited (such as short trips as provided with the International Botanical Congress, 1975, Leningrad). However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the concurrent opening of collaboration in China provided just such a "window" for me. Never before have we had the technology for transportation, coupled with the accessibility (politically) to the northern hemisphere, plus the ease of internet and FAX communications. In 1990, under the sponsorship of NSF, I spent 6 weeks with Prof. Ge-lin Chu in Gansu, China collecting Juniperus (all preserved in silica gel for subsequent DNA analysis). Following this study, collaborations and field collections were conducted in Armenia, China (Qinghai, Sichuan, Xinjiang, Yunnan), Georgia (CIS), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Taiwan, and Turkmenistan. These collaborations, many taking several years to develop, resulted in field collections and observations for all the Juniperus taxa in central Asia. Supplemental trips to the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, and Sweden plus recollections of all the Juniperus taxa from the western hemisphere has resulted in the assemblage of DNA and essential oils for the entire set of Juniperus taxa of the world. During the past 47 years, I have collected over 10,000 Juniperus specimens. I have been fortunate to have the "window of opporrunity" to visit and collect all of Juniperus in their native habitats. Hopefully, this treatment of Juniperus will be useful to the many colleagues who have contributed to these trips and a lifetime of the study of Juniperus. The reader is also encouraged to visit www.juniperus.org to obtain additional information about Juniperus, reprints of articles and updated keys.

Please visit www.juniperus.org to see and download Bob's publications. Also, beginning in December 2006 he was the managing editor of Phytologia, issues of which can be viewed at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.