Carlos Ochoa: a life devoted to potatoes


On Thursday, 11 December 2008, Professor Carlos Manuel Ochoa passed away. “The world has lost one of the pre-eminent scholars on potato taxonomy,” said CIP’s Director General Dr. Pamela Anderson. “Professor Ochoa was an invaluable member of CIP and will be greatly missed.”

Ochoa, a Scientist Emeritus of CIP, was born in Cusco, Peru. He is popularly known as the Indiana Jones of the Potato. For more than 40 years, as a youth and as a professional plant breeder and taxonomist, Ochoa combed the rugged mountainsides of the Andes to describe and document the characteristics of the widely diverse wild potatoes and their natural habitats. In these explorations, and in others around the world, he discovered more than 70 species, and rediscovered 15; in all almost a third of the known wild species. In addition, he bred highly productive new commercial potato varieties including Alheli, Antarqui, Cuzco, Chasqui, Mantaro, Micaela Bastidas, Ranrahirca, Renacimiento, Tomasa Condemayta and Yungay for his Peruvian homeland. The last variety is still widely grown and sold in Peru.

Early days
Before joining CIP in 1971, Ochoa was professor of plant improvement in the National Agrarian University of La Molina, in Lima for 20 years. Nowadays, many of his past students are members of the staff of CIP. However, his first job had nothing to do with tubers but rather with grains: he developed a wheat variety suitable for Peruvian conditions. Then he began to wonder about the wisdom of planting wheat in the mountains, where potatoes had been cultivated successfully for more than 8000 years. An admirer of Nikolái Vavilov, the famous Russian geneticist and plant collector who originally theorized that the potato was native to the Andes, Ochoa felt the moral obligation to collect and evaluate every existing species of potato. This was in the time when many farmers were migrating to the cities on the coast, abandoning their potato fields and terraces that had been cultivated for hundreds and even thousands of years. “The domesticated species were at risk of disappearing and the environments where the wild species were found were threatened with erosion and deforestation,” recalled Ochoa. “There was the danger of losing species of potato before they had been discovered.”

In his collecting activities, he took advantage of the rainy seasons, when the potato plants flower and are easy to find. He searched in hidden Andean valleys for wild potato species, often beautiful plants but with bitter and inedible tubers that were useless as food but with inestimable genetic value. “At the beginning, I searched the high plains and the deserts,” he recalled. But he soon learned that the temperate valleys of the Andes were better places to look.

Darwin‘s potato
Although he had a thousand anecdotes, Professor Ochoa said that one of his most gratifying moments in his scientific career came in 1969, when he rediscovered a potato described for the first time in 1830 by Charles Darwin. He found it in a windswept cave in the archipelago of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile, where Darwin saw it for the first time. It was the first report of that potato in more than 150 years. To find it, he had to wade across a swamp full of leeches. Darwin had described the potato plant as a native wild species of Chile but Ochoa questioned that origin. However, he needed a living plant to confirm his theory. “With the potato plant in my hands,” he said, “I could confirm that it was not a wild species, but an escaped domesticated variety.”

Darwin’s potato had a great tolerance to soil salinity and live samples are still maintained in CIP’s genebank for use in improvement programs around the world. Many of the species that he discovered and conserved had been lost from the wild. A species in Colombia was eradicated by the lava from a volcanic eruption, with Ochoa only just escaping the lava flow himself. Others were destroyed during the building of the Pan American Highway or when their habitats were invaded by landless people around the Peruvian capital.

A little-valued treasure
He had many perilous encounters in those long months of lonely exploration. Once, on the outskirts of the department of Cajamarca, over 850 km from Lima, some thieves took him for a treasure hunter. They could not understand that the ‘treasure’ of Ochoa consisted of some humble potato plants, so they pushed him into a ravine. Luckily he landed on a ledge and from there he could jump into the river and escape, with his wild potatoes intact!

One of Ochoa’s last journeys was to the desert in the north of Peru, one of the driest places in the world. After a two-week trip, he returned with a sample of drought-tolerant mini-tubers, collected for the first time 30 years ago, with pronounced resistance to late blight, one of worst potato diseases in the world.

World recognition
In his retirement he had been documenting the plants that he collected during his career.  For a life devoted to scientific exploration, he received in 1992 the Bernardo A. Houssay Inter-American Award for Sciences from the Organization of American States. In July 2001, the Peruvian government, in recognition of his work to safeguard the potato, awarded him the decoration the Order of the Sun in the degree of commander. He also received the recognition of numerous Peruvian universities. Most recently, in May 2006, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Diplomatic Service of Peru José Gregorio Paz Soldán, during celebrations to mark National Potato Day. In the same year he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala,  Sweden.  The scientific world also paid him tribute: three species of potato are named after him.

Professor Ochoa was a member of the Smithsonian Institute of the USA and of the Company Linnena of the UK. He was the author of numerous published works and scientific articles, including The Taxonomy of Tuber-bearing Potatoes of Peru. August 2003 saw the publication of the compendium The Potatoes of Peru, Database 1947-1997. CIP published English and Spanish versions of  The Potatoes of South America: Peru, a biosystematic work on the wild potatoes of Peru. This fundamental volume of over one thousand pages describes almost one hundred wild species of the potato, approximately half of the existing wild species in the American hemisphere. With the collaboration of CIP, he also published The Potatoes of Bolivia, which constitutes one of the most complete studies on the diversity and taxonomy of the potato of that country.

Legacy
Ochoa leaves an outstanding legacy of knowledge and material, including most of the global in-trust collections of both the 4500 accessions of cultivated potatoes and the 2500 accessions of wild potatoes maintained at CIP. He hoped that understanding the biosystematics of the wild potatoes of Peru would prove valuable to the general scientific community. In 1997 he wrote, “Because of the great diversity and genetic potential of the Peruvian wild species, many of which still remain unevaluated with respect to their possible horticultural use, the opportunities for doing future research in the field of potato improvement programs would appear endless.” Today the potato is grown in over 130 countries worldwide and has become the most important root and tuber crop in the world. Its increasing importance is a testament to Ochoa’s vision.