Daniel Zohary: Geneticist and Explorer of Plant Domestication

摘要

Daniel Zohary is a botanist, geneticist, and cytogeneticist. He occupies the middle link in a dynasty of three professors of biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His father, Michael Zohary, was a renowned botanist who laid the foundation tocomprehensive accounts and documentation of the Flora of Israel, whereas Daniel's son, Ehud Zohary, is a neurobiologist specializing in functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. Professor Zohary (known to all in Israel as Danny) is mostly' recognized as an explorer of plant domestication and of the rise of agriculture and Neolithic settlements in the Fertile Crescent. His research and long career are marked by the employment of expertise from different scientific disciplines, such as botany, cytogenetics,population genetics, ecology, and archaeology, and the synthesis of findings obtained in these fields into a coherent evolutionary description of the rise of agriculture. Danny has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers; unlike most ofhis colleagues, he was also able to summarize his life work in a comprehensive book on plant domestication, which was published in four successful editions (Zohary and Hopf 1988, 1993, 2000; Zohary et al. 2012).