BA Massey BSc Bristol PhD Cape Town DSc Massey FRSNZ
1926–2001
Robert Brooks
With the death of Emeritus Professor Robert Richard Brooks on 23 January 2001, New Zealand science lost one of its most colourful, energetic and versatile practitioners. A member of the staff of Massey University for all of the 40 years he spent in New Zealand, Robert Brooks became well known worldwide for his work in analytical chemistry and geochemistry, and especially for his studies on uptake of trace metals by plants of metalliferous soils. In these areas he made substantial contributions to the literature, not only through his own research but also through the publication of books in which the international literature was summarised and assessed.
Robert Brooks was born on 9 April 1926 in Bristol, England, but lived during his school days near Sheffield where he attended King Edward VII School. During the early years of World War II he was employed in Bristol, but late in the war he was called into the British Army. The embarkation of Robert and his fellow 19-year-old recruits on a troop ship in the Clyde early in May 1945 coincided with the demise of Hitler, and resulted in Robert’s doing postwar service in East Africa (at an Italian prisoner-of-war camp in Kenya) and in the Middle East.
On his return to the UK he took up the offer of a chance to study chemistry at the University of Bristol (and later frequently expressed his gratitude to Hitler for providing him with this opportunity!). After graduating in 1952 he gained industrial experience as a chemist at the Avonmouth zinc smelter of Imperial Smelting Corporation and then at E.S. and A. Robinson in Bristol. In 1956 he decided to emigrate to South Africa with his wife and young daughter, and initially worked in the printing industry as chemist for the Cape Times. However, he was soon given the opportunity to embark on PhD studies with the noted geochemist Louis Ahrens at the University of Cape Town, working on ion-exchange separations and emission spectrographic analysis. This early work in analytical chemistry became the basis of his future career in both teaching and research.
During his time as a PhD student, Robert was also employed as a lecturer in the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology at the University of Cape Town, teaching both Chemistry and Physics to their first-year students. After his graduation, however, the events at Sharpeville in March 1960 led Robert to conclude that turmoil in South Africa was imminent, and caused him to look to Australasia for other opportunities and a safer environment for his family.
Late in 1960 he accepted a lectureship in Chemistry at Massey University in Palmerston North, where he was based for the rest of his career. His international contributions to Science were recognised at Massey by the award of a DSc in 1977 and a Personal Chair in Geochemistry in 1987. He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1996. Although Robert formally retired from Massey’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1991, this was a retirement in name only. As Professor Emeritus and Honorary Research Fellow in what evolved into Soil and Earth Sciences in Massey’s Institute of Natural Resources, he continued the pursuit of his research interests for a further nine years.
Through the 1960s Robert Brooks developed his interests in elemental analysis, particularly by atomic spectroscopic methods, initially using emission spectrography and then becoming an early user of the emerging technique of atomic absorption. He was always searching for ways of applying his analytical capabilities to practical problems in many fields archaeology, mineral exploration, environmental pollution, and the uptake of trace elements by plants and animals. His work in the 1960s included a demonstration of the use of emission spectrography to identify the sources of New Zealand obsidians, and the discovery of extreme accumulation of zinc and cadmium in certain shellfish organs. (His 1965 paper with M. G. Rumsby on the latter subject subsequently became a Current Contents "Citation Classic".) From the mid 1960s Robert and his students and colleagues worked on the relationship between elemental concentrations in soils and in the plants they supported, initially with a focus on the possibility of biogeochemical prospecting using plant analysis in prospecting for, and delineating, mineral deposits.
In the late 1960s, a visit to Dun Mountain, one of New Zealand’s best-known serpentine soil sites, kindled an enthusiasm for the study of the flora of serpentine and other metalliferous soils. Shortly afterwards, during a biogeochemical survey of nickel prospects in Western Australia, Robert and his research student B. C. Severne discovered extremely high nickel accumulation (to levels a thousand times greater than normally found in plants) by Hybanthus floribundus; such behaviour, later to be described as "hyperaccumulation", had previously been known only in three species of Alyssum found in Mediterranean Europe and Asia Minor. The interest in nickel accumulation was reinforced by a chance meeting with Dr T. Jaffré, who was working with ORSTOM in New Caledonia; this led to a long period of collaborative work on many aspects of the island’s serpentine-endemic flora. For almost 30 years Robert Brooks, Roger Reeves and their students and collaborators have carried out analytical work on soils and plants from both serpentine and other metalliferous areas in many parts of the world. A notable feature of the work was the use of herbarium specimens, as well as samples collected directly from the field. The work carried out at Massey has been responsible for establishing about 85% of the world’s 330 known nickel hyperaccumulating species, and most of the smaller numbers of instances of hyperaccumulation of copper and cobalt. The latter findings resulted largely from an association with Professor F. Malaisse from Belgium, who was working in Zaïre where most of the copper- and cobalt-accumulating plants were found. During the decade from 1988, Robert Brooks and his colleagues were supported extensively by the National Geographic Society in the USA for field projects and plant collections carried out in Brazil and elsewhere in South America, and in Spain and Morocco. An ambitious plan to collect plants from metalliferous soils at high altitudes on Puncak Jaya in New Guinea will, unfortunately, not now be realised. An important legacy, however, is the Massey University Metallophyte Herbarium, containing more than 2000 specimens of many metal-tolerant and metal-accumulating plants collected by Robert and his colleagues during field work in many parts of the world. This collection will be preserved and enhanced during the coming years.
It was particularly gratifying to Robert that in the last few years there has been an upsurge of interest in the potential for using metal-tolerant plants in general, and metal hyperaccumulators in particular, to help in solving various kinds of metal-contamination problems arising from industries such as mining and smelting. Special interest from the news media followed his work on encouraging plants growing on areas of goldmine tailings to increase their minute uptake of gold through chemical modification of the soil.
It is indicative of the international standing of Robert Brooks and his work that a specialist meeting held in July 2001 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was formally entitled "The Robert Brooks Workshop on Metallophytes, Mine Waste and Land Reclamation". This meeting, sponsored by the Royal Botanic Gardens and the mining multinational Rio Tinto, was attended by a selected group of 20 invitees from around the world. It is clear that Robert’s influence will be strongly felt in the initiatives and activities that are likely to result from the workshop, which covered such issues as the need for further exploration of the flora of metalliferous soils, conservation measures, the use of metallophytes for reclamation of lands disturbed by mining, and fundamental research on mechanisms of metal tolerance and metal accumulation by plants.
Robert’s analytical talents (and those of his students) were also used to investigate geological and cosmological problems. This was most notably shown by his publications on trace elements, especially noble metals, in iron meteorites, and in clay samples from Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary sites, where the presence of a thin layer of extraterrestrial material can be inferred from the unusually high noble-metal content.
Robert’s fluency in languages (French, German and Russian, in particular), and his correspondence with a wide circle of scientists, helped him to develop research interests that took him to many parts of the world (Australia, New Caledonia, UK, France, Germany and several other countries in Europe, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Canada, USA, Brazil and other parts of South America, Zaïre, China and the USSR). He was supervisor or co-supervisor of the work of about 45 research students. Together with his many New Zealand and overseas collaborators, Robert produced an impressive list of about 300 publications, including nine books, two of which were subsequently translated into Russian. His 1987 book ‘Serpentine and its Vegetation’ is now the standard starting point for all who wish to enter this field of research. His books are testimony to the enormous amount of work that Robert did in collating, reading, interpreting and summarising the literature in a variety of fields, and the scientific world is greatly indebted to him for turning his energies and talents in this direction. (Sadly, his autobiography will never appear alongside the rest of his books – it could have become a best seller, and would have more than matched everything written by David Niven, Peter Ustinov, Bill Bryson et al.)
In the wider community, Robert Brooks lent his considerable energies at various times to a number of cultural and recreational organisations in Palmerston North. He was for many years a very active member of the Manawatu Philatelic Society, and was the major driving force behind the construction of the Manawatu Observatory.
All those who worked with Robert remember him for his ceaseless energy, his ability to turn ideas into work accomplished, his fund of anecdotes, his uncanny knack of encountering (and generating) problems while travelling or in the field, the speed with which solutions to the problems were found, and the delight with which he told and retold his adventures. A rare quality was the special pleasure he reserved for the recounting of experiences where he was the victim of his own impulsiveness. In all of these ways Robert Brooks was a most stimulating friend and colleague who will live on through many memories and stories, and through a remarkable legacy of discovery and published work.
Robert Brooks maintained his interest and activity in science until the last month of his life, when his health deteriorated as a result of complications following heart surgery. He is survived by his wife, Mary, three daughters and a son.
– Roger Reeves
