The Western Producer has developed a reputation over the years for helping couples form romantic relationships through its personal ads.
We’ve even written the occasional story about prairie couples who found love by answering a personal ad in the Producer.
However, the paper recently played matchmaker of a different sort.
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The tale starts with Margaret Evans, a freelance writer from British Columbia who specializes in stories about the latest breakthroughs in agricultural science.
The Western Producer publishes quite a few of her stories, including two on page 32 of the June 2 issue. One was about research at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom that discovered chemical compounds used by wheat plants to defend themselves. The other story was from the University of Birmingham, also in the U.K., about the discovery of a gene that controls self-fertilization in plants.
Many of the scientists Evans interviews like to read her stories about them on our website after they have been published, but that doesn’t work in Europe.
I don’t profess to understand all the technical ins and outs, but the long and the short of it is that people in Europe can’t access The Western Producer online. Go figure.
To help out these scientists, Evans will ask us to send her a PDF of the page in question and she then emails it to them.
We did this with page 32 of the June 2 issue, and that’s when things got interesting.
Evans had emailed the PDF to professor Noni Franklin-Tong, the scientist from the University of Birmingham who is researching self-fertilization in plants.
Much to Franklin-Tong’s surprise, the other story on the page included a photo of Anne Osborne, the group leader from the John Innes Centre who is working on how wheat plants defend themselves.
It turns out Franklin-Tong and Osborne had gone to university together back in the day, even doing their doctoral studies together in the same department.
The years had gone by and they had lost touch, but now here, on page 32 of the June 2 issue of The Western Producer, was the spark that would bring them back together.
As Evans said to me: “If you hadn’t run those two stories together, they would never have connected.”
Glad to help.
