Paul Williams, a retired emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison plant pathology department, came to the university as a graduate student in 1959 off a train from Vancouver.
Williams was offered a professorship right after graduation and assigned to take care of the cabbage and sauerkraut crops on campus.
The job, he says, quickly morphed into many different things. He noticed plants in the cabbage family took a notoriously long time to go through their life cycles. He said he had a “eureka moment” when he realized he could start breeding cabbage more quickly. He soon invented and branded a system called Fast Plants, which was able to accelerate the life cycle of a cabbage plant and its relatives from two years to 40 days.
Williams soon noticed Fast Plants could be a useful tool not only for his teaching but also as a benefit to schools across the country for experiments. He said anyone can easily grow the plants in almost any kind of container with some fluorescent lighting.
Since then, Williams has given up all rights of the program to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and the program is used in schools and research labs all over the world.
Fast Plants also transitioned into another project Williams now works on called Bottle Biology. The program creates designs using old bottles and food containers and places them in manuals on the Internet for schools to use for experiments.
Throughout his time at the university, Williams said he has seen the entire UW Hospital system and the nearby power plant constructed on his cabbage fields.
Despite having graduated 50 years ago, Williams still describes the university as his home. He met his wife during college, and raised his kids who also attended UW-Madison.
“I retired 15 years ago, but this campus is my sandbox. I come every day to play with whoever wants to play,” he said. “That’s my life. No door’s closed to me.”
Williams, who considers himself the “coach” of the undergrad researchers he oversees, still lives in Madison and visits campus every day.
“The undergrads at this campus recharge my batteries every day, and that’s my reason for coming back to my sandbox,” Williams said.
