Jan. 23, 2003
Writer: Cat Holmes (706) 542-8960
(clholmes@uga.edu)
Source: Hardy Edwards (706) 542-1351
(hedwards@uga.edu)
A perennial ‘hardy’:
Edwards still excels at UGA
By Cat Holmes
University of Georgia
When
Hardy
Edwards began his University of Georgia research and teaching
career on Nov. 1,
1957, Sputnik I had been orbiting Earth less than a month.
Television was black-and-white, and
the campus wasn’t ? it was still four years before
integration.
Nearly
everything has changed, said Edwards, a renowned poultry
scientist who was recently
recognized for his 45 years at UGA, the longest tenure of any
faculty member now.
“One
of the things you learn to adjust to, if you stay around an
institution as long as I’ve stayed at
the University of Georgia, is change,” Edwards said with a
laugh. “Mine is a dynamic field. And
both the university and the world have changed a great
deal.”
At 73,
Edwards continues to conduct research, guide graduate students
and teach classes. Indeed,
“the last 20 years have been particularly fruitful,”
he said. “I’ve had a really fun and rewarding
career here. When I came to UGA, I decided I would not lay
around, and I haven’t.”
Born in
Ruston, La., in 1929, Edwards graduated from Southwestern
Louisiana Institute in 1949.
He got a master’s degree from Florida in 1950 and a PhD
from Cornell in 1953, when he was just
23.
“I
was the youngest person at Cornell at that time to have received
a PhD,” Edwards said. “Can
you imagine what a big head I had as a young
man?”
Drafted
into the Army then, he served for two years. “The army did
me a lot of good,” he said.
“You know what they say about Cornell students: ‘You
can always tell them because you can’t
tell them much.’ In the Army, I was a private and spent two
years picking up cigarette butts off
the ground. I needed that.”
For
Edwards’ first 15 years, he developed a highly respected
research program in poultry and
animal nutrition, with emphasis on lipid and mineral metabolism.
He co-discovered the
condition, cause and prevention of X disease in chickens and the
antibiotic growth response in
animals.
Edwards
spent a year as a research associate in physiological chemistry
at the University of Lund
in Sweden in 1964-65.
He was
awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1972 and spent it at the
Institute of National
Research in Agriculture in Tours, France, and the Applied
Biology
Department at Cambridge,
England.
Promoted
to professor in 1966, Edwards became the UGA graduate dean in
1972. For the next
seven years, he came to appreciate the UGA’s
“top-notch” programs.
In 1979,
he returned to poultry science, building a new research program
focused on the cause
and prevention of leg abnormalities in poultry and on phytate
phosphorous utilization by poultry.
This work has resulted in four U.S. patents.
In 1984,
he was a visiting professor for the National Institute of Animal
Science in Copenhagen,
Denmark, and a Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Research
Council Fellow.
In 1991,
in the House of Commons in London, he was presented the Tom
Newman International
Award for contributions to poultry research.
Edwards
now studies vitamin D requirements of broiler/breeder chickens
and the vitamin’s
effects on their progeny.
“I’m interested in how this may affect immune
responses,” he said. “All kinds of cancers have
been linked to Vitamin D deficiency. This isn’t a
backwater area. This is an area that’s moving
fast.”
Edwards
still lives on the same farm he bought with his wife, Aldies, in
1957 and where their
son, Hardy III, grew up. On 170 acres between Winterville and
Hull, he continues to manage a
cow-calf farm, though he says he’s starting to slow
down.
“Five years ago I could stack a hay wagon by
myself,” he said. “But some of these things require
physical labor I’m no longer equal to.”
He may
not
be stacking hay wagons, but with three articles being published,
a graduate course
this semester and an active research program, he’s
certainly living up to his name.
(Cat
Holmes is a science writer with the University of Georgia
College
of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences.)
