Alan Kapuler

Alan Kapuler, Ph.D., is Research Director of Seeds of Change organic seed company, founder of Peace Seeds (now Deep Diversity), plant breeder with a special focus on nutrition, and pioneer in the development of kinship gardening, an approach which emphasizes the importance of conserving biodiversity. A winner of the Westinghouse high school science talent search, Alan studied biology at Yale (where he graduated summa cum laude at the age of nineteen) and molecular biology at Rockefeller University, where his cutting-edge research earned him a Ph.D. and a professorship. In the early 1970s, disillusioned with the values and activities he felt his academic work was promoting, he left his career on the East Coast and arrived in the woods of the Pacific Northwest as a bucket-hauling, shovel-wielding aspiring gardener. He soon started saving his own seeds, started a small seed company, and the rest, as they say, is history. He has survived a ten-year struggle with lymphatic cancer, and is also an accomplished, prolific artist; some of his paintings accompany this interview.