Timothy Josling, a professor emeritus at the former Food Research Institute and an affiliate of The Europe Center known for his encyclopedic knowledge of international agricultural policy, died on Nov. 27.

Timothy Josling, a Stanford professor emeritus of agricultural economics, died at his home in Davis, California, on Nov. 27 after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 78.

Josling, professor emeritus at the former Food Research Institute, was a prolific scholar in agricultural economics. He was known for his humor, patience and devotion to his work and family, according to his relatives and colleagues.

“My dad was one of those people who had an answer to every question,” said his daughter, Catherine Josling. “I loved asking him questions because I knew whether he knew the answer or not, he would confidently answer the question. He also had a wonderful sense of humor – you could always count on him for a witty retort.”

A walking encyclopedia

Originally from London, England, Josling joined Stanford in 1978 to teach at the former Food Research Institute, which was founded in 1921 by Herbert Hoover to investigate the issues of food production, distribution and consumption.

Josling’s research interests centered on agricultural policies and international trade regulations – and he was admired by his colleagues for his wide breadth of knowledge on these topics.

“Tim Josling was a walking encyclopedia of international agricultural institutions, and he made lasting contributions in the fields of international trade and policy analysis,” said Walter P. Falcon, who directed the Food Research Institute from 1972 to 1991 and recruited Josling to join the faculty. “He was also uncommonly broad. We used to jokingly – but seriously – say that if one wanted 10 pages overnight of really good analysis on any economics topic, best to call Tim.”

Among his many contributions to the field of agricultural economics, Josling is most known for developing the “producer subsidy equivalent approach,” a measure that helps countries understand how much of a farmer’s earnings was created by agricultural policy. Josling initially developed the formula, also known as the “PSE,” for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and it has since been adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States Department of Agriculture and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

“The Josling PSE is used to this day,” said his colleague Scott Pearson, who served on the Stanford faculty as a professor of agricultural economics from 1968 until his retirement in 2002 and as director of the Food Research Institute from 1991 to 1996. “The PSE helps governments understand the costs of agricultural protection and support.”

Dedicated scholar

From 1993 to 1996, Josling served as the director for the Center for European Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). When the Food Research Institute closed in 1996, he went on to co-convene the European Forum, now The Europe Center, until he retired in 2003.

Throughout retirement, Josling remained active on campus as a senior fellow, by courtesy, at FSI. Until 2016, he taught a course on the economics of the WTO for the Program in International Relations and would regularly meet with his students at the Europe Center’s offices, said program administrator Karen Haley.

Josling’s recent publications include the three-volume Handbook on International Food and Agricultural Policies, which was published in 2018. In 2015, he co-authored Transatlantic Food and Agricultural Trade Policy: 50 Years of Conflict and Convergence with his long-time collaborator, Stefan Tangermann of the University of Göttingen in Germany.

“One could discuss the most crazy ideas with him and develop them jointly into workable hypotheses and proposals,” said Tangermann, who first met Josling in 1973. Over the next 40 years, the pair developed a close professional partnership and wrote more than 50 publications together, including two major books.

“From the 1980s on, Josling and Tangermann were considered the profession’s leaders in explaining European agricultural policy and in discussing its implications for policymakers,” said Pearson.

Josling was a member of the International Policy Council on Food and Agricultural Trade and former chair of the executive committee of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium. He also held a visiting professorship at the University of Kent, in the United Kingdom, and was a past president of the UK Agricultural Economics Association. In 2004, he was made a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association.

Despite his accomplishments, Josling was “very self-effacing,” said his colleague and friend Christophe Crombez, a senior research scholar at the Europe Center. “Tim was not someone who sought the spotlight.”

Quintessential English professor; avid sports fan

Prior to joining Stanford, Josling taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Reading in England.

Josling received a BSc in agriculture from the University of London (Wye College), an MSc in agricultural economics from the University of Guelph, Canada, and a PhD in agricultural economics from Michigan State University.

His family described him as the “quintessential English professor,” and according to Falcon, “He never lost all of his English ways. If he were to walk in the door you would think he belonged in a Shakespeare play – he looked the part of an English actor.”

Josling also loved sports, including cricket and thanks to Pearson, baseball as well.

Pearson remembers taking Josling to his first game at Stanford’s Sunken Diamond in the late 1970s: “At his first game, Tim offered a suggestion. He noted that it would be much more difficult for the batter to hit the baseball if only the pitcher – no, Tim, he was not called the hurler – would bounce the ball in front of home plate. I had to tell him that, alas, this would not work in American baseball.”

For years, Josling and his wife, Anthea, also had season tickets for Stanford football as well as for women’s and men’s basketball.

Josling was devoted to his family and garden. In 2003, he and Anthea moved to the hills in Los Gatos. There, he grew a variety of vegetables and tended to goats and chickens, as well as caring for several cats and dogs. His also enjoyed sailing, photography and travel. In early 2018, the Joslings moved to Davis to be closer to his daughter and grandchildren.

“What I liked most about Tim was his good nature,” Falcon said. “Tim could find the bright side of things, when the rest of us had trouble.”

Josling is survived by his wife, Anthea; his children, Catherine, BS ’03, and John Mark, BS ’99, and their spouses, Amiel Sagpao and Jessica Smith, as well as two grandchildren, Claire Sagpao and Andrew Sagpao. Plans for a celebration of life in the new year are pending. In lieu of flowers, the family request donations in Josling’s name to the Cancer Research Institute.

Preeclampsia is a serious complication of pregnancy that affects 5 to 10 percent of all pregnancies — over 8 million a year worldwide — and claims the lives of 76,000 mothers and half a million babies each year.

The condition causes hypertension and abnormal protein in the urine, and has few effective preventive or therapeutic strategies. The clinical abnormalities usually resolve completely after delivery, but recent research shows that women who have had preeclampsia have higher rates of heart disease later in life, for reasons that are poorly understood.

That’s where Mark Hlatky, Virginia Winn, and their Stanford Medicine research team come in. They were recently awarded a 4-year, $6 million NIH grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study the links between preeclampsia and the subsequent risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) as women grow older.

“The goal of this study is to improve cardiovascular health in women, by learning how pregnancy affects heart disease later in life,” said Hlatky, a Stanford Health Policy fellow. “We hope that shedding new light on these links can lead to better prevention and treatment.”

The interdisciplinary study called EPOCH — Effect of Preeclampsia On Cardiovascular Health — could eventually help millions of women and their clinicians worldwide.

“Since about 85 percent of women become pregnant at some point during their lives, and heart disease is the leading cause of death in women, determining how pregnancy complications might increase the risk of heart disease later in life could be very important,” said Hlatky, a professor of health research and policy and of cardiovascular medicine. “If there is a specific biomarker ‘signature’ of heart disease risk in women who have had preeclampsia, it would open up new possibilities for risk assessment and better treatment to prevent heart attacks and strokes.”

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Hlatky and his co-principal investigator, Stanford high-risk obstetrician Winn, note that a history of preeclampsia doubles the woman’s risk of future heart disease and stroke, and triples her risk of hypertension. And these adverse consequences occur at younger ages than in women who never developed the condition during pregnancy.

"The dramatic physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy are indeed remarkable," said Winn, the Arline and Pete Harman faculty scholar in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "This study highlights how complications that occur in pregnancy impact women's health beyond pregnancy." 

The pathogenic links between preeclampsia early in life and ASCVD late in life have been difficult to investigate because the process develops over decades, the authors said. And few clinicians are aware of the link between the condition and late ASCVD risk and there are no validated biomarkers for this process.

Preliminary data that contributed to the application of the project was a direct result of Winn’s endowed Arline and Pete Harman Faculty Scholar award and funding from the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute.

The 4-year grant will support a multi-disciplinary research team in taking a life-course approach. The EPOCH study will enroll three cohorts of women at distinct points in the natural history of the disorder: during pregnancy in their reproductive years; during the long, asymptomatic period in mid-life; and the ultimate development of ASCVD in later life.

“It’s very difficult to study the effects of early life events on the development of diseases late in life, since they are separated by 40 years or more,” Hlatky said. “We don’t have reliable health records in the United States from 40 or more years ago, so it’s a challenge for American researchers.” This is why, he said, the EPOCH study includes researchers from Denmark, which has a national health system, complete medical data of their citizens since the 1970’s, and a national biobank that will allow study of later life events.

The first cohort of women will include some of those who are already part of the Stanford March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center. The center, led by David Stevenson began recruiting women in 2011 to study pregnancy from the first trimester through delivery. The study has collected a wide array of “omics” measures at multiple time points: metabolomics, proteomics, cell-free RNA, the microbiome and immune cells for analysis, as well as collection of amniotic fluid, cord blood, and the placenta. The pregnancy cohort will enroll additional women who are cared for at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital for treatment of preeclampsia, about 100 in all, plus a matched group with uncomplicated pregnancies.

This is where it gets pretty technical — but also pretty cool

The researchers will collect high-dimensional “omic” biomarker data to assess the pathophysiology of preeclampsia and its relationship to cardiovascular function and disease. They’ll assess cell signaling pathways using single-cell immune profiling (CyTOF) methods in the lab of Brice Gaudilliere, an assistant professor of anesthesia.

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They will then analyze the cell-free RNA profiles using methods developed by co-investigator Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering and applied physics, and co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. They will assess metabolomics using novel methods also developed at Stanford by co-investigator Michael Snyder,  professor and chair of genetics.

Stanford data scientists, including co-investigators, Robert Tibshirani and Nima Aghaeepour, have been at the forefront of developing and applying novel statistical and bioinformatic approaches, which the team will use to analyze the torrents of data that can now be collected by modern “omics” technologies from individual clinical research subjects.

“The EPOCH study is truly interdisciplinary — we are bringing together faculty from eight different departments to study a major problem in women’s health.”

The second, mid-life cohort will be recruited from women who had a pregnancy complicated by preeclampsia. Marcia Stefanick, professor of medicine in the Stanford Prevention Research Center, will use the Stanford Medicine Research Data Repository (STARR), which contains electronic records from more than 1.6 million patients since 1995, to identify eligible women. Stefanick and the EPOCH team will recruit 200 pre-menopausal women who had either a pregnancy complicated by preeclampsia or an uncomplicated pregnancy.

The third, late-life cohort of women will be identified in the Danish National Biobank by Stanford visiting professor Mads Melbye. Samples will be retrieved from women who had preeclampsia early in life and ASCD later in life, as well as a set of matched control subjects, and analyzed in Stanford laboratories.

“We’re not quite sure whether the physiologic challenges of pregnancy that result in preeclampsia simply reveal underlying cardiovascular risk, or causes change that leads to the increased risk in later life,” Winn said. “The EPOCH study will identify unique aspects of preeclampsia that links it to later ASCVD, opening potential novel approaches to improve women’s health.”

The EPOCH study brings together investigators from eight departments. Additional faculty include Gary Shaw and Seda Tierney (Pediatrics), Martin Angst (Anesthesia), Nicholas Leeper (Surgery) and Heather Boyd (Danish Biobank).

When the subject of extending the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) arises, National Security Advisor John Bolton suggests the 2002 Treaty of Moscow model as a possible alternative. The Russians, however, would never agree to that now. Moreover, the Treaty of Moscow was not good arms control. Trying to replace New START with something like it would be foolish.

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