50 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
PROFILEDiego (UCSD), over the last three decades. She estimates
that around 20 graduate students and 120 postdocs have
worked for her. Jennifer Nemhauser, a plant biologist at the
University of Washington who was a postdoc in Chory’s group
for more than five years, says the lab was filled with “super
ambitious, super smart, really committed and generous
scientists.... There were so many different journal clubs
going on, and it was just a hive of intellectual exchange.” As
a result, Nemhauser ended up postponing a job offer for six
months “because I was having so much fun.... I was still
learning so much that I wanted to stay and learn more.”
One of the learning opportunities that Chory offers her
trainees is the freedom to try new techniques in the lab as
technology advances. “I was one of the first people in Joanne’s
lab to do RNA sequencing, and she was super supportive,”
says Ullas Pedmale, a plant researcher at CSHL who was a
postdoc in Chory’s lab from 2009 to 2015. “[When] people
come to me [and say] ‘I want to try this,’ initially I’ll be
apprehensive.... Then I think, Joanne was supportive; we
should let people explore their ideas.”
“She’s so proud of the people that she has trained and is
very happy to let us think that we have come to our remarkable
insights completely on our own, even though she’s actually
been in the background,” Nemhauser notes. And, she adds,
Chory’s mentorship extends beyond her own lab: “If she’s at a
meeting, she goes to the poster session and talks to trainees.
I can’t even tell you how many people have told me that one
interaction like that at a meeting made the difference to them
in how they saw themselves as a scientist.”
Yunde Zhao, a former postdoc in Chory’s lab who is now an
auxin researcher at UCSD, agrees. “A lot of times people know
the scientific contributions, but don’t know the other part of
an education, [which is] how you treat people,” Zhao says.
“She promotes the whole field, she is not selfish.... She has
so many contributions [beyond] just scientific discoveries.”BIG CHALLENGES, BIG IDEAS
Chory’s path to success hasn’t always been easy. In 2004,
she was diagnosed with the progressive nervous system
disorder Parkinson’s disease. For a decade after that, she says
she barely had symptoms, but in the last few years—especially
in the last twelve months—the disease has gotten progressively
worse. She’s on medication that raises dopamine levels, which
decrease during the disease due to a loss of neurons, and a few
years ago she received a deep brain stimulator, which delivers
electrical pulses to relieve symptoms such as muscle tremors.
It “makes you more even throughout the d ay, so that you’re
not having these ups and downs,” she says.
Still, she says she has good days and bad days. “When you
wake up, you don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have
until you try to get out of bed... And then when you have a
good d ay, you try to do too much.” The disease has taught herto live for the moment, she says. “I do take risks now that are
much bigger,” especially when it comes to her science.
Her latest big project is leading the Harnessing Plants
Initiative, a project made up of five teams of plant biologists
at Salk that are attempting to fight climate change by
engineering plants to take in more carbon dioxide through
their roots. “I wanted the challenge of working on something
totally new to me,” she says. The project has three main
components: getting plants to grow more roots, deeper roots,
and roots that have more suberin, a decomposition-resistant
compound found in cork that is good at capturing carbon.
Chory and her colleagues have found genes in Arabidopsis
that can be knocked out or overexpressed to make plants grow
more roots and are working on the other two characteristics,
with the ultimate goal of changing these traits in crop plants.
Right now, they’re working on inserting the root-altering
genes into the canola plant (Brassica napus), which is closely
related to Arabidopsis.But engineering crops to take in more carbon dioxide won’t
be enough to slow climate change, Chory notes. “We have to
make policy change so that farmers can be incentivized to buy
these seeds.” With the right policies in place, the initiative
would be able to take advantage of the existing agricultural
system to keep the price down compared to machine-based
carbon sequestration processes, she says.
The initiative receives funding from TED’s Audacious
Project, a program that supports ambitious ideas aimed at
solving pressing issues. “It was definitely very audacious when
I proposed it to [TED],” she says. “It seemed like an alternative
no one had really ever suggested in the whole climate world.”
Chory says it came to her and her colleagues because “we were
all plant geneticists—we looked at plants differently.”
Chory presented the initiative’s ideas to the public in a TED
Talk last year during an event announcing several projects
funded by TED’s Audacious Project. She describes presenting
as “nerve-wracking,” but is happy that the initiative’s ideas
have reached so many viewers—more than a million so far.
“Every one of [the winning projects] really benefited a lot
from it. Those are the TED Talks I like the best, the ones of
people trying to find solutions,” she says. “ We just want to be
part of the solution.” gIf this discovery had been made not in the
plant system, but in the animal system, it
certainly would have been honored with a
Nobel Prize.— Detlef Weigel, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology