junior years of college when I got a job
working for a plant breeder. I worked for
the same breeder during the remainder
of my baccalaureate degree program
and I subsequently did my master’s
degree under his direction. I then
pursued my Ph.D. degree in Genetics
with a minor in Plant Physiology at
North Carolina State University. Back
in those days, we did not typically take
postdoctoral appointments unless we
had problems getting an offer of a per-
manent position.
I have been in an academic appointment
at the University of Kentucky since
completing my Ph.D. degree in 1966.
Training in the field of genetics and
plant breeding/cytogenetics was a won-
derful platform for being positioned to
participate in and contribute to the
advancements in plant biotechnology. I
headed up a team that developed and
released ten new cultivars and eleven
germplasm lines during the fourteen
years that I was in my faculty position
as the plant breeder. At the same time,
my program made major contributions
to crop improvement by developing
alternate strategies for crop improvement
that included improved plant tissue
culture systems; producing haploids
and doubled haploids from microspores
in cultured anthers; and in generating
new interspecific hybrid combinations
in plants using in vitro embryo rescue
and protoplast fusion. I moved into a
more basic-science-oriented faculty pos-
ition in 1980 that was defined as plant
somatic cell genetics. This position
change was well timed for the vast
opportunities which were made avail-
able by recombinant DNA tools and
genetic engineering approaches for
putting foreign genes into plants using
in vitro cultured explants in an aseptic
tissue culture environment. We had
already developed efficient totipotent in
vitro systems for several plant species
including for severalTrifoliumspecies
in the legume family. We generated
transgenic soybeans in the late 1980s
and to date we have introduced genes
for disease resistance, herbicide toler-
ance and for biochemical trait modifi-
cations into a number of plant species.
In addition to these cited examples of
contributions to the shaping of plant bio-
technology, I give a lot of credit to
people who have been in or associated
with my program and provided major
advancements to the field of biotechnol-
ogy both while in my laboratory and
then in their own career positions.
These include seventeen doctoral stu-
dents; twelve M.S. students; twenty-
five postdoctoral fellows; twenty-four
visiting scientists; plus the staff in my
laboratory and my many collaborators.
Another very significant contribution
which we have made to the advancement
of plant biotechnology has been the train-
ing of a very large number B.S. degree
recipients through our interdisciplinary
program in Agricultural Biotechnology,
which was initiated in 1988 as a research
oriented baccalaureate degree. A majority
of these graduates have gone into doctoral
and professional degree programs with a
substantial number of them in biotechnol-
ogy careers. Many other graduates have
accepted positions in the field of biotech-
nology with private companies or in
University and government laboratories.
I have a difficult time feeling precise and
inclusive when I think about trying to
predict future advancements in plant
biotechnology. The reason is because
the advancements are so rapid, numer-
ous, and diverse as we utilize functional
genomics and other approaches to ident-
ify genes and the traits that they control
in plants, that predicting the myriad of
applications is mind-boggling. The
knowledge-base that will be generated
will certainly provide the opportunity
to improve crops for their current tra-
ditional uses and also to engineer
plants for new uses in health, nutrition,
energy and environmental applications.LIFE BOX 5.2. GLENN BURTON COLLINS 131