Wishing to expand my horizons a bit
more we purified bean PSV membranes
(tonoplasts really) and cloned the gene
for the most abundant tonoplast
protein. This turned out to be a protein
with six membrane-spanning domains.
What could its function be? Not until
we obtained a homolog from
Arabidopsiswas Christophe Maurel in
the lab able to show that this new
family of proteins constituted the plant
aquaporins. Aquaporins had been
described the year before by Peter Agre
who later received the Nobel Prize for
this work. From then on we dropped
the vacuolar targeting work and
worked on aquaporins, as they were cap-
turing the imagination of many plant
physiologists. Somewhere along the
line I had time to do other things. My
former mentor Joe Varner was always
heavily involved in “service to the pro-
fession” and I also accepted to become
first Associate Editor and later Editor
in chief ofPlant Physiology, an excel-
lent journal then in need of a physical
and intellectual facelift. I believe that I
contributed to this facelift and my suc-
cessor Natasha Raikhel took the
journal to new heights.
When, in 1978, the USDA created its
first Competitive Grants Program, I
called my friend Joe Key who had just
been named the Director and volun-
teered to come to Washington DC on
short notice to put together a panel to
evaluate grants in the area of “Genetic
mechanisms for crop improvement”.
He took me up on my offer and a few
weeks later I was working in DC
having received a leave of absence
from UCSD. While on sabbatical leave
in Canberra, Australia I becameinvolved in a biotech project. We had
isolated the cDNA fora-amylase inhibi-
tor from common bean, and with my
friend T. J. Higgins we expressed this
gene in developing pea seeds. Larry
Murdock from Purdue University
showed that the larvae of the pea
bruchid, which normally burrow into
dry pea seeds, starved to death on these
transgenic pea seeds, presumably
because the bruchid digestive amylases
are inhibited by the bean inhibitor. At
this time I also realized that there was
no good textbook to help university tea-
chers who wished to teach courses in
plant biology with an applied or biotech-
nology flavor, and I started work on the
first edition of a text that in its second
edition was calledPlants, Genes and
Crop Biotechnology. David Sadava and
I put together a completely integrated
textbook that had elements of plant
physiology and biochemistry, human
nutrition, plant breeding, human popu-
lation changes and world food pro-
duction, soils and plant nutrition, and
biotechnology applications.By the year 1997, 30 years after my
arrival in San Diego, plant biology had
grown from just three faculty members
to about 15 in three different insti-
tutions—UCSD, The Salk Institute and
The Scripps Research Institute—and
we founded the San Diego Center for
Molecular Agriculture—a virtual center
with a grandiose name—whose
purpose it would be to simply enrich
our own intellectual lives. Creating “a
community of scholars” as we fondly
call academia, is actually quite difficult
and requires effort and commitment
from all parties.154 MOLECULAR GENETICS OF GENE EXPRESSION