LIFE BOX 8.1. DENNIS GONSALVESDennis Gonsalves, Center Director, Pacific Basin Agricultural Research
Center, USDA Agricultural Research Service; Recipient of the Alexander
Von Humbolt Award (2002)
Dennis Gonsalveswith transgenic
papayas.I was born and raised on a sugar plantation
in Kohala on the island of Hawaii. My dad
was a first generation Portuguese whose
parents had immigrated from the Azores
and from the Madeira islands. My
mother was Hawaiian-Chinese with her
dad emigrating from mainland China and
her mom being a pure native Hawaiian.
As a child and all the way through my
undergraduate career, I never had ambi-
tions to be a scientist nor even to go to
graduate school. I had a key break in life
when I was accepted to attend the excellent
Kamehameha Schools, which had been
started in the late 1800s by the Hawaiian
Princess Pauahi Bishop to educate people
of the Hawaiian race. I subsequently
enrolled at the University of Hawaii with
the intention of being an agricultural
engineer so I could be back to work onthe sugar plantation. However, midway
through my undergraduate tenure, the
program for training engineers to work
on the sugar plantations was dropped and
I subsequently shifted to the field of horti-
culture. I was just an average student. I
landed a job on the island of Kauai as a
technician for Dr. Eduardo Trujillo, a
plant pathologist at the University of
Hawaii. That one year as a technician
changed my life.
Dr. Trujillo told me to look at this “new”
disease of papaya which he felt was
caused by a virus. I knew next to
nothing about viruses, but as soon as I
started work to identify the disease I
knew that I wanted to be a research
plant pathologist that would specialize
in plant viruses. I had found my poten-
tial career niche. After working for
some months as a technician, I wanted
to pursue graduate work, but my
grades were not good enough. I got a
break when Dr. Trujillo persuaded the
graduate school to accept me into a
Master’s program on probation. The
other break or lesson also came from
Dr. Trujillo who told me: “don’t just
be a test tube scientist, do things that
will have practical applications.” That
philosophy would serve me well as I
pursued my career, especially in bio-
technology. I got my Master’s degree
from the University of Hawaii in 1968
under Dr. Trujillo and Ph.D. from the
University of California at Davis in
1971 under Dr. Robert Shepherd, who
at that time had just shown for the first
time that the cauliflower mosaic virus
had a DNA genome. Little did I know
that it would yield the sequences for
the CAMV 35S promoter which is
widely used in biotechnology. In 1972,
I took a job at the University of
Florida, subsequently moved to Cornell
University in 1977, and in 2002 ILIFE BOX 8.1. DENNIS GONSALVES 211