LIFE BOX 5.1. MARTHA S. WRIGHTMartha S. Wright, Research Scientist (retired), Syngenta and Monsanto
Martha Wrightwith a regenerated
soybean plant (1981).
My love of science emerged in high
school when I entered the Kansas City
Science Fair in 1956. For my project, I
disassembled an animal from each of
the phyla and put their skeletons back
together for comparison. The project
didn’t win anything, but my mom was
glad that I wasn’t boiling lizards on
her stove anymore. At Lindenwood
College, now Lindenwood University,
in St. Charles, Missouri, I originally
majored in business because my father
said I’d always be able to get a job as
a secretary. Remember, this was 1958
and I grew up in Kansas. In my sopho-
more year, I was fortunate to have an
advisor in the business department who
noted that I was bored. After a discus-
sion, she urged me to sign up for an
advanced biology course. Ultimately, Igraduated in 1962 from Lindenwood
with a major in biology and minors in
chemistry, classics and business.
During my last 2 years of college, I
worked summers in hospital labora-
tories. My first permanent job after
graduating was in the Agricultural
Division of Monsanto in St. Louis. I
was hired because I had worked with
radioactivity while in college. One of
my biology professors had worked on
the Manhattan Project. My first assign-
ment at Monsanto was to work on an
insecticide. For the next 15 years, I
worked on a series of projects, some
having to do with animals and some
with plants. I especially enjoyed my
early work with Roundupw. We were
able to determine the mode of action
through a series of experiments using
Lemnaas a model system. In the early
1970’s, Ernie Jaworski, my supervisor
at Monsanto at that time, went to
Saskatoon on a sabbatical in Olaf
Gamborg’s laboratory. When he
returned he handed me some cell cul-
tures and they became mine, and that
was the beginning of my true career.
In the early days of field crop cell
culture, the “holy grail” was soybean
and it was thought to be impossible to
regenerate from cell culture. An under-
standing of the way plant hormones act
at different stages was probably the
single most important factor to aid soy-
bean regeneration. I was fortunate to
work with Michael Carnes as we unra-
veled the hormone profiles of several
field crops, soybean, maize, alfalfa, etc.
By the mid 1980’s, we had published 3
methods for regenerating soybeans
from cell culture. Concurrently, molecu-
lar biologists were having some success
with plant cell transformation.LIFE BOX 5.1. MARTHA S. WRIGHT 129