LIFE BOX 12.2. RAYMOND D. SHILLITORaymond D. Shillito, Regional Manager External Technical
Services—Americas Molecular and Biochemical Analytical Services
of Bayer CropScience LPRay ShillitoHow did I end up doing what I am doing
now? I followed my instincts, stayed
open to possibilities, made mistakes,
collaborated with good people, and
never stopped learning. My advice is to
find something you enjoy doing, as
you will usually be good at it. One
major thing I learned along the way
was, in research, to only try to do one
difficult thing at a time. Another is that
traditional biochemistry was a great
basis for work in this field.
My entry into this field was through
tissue culture, a discipline which is still
way underestimated by most. I studied
Quantitative Biochemistry and became
interested in obtaining auxotrophic
mutants in plants. I was fortunate
enough to get a position to do a Ph.D.
at the University of Leicester with
Professor H. E. Street, a major force in
plant tissue culture. Towards the end of
my studies, we discussed using insertion
mutagenesis with Agrobacterium to
make mutants and H. E. suggested thelaboratory of Prof. Schilperoort. Sadly,
H. E. Street died at Christmas 1977.
Lyndsey Withers and Bill Cockburn
helped me complete my thesis, and
I obtained a grant to study in
Schilperoort’s laboratory at Leiden in
the Netherlands.
When I arrived, Loci Marton had just
left, having shown that regenerating
Nicotiana protoplasts could be trans-
formed byAgrobacterium. Thus I was
introduced toAgrobacteriumand proto-
plasts, and to the worlds of gene trans-
fer and molecular biology. Eventually
we moved to Basel Switzerland where
Ingo Potrykus assembled a team at
the Friedrich Miescher Institut to
work on transformation and protoplasts;
Jurek Paszkowski and Mike Saul com-
pleted the core team. Work at the FMI
was very collaborative, and I enjoyed
collaborating with the groups led by
Pat King, and Barbara and Tom
Hohn. In 1983, we were able to trans-
form protoplast directly using DNA
without anyAgrobacteriumsequences.
This was a major contribution to the
field, and we had an excellent exper-
imental system to test other ideas. It
led to transforming protoplasts at high
efficiency and studies of co-transform-
ation and expression of selectable
markers, and of inheritance of intro-
duced genes. My interest in
Agrobacterium led to collaboration
with Szdena Nicola-Koukolikova and
others to investigate the structure of
DNA transferred during transformation.
This was a very stimulating time, and I
was lucky to experience working with
a fun and successful group of people.
After 5 years Mary-Dell Chilton gave
me the opportunity to move to the
USA, to Ciba-Geigy’s Biotechnology308 REGULATIONS AND BIOSAFETY