LIFE BOX 2.1. RICHARD A. DIXONRichard A. Dixon, Professor and Director, Plant Biology Division, Samuel
Roberts Noble Foundation; Member, National Academy of SciencesRick Dixonrelaxing at a faculty retreat,
Quartz Mountain, Oklahoma (May 2007).I first became interested in plant natural
products as an undergraduate at Oxford.
I was reading Biochemistry, and the
course was quite heavily weighted
towards physical biochemistry, an area I
found hard because of my lack of math-
ematical prowess. Faced with the choice
of either whole animal physiology or
plant biochemistry as an elective, I
jumped at the latter, a decision that deter-
mined the future course of my career. I
had been excited by organic chemistry at
an early age, and was fascinated to learn
how plants “do” organic chemistry
during the synthesis of natural products
and lignin. This was before the era of mol-
ecular biology, and our understanding
depended mostly on the results of in vivo
labeling studies coupled with in vitro
enzymology. I always remember my first
lecture from Vernon Butt, in which he
outlined current views on how themonolignol units of lignin are formed. It
all seemed so beautiful and logical,
although my group and others were later
to show that it is actually more complex
than envisaged at the time. This new
understanding had to wait until we had
the necessary genetic and genomic tools.
I decided to stay on in the Botany School
at Oxford to work on my D.Phil. with
Keith Fuller. Keith had suggested a
project on galactomannan mobilization
in alfalfa, but, when I returned from the
summer vacation to start this project, we
discovered that four papers, reporting
essentially everything we were planning
to do, had just appeared in the literature.
Keith suggested I might instead look at
how plants make bioactives in cell
culture. I was disappointed at being
“scooped” on my planned project
(although better early than later!), and
did not realize at the time that agreeing
to the back-up plan was the defining
moment in my career. Using the isoflavo-
noid phytoalexin phaseollin from bean as
a model, I established conditions for
turning on isoflavonoid metabolism in
cell cultures. When Chris Lamb joined
the lab as a postdoc we set up a collabor-
ation that lasted nearly 20 years, in which
we used the phytoalexin induction system
as a model for studying microbially-
induced gene expression in plants using
the new tools of molecular genetics.
After two years of postdoctoral work in
Cambridge and nine years of teaching
and research at the University of
London, I moved to become director of
the newly formed Plant Biology
Division at the Noble Foundation in
Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1988. During
the first eight years of my tenure at
Noble, I continued to work primarily
on plant–microbe interactions. The
Noble Foundation’s major mission is to
assist farmers and ranchers reach their42 MENDELIAN GENETICS AND PLANT REPRODUCTION