LIFE BOX 9.1. DAVID W. OWDavid W. Ow, Principal Investigator, Plant Gene Expression Center,
USDA–ARS/UC BerkeleyDavid Owwhile visiting the Cotton
Research Institute, Anyang, China
(June 2007).Chance events shape a career. In
Spring 1977, while an undergraduate in
Rich Calendar’s lab, I heard good
reviews about Hatch Echols’ graduate
seminar course on Genetics and
Society. An extensive list of topics for
presentation was available, but as a
lowly undergraduate, I got left with the
topic of least interest to others: agricul-
ture and society. I was so worried that
I might not measure up to the graduate
students that I spent countless hours at
the library reading up the green revolu-
tion and promising technologies in
plant tissue culture, nitrogen fixation,
and photosynthesis. For a 1-unit pass/
fail course, it turned out to be more
work than any of my other classes.
Unexpectedly, after boning up on thistopic, I actually got excited about
genetics for agriculture^1. After my
presentation, Hatch Echols in his usual
tie-dye tee shirt had a chat with me
about plants, agriculture and the third
world. He saw that I might want some
practical experience and suggested I
see Renee Sung. So I ended up moon-
lighting in Renee’s lab to learn plant
tissue culture. When it came time for
graduate work, however, I decided on
bacterial genetics; plant cell culture work
was too slow for my liking. Fred
Ausubel’s lab was cloning bacterial
nitrogen fixation genes, and also doing
petunia cell culture, so I ended up at
Harvard.
The summer before grad school, I took a
month off to visit the Orient. In 1978,
China was off limits except for a 3-day
tour to Guangzhou. On the train from
Hong Kong, I sat next to a Mrs.
Bogorad.^2 Apparently, Lawrence
Bogorad just left for an official del-
egation to Beijing, and put her on the
Guangzhou tour until they could join
up again. I don’t know whether
meeting her had any relevance, but in
Fall 1978, during my rotation in Fred’s
lab, Dr. Bogorad called me to a recep-
tion for a Chinese delegation. Being a
first year student, I was a bit nervous
but managed a good exchange with the
Chinese visitors, who were all quite
aged as they had received their PhDs
from the West before communism.
When we parted, some of them even
invited me to visit, which I thought
was just a polite gesture.
A member of that delegation was San-
Chiun Shen, who did his Ph.D. with
Norman Horowitz at Caltech. He would(^1) A graduate student of that class, Sally Leong, also ended up with a career in USDA.
(^2) Also on the same tour was a to-be Harvard classmate Donny Strauss.
238 MARKER GENES AND PROMOTERS