ARTICLE

TOP ARTICLE

Jim Peacock, Chief, Plant Industry, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization

The train to Sydney was late and by the time I saw the officials at the University of Sydney I had made up my mind that I really wanted to be a high school teacher in economics. However, the advisers at the University said they already had a lot of people sign up for economics that day and suggested I consider something else, like biology. Since I had enjoyed science in high school, I said, "OK," and signed up for botany and zoology as well as physics and chemistry. Ultimately, I majored in both botany and zoology for my Bachelor's degree. I especially liked the genetics components in both of those courses.

I had two marvelous genetics teachers; one was a university lecturer and the other a prominent Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) scientist. I went on to do Honors in cytogenetics on a family of Australian plants, and that's when I discovered that I was excited by research and gave up the idea of becoming a schoolteacher.

My boyhood was in Leura, a small town in the beautiful Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I spent a good deal of time in the bush, which was the National Park surrounding the town. I didn't take any biology courses in high school because at that time in Australia only girls did biology, but I did learn to observe and understand the Australia flora and fauna with the help of my grandfather and the Anglican Minister in Leura.

I went on to complete a PhD in Sydney, having taken some special courses in Genetics at Adelaide University, the only place in Australia that had a genetics specialization at that time. My PhD topic centered on a family of Australian plants, their chromosomes and genetic systems. One of the members of the family of plants that I worked on was called Brunonia, which had beautiful chromosomes. I used to look at meiosis in Brunonia and wish I could get down the microscope and really see what the genes were doing. Little did I think that it was going to be possible to do just that in the future!

I read widely as a graduate student and was excited with some of the genetics that was being published in Drosophila research, particularly the work by Ed Novitski on the behavior of rearranged X and Y chromosomes. I thought it would be possible to use tandem metacentric X/Y chromosomes to work out the interference rules for successive recombination events, and when I mentioned this to a visiting American scientist, Dick Lewontin, he said "Why don't you go and work with Novitskiwrite to him". So I did, and Novitski encouraged me to go to Eugene, OR, and work in his lab, even though I had never worked with Drosophila.

Then followed a wonderful period in Drosophila genetics, first in the United States and later when I returned to Australia to CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra. I came to CSIRO largely because I had worked here for a few months at the end of my PhD and I found it a wonderfully stimulating and happy place. I still do. When I returned to Australia there were university positions available, but I chose to work at CSIRO even though I love teaching. I figured I would stay about 6 years and then take up a university position. Thirty-five years later I am still at CSIRO and I still think it is a fantastic place to do research. I was fortunate because I had a number of opportunities to return to the United States for periods ranging from several months to 2 years. These visits were very important for me and were seminal times in my career.

My postdoctoral period at Eugene, and the biological laboratories at Oakridge, TN, introduced me to the American way of doing science. The mid 1960s were a golden era in respect to support for science. The lab cultures were very different from those I had been exposed to as a graduate student in Australia, where we were very much in the English mode of scientific inquiry. My sojourns back to the United States as a Visiting Professor were to wonderful laboratories and universities. I found, with my Drosophila genetics, that I still had the urge to be more reductionist and I wanted to find out how genes worked. I spent a year at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a year in Arthur Kornberg's Department at Stanford working with Dave Hogness. These were my kindergarten years in molecular biology. I grew to love the wonderful power and discipline of molecular biological research. It was tempting for me to stay in the United Statesmy wife and I enjoyed living there and made many lasting friendships, but even though the eucalypt trees were somewhat less knocked around than the ones in Australia, I guess it was the Australian bush that won. I was driven to try and do what I could to help science in Australia and I returned to CSIRO to set up a molecular biology laboratory.

Initially, we worked in Drosophila and, in precloning days, it was largely on highly repeated DNA sequences and mitochondrial DNA. Many scientists were visiting CSIRO, and it was about that time that Dr. Liz Dennis joined me in the lab. We have had a wonderful scientific partnership that we still enjoy today, and we have a laboratory with marvelous colleagues and a succession of talented postdoctoral fellows and students.

As technology improved, we were able to return to plants, although it was very hard to leave Drosophila. Again, we initially concentrated on repeated sequence DNA in plants and especially cereals, but we were able to move to coding genes in the late 1970s. We chose Alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh), largely because of the great genetic work that had been done by Drew Schwartz and because there was an opportunity to work with Barbara McClintock's Ac/Ds system with the Adh locus. Both areas turned out very well. I can still remember the Christmas of 1982 when I wrote to Barbara McClintock to give her the first sequence of one of her controlling elements, Ds1, and showed her exactly what happened in terms of nucleotide changes when the element moved in and out of chromosomes. I still treasure her letter of reply.

Our choice of Adh as a gene on which to focus our research was a good one I think, and it has led us through remarkable periods of discovery. It still does today as we enter into functional genomics and use some of the new technologies such as microarrays.

We have developed other major areas of research including the plant hemoglobins, the induction of flowering, and more recently an examination of seed development and Apomixis. In all of these areas, Liz Dennis and I have been fortunate to have complementary thought processes and approaches. We have both benefited enormously from our periods of study in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford, I with Dave Hogness and Liz with Paul Berg. I think what we term the "Stanford approach" and the "Stanford rule of quality" is ever present in our planning and execution of research programs.

Our entry into flowering was based on our wish to gain an understanding of patterns of gene expression in plant development. It was a natural progression given the prominence of the work of Lloyd Evans and Rod King on the physiology of flowering here at CSIRO. One of the earliest concepts we had was that epigenetic control of gene action was likely to be important, not only in the developmental switch to flowering, but also in many other plant processes. It has been very encouraging to see this area, which was initially treated with great suspicion in the plant world, has begun to gain prominence.

Our hemoglobin work, which is developing very nicely, was due to the interest generated by a colleague, Cyril Appleby and it was a challenge to enter into a new area of plant biochemistry.

Our work on seed development and Apomixis developed from my association with the Rockefeller Foundation (New York) and their program on the molecular biology of rice. The work I did on that Committee, which I enjoyed enormously, led me to think about Apomixis and how one might select for the genes that mediate asexual seed development. In this area, as in all our other research projects, Arabidopsis has been the key to success. What a wonderful tool for plant science!

Apart from research, my other role in CSIRO has been to lead CSIRO Plant Industry. It is a large group of researchers with 10 locations around Australia. We work in a host of disciplines of plant science with applications in horticulture, pasture-based agriculture, biodiversity, and especially in the cropping industries. Sounds like a big job, and it is, but I really love it. The good thing about my position is that I am involved in helping a lot of other scientists, particularly young scientists, in their research programs and in their contact with industry, while at the same time maintaining some activity in my own research interests. I have found the applications of our research findings into agriculture and horticulture to be as exciting as the prime research process itself. It is rewarding. I think too, perhaps because I have been doing it for a long time, that maintaining a strong nexus between research and its applications does a lot to improve the quality of the research process.

I think the decision to work in CSIRO was a good one. I have great colleagues working in a wide range of plant disciplines, top-class facilities, and an emphasis on applying research results to help the Australian agricultural industry. I've tried hard to culture an ethos of excellence and creativity while promoting urgency and relevance. I've fought to have lots of PhD students in our laboratories, and maybe even more importantly, I've championed a Post-doc culturegifted youth are worth fighting for! I have also made sure we welcomed Visiting Scientists from all over the worldthey bring intellectual challenges and treasures. Not surprisingly, we have good friends and collaborations in many countries. It has been an exciting privilege to have been involved in the development of molecular biology throughout my career.