Sir David Baulcombe awarded Society for General Microbiology Prize Medal
31 March 2015
Today at the Annual Conference, Sir David Baulcombe will be awarded the Society’s Prize Medal. Sir David, Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, was a co-discoverer of the first ‘small interfering RNA’ (siRNA) and showed that these molecules have a role in gene silencing.
Sir David’s discovery of siRNAs in plants, while working at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich, has had impact in both plant and animal biology including medicine. In 2009, Sir David received a knighthood for services to plant science. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. His prize lecture, The small RNA link in antiviral defense and epigenetics, will be held at 12.10 today.
When did you first become aware of science?
At school I liked doing everything, I was a bit of a geek – at the age of 15 or 16 the education system in the UK meant that you had to choose art or science. I almost took languages but eventually chose science.
Looking back over your career, do you think this is where the 15-year-old you could have envisioned going?
I don’t think so. I didn’t really take academic science seriously until I got to the University of Leeds, and it was there that I thought “I really like this”. I just liked the whole business of science and academia: reading papers and thinking about ‘stuff’, so it was as a student that I discovered myself and science.
Was there a particular class or staff member that stood out to you at this time?
When I thought I might do a PhD my supervisor Dr Jim Callow asked me “What are you going to do it on?” I thought for a bit so he gave me a prompt by asking me what I thought the most important problem was in the whole of biology. I answered that I thought how gene expression is regulated was an important problem – I still think it now. That was in 1973 when we had the paradigm of gene expression in prokaryotes but little understanding in eukaryotes – plants and animals. That’s what I decided to investigate during my PhD.
You’ve worked in a lot of different institutions. How did that come about?
I did the standard sort of thing and got postdoc positions in America – I still think it’s a good thing for young researchers to do – but family ties and scientific opportunities brought me back to Britain. I worked in McGill University in Canada and then the University of Athens, Georgia, USA – I liked both, but Georgia was a fantastic environment. I had the chance to do some interesting work, which got me a job in the Plant Breeding Institute at the University of Cambridge to look at the effect of hormones on the regulation of gene expression. I also started working on plant viruses because the plant breeders wanted diagnostic tests for the diseases that were infecting their breeding population. I developed a test using DNA clones of potato viruses but then I started some other virus-related side projects.
What was virology research like at the time? Was this work at the leading edge?
Modern virology was really just emerging – molecular biology and gene cloning were coming into their own. Working on gene expression in viruses was a breath of fresh air; it was relatively easy compared to the work I was doing with the complicated genome of wheat. With viruses, you could design an experiment, mutate a virus and get a result all within a few days.
So the ‘tinkering’ aspect of science was alive and well then?
Absolutely. We could test hypotheses in a way that was proving difficult with my ‘day job’ working on wheat. My virology side project didn’t really have the ringing endorsement of my Director because it was not what we were supposed to do in the Plant Breeding Institute. However I managed to keep the work going and we ended up having a few Nature papers describing virus resistance in GM plants in the mid 1980s.
When the opportunity came to move to the Sainsbury Laboratory in 1988 I was very happy to do that – it was a great opportunity to really develop the virology work that I was finding more rewarding than the wheat project.
Why do you think it’s important for young researchers to move abroad?
When I was doing my PhD in the early 1970s, you showed up in a lab on 1 October of the first year and that lab was your world for the next three or four years. The training for students at the time in the UK – and I still think it’s true to some extent now – was relatively narrow. As a British graduate you come out of your PhD rather young and with less experience than graduates from other countries. Moving after my PhD gave me experience of different systems and other ways of doing science. Maybe you can do that by staying in your own country, but I think that seeing a different scientific culture is a good idea.
You’re well known for your work on gene silencing. Could you tell us how this came about?
We started by exploring a concept known as ‘parasite derived resistance’, which is ‘genetic immunisation’. The original test of the concepts involved transferring a gene from a virus into a bacterial cell and demonstrating that the recipient cells acquired immunity to subsequent infections by the virus. We tested the idea in plants with plant viruses and it worked there too in that some of the plant lines were immune. However there were other lines that contained the viral transgene but they were not resistant. That was fine, we knew about variation between lines, but we were puzzled by the finding that the viral transgene was silent - switched off - in the resistant lines and active in the susceptible lines. This was bizarre – how could you get a resistance trait from a gene that was switched off? We eventually realised after some head scratching that the transgene silencing mechanism and virus resistance were the same process.
How did you follow up this observation?
The viruses we were working with had RNA genomes, rather than DNA ones, and we concluded that virus resistance and transgene silencing operated at the RNA level and we now refer to RNA- rather than gene- silencing. Our hypothesis was correct and, by using some genetics and logical thinking, we uncovered aspects of the mechanism. Others working on fungi and animals made similar discoveries and we slowly realised that RNA silencing must have been present in common ancestors of plants and animals. In my Prize Lecture I’ll be talking about how we can use RNA silencing to protect against viruses in plants and animals.
You were knighted in 2009 – what sort of an experience was that?
My mother liked it! Sadly my dad wasn’t there to see it; he would have loved it. It was also a humbling experience: I was being recognised for doing my job but there were others, including some military awardees, who had performed above and beyond the call of normal duty.
How was meeting the Queen?
Actually it was Prince Charles. I didn’t ask him for his views on GM plants.
What does winning this prize mean to you?
The Society for General Microbiology has been my virological home. I came into virology very naive – I really had no background in it at all. We published some of our first papers in the Journal of General Virology and the Society meetings introduced me to the virology community. To get an award from a Society that has helped me so much means an awful lot.
Image: Sir David Baulcombe.
