Mary-Dell Chilton, Ph.D., has had a revolutionary impact on plant science. In 1977, when she was a research faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, she led an interdepartmental team that proved the microbe causing crown gall disease in plants develops a way to transfer a part of its DNA to the gall cells, which causes them to grow. Several years later, when she was an associate professor in the Biology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, she and a new team developed a way to exploit this process. Working with Professor Andrew Binns, Ph.D., at the University of Pennsylvania, they produced the first transgenic—now called genetically modified (GM)—plant. This work pioneered the field of agricultural biotechnology and dramatically affected the way scientists conduct plant genetic research. Today, she is a distinguished science fellow at Syngenta. Her contributions to advancing plant biotechnology have made a lasting impact on the global agriculture industry. Friends and colleagues sometimes call her the “Queen of Agrobacterium,” although she good-humoredly denies any such claims to royalty and prefers to think of herself as a student of this natural process.

Agricultural biotechnology Plant genetic research