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Caroline Dean

It is interesting to reflect on one's career path. As a young teenager I was hooked on marine biology programs on TV presented by Jacques Cousteau, and as a result chose to register for a marine biology degree at the university. However, the initial coursework involved analysis and description of fish bones, a very dull introduction! I also took biochemistry courses as part of my first year at the university and, having never done things like standard curves at school, practicals were a revelation. I switched to a biology degree specializing in biochemistry and opted for plant courses inspired by a great practical session on electron transport studies in isolated chloroplasts. I decided to stay in the area of chloroplast biology for my PhD work and focused on chloroplast development in wheat in the laboratory of Professor Rachel Leech at the University of York. I really enjoyed my research at York and for the first time contemplated a research career.

Stories of sabbaticals in California by the York faculty made me consider a fellowship in the United States, and I was lucky enough to meet John Bedbrook at a "Plant Genome" meeting held at the John Innes Institute during the last year of my thesis work. I wrote to him when I heard he was setting up a new biotech company in Oakland, CA, and he offered me a post-doctoral position. In February 1983, I arrived in California to work at Advanced Genetic Sciences Inc. It was a great place to bea brand new company full of enthusiastic, clever peopleand it was really the starting period for plant biotechnology: Agrobacterium binary vector systems were just being developed, greatly simplifying introduction of foreign genes into plants. I learned a huge amount, and my work chiefly focused on the characterization of the petunia rbcS gene family and its use to drive high level expression of foreign proteins in transgenic plants. At that point, petunia (Mitchell) was the model plant for molecular studies! I also loved living in California and still recommend a stint there to any student/fellow I talk to.

As a small reminder of home, I had a window box and used to plant tulips each year. It was a surprise to me at the time that I had to leave the bulbs in the fridge for several weeks before planting them. This intrigued me enough to make me read up on the

process of vernalization. This coincided with the company beginning to move away from the more basic research to focus on things that would make money (as a company should).

After 5 years at Advanced Genetic Sciences Inc., I decided to move back into academic research. I had then become we, as I had met Jonathan Jones, who had also arrived to work at the company in 1983. We began the familiar story for couples of looking for two positions in the same town and were very lucky to have to choose from three offers. We accepted two positions in Norwich. Jonathan joined the newly formed Sainsbury Laboratory (his story will be coming up later in this series), and I joined the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, which was in the process of moving to Norwich to form, together with the John Innes Institute, the John Innes Centre. I decided to switch to working on Arabidopsis in order to be able to undertake a molecular genetic analysis of vernalization. What a great decision that turned out to be. Within a month of arriving in the UK, I visited Professor Klaus Napp-Zinn in Koeln. He was then very close to retirement and was delighted that someone would continue working with lines he had produced in the 1950s when he was actively analyzing the genetic basis of vernalization requirement in Arabidopsis accessions. I also visited Professor Maarten Koornneef in Wageningen, who showed me how to do Arabidopsis crosses and provided me with seed lots of all the different late-flowering mutants. These were generous gifts that significantly influenced the direction of work in my new lab. I was also extremely fortunate to have arrived back in the UK just before the announcement of a large funding program designed to kickstart Arabidopsis research in the UK. This funded the vernalization work, but also funded work to develop a transposon tagging system in Arabidopsis and to generate an Arabidopsis physical map. Twelve years later, the lab is now entirely focused on analyzing the molecular basis of vernalization requirement and response. I have very much enjoyed being part of the Arabidopsis community and am still amazed at the potential the focus on Arabidopsis offers to fully understanding the workings of a plant.

Looking back on my career, I would not change any part of it. I value the relative freedom of aca-demic research and enjoy the focus on research gained from working at a research institute rather than a university. My experience in a new start-up company taught me a lot about how to combine basic research with more strategic objectives. This is important working in the environment of a research institute. I have always enjoyed the strong support of colleagues and have never experienced any gender discrimination at any stage of my training or research. I look across at my non-scientist friends and think how lucky I am to be paid for doing my hobby!