Mary-Dell Chilton, the Mother of Genetically Modified Plants, Dies at 87
In 1970, Mary-Dell Chilton was a perseverant but underemployed young chemist teaching part-time at the University of Washington in Seattle—a position she’d leapt at only because, after months at home caring for an infant, she was desperate to get back to work.
One of her students gave a presentation about a recently published paper about a tumor-producing disease that affected grapes, stone fruits and other crops. The paper claimed that a common soil bacteria, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, was actually transplanting its own genes into the DNA of the affected plant—genes which, once expressed, spurred the growth of those tumors.
“I just absolutely did not believe it,” Chilton recalled. In the 2018 book “Seeds of Science,” journalist Mark Lynas writes that Chilton even cold-called the paper’s lead author in Belgium, Marc Van Montagu, just to tell him she thought his results—this idea that a bacteria was going around smuggling its DNA into a plant—were “nonsense, total nonsense.”
