ASPB members share a common goal of promoting the growth, development, and outreach of plant biology as a pure and applied science. This column features some of the dedicated and innovative members of ASPB who believe that membership in our Society is crucial to the future of plant biology.

If you are interested in contributing to this feature, please contact ASPB Membership at info@aspb.org.

Membership Corner

Name: Philip A. Rea
Title: Professor of Biology
Place of Work or School: Plant Science Institute, Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania
Research Area: Energy-dependent transport across membranes and cellular mechanisms of detoxification in plants and yeast (occasionally worms)
Member Since: 1989

1. Has being a member of ASPB helped you in your career? If so, how?
Yes, by giving my colleagues and me a sense of the depth, breadth, and practicality of plant research through frequent interactions with ASPB’s members and reference to its journals, website, newsletter, and membership directory. Not only has this been immensely enriching at a personal level, but it has also been instrumental in helping us appreciate, and sometimes realize for the first time, the broader significance and potential for application of some of our more basic (more esoteric) investigations.

2. Why has being a member of ASPB been important?
Because the kick is in finding out stuff about stuff and sharing it with others, and if you’re a plant scientist there are not so many organizations with this aim as their primary remit. The simple fact of the matter is that I would not know half of what I know if not for ASPB and its membership.

3. Was someone instrumental in getting you to join ASPB?
There was no one person who prompted me to join but rather many; in fact, most if not all of the plant scientists I knew were already members and without exception spoke or wrote highly of the Society.

4. What would you tell nonmembers to encourage them to join?
That it would be folly to do otherwise given how rich a resource of people, expertise, and unfettered enthusiasm for the plant sciences ASPB represents.

5. Have you found a job using ASPB job postings or through networking at the annual meeting?
I have not found a job directly using ASPB job postings or from chance encounters at the annual meeting, but several of the people from my group have. The meeting is a great gathering place for scientists—especially for those who are just starting out—to learn what gainful employment the “plant world” has to offer. “Networking” is a word I prefer not to use because it smacks of “corporate-speak” and using people disingenuously as a means to selfish ends.

6. Have you hired anyone as a result of a job posting at the meetings or on our online Job Bank?
Yes, I’ve hired many of the postdocs in my group either directly through ASPB postings or through the discovery of postings after the event and unsolicited inquiries into the availability of similar positions in my group.

7. Do you still read print journals? If so, where do you usually read them?
Most of the articles I read are printed from online PDFs that I stuff in my bag and read anywhere, but mostly when traveling. There is clarity of thought and a sense of adventure that come from the anonymity of traveling alone (no disrespect to family and friends who I also like to travel with, but in a different way). That said, if money were not an impediment, we would subscribe to as many print journals as possible and have them delivered to the lab or department for display and reading anywhere, anytime. There is something to be said for the “browse factor”—the stuff you learn that you would not learn otherwise—by literally bumping into it when leafing through journals looking for other stuff (or having it pushed in your face at Plant Biology meetings and the like). Online literature searches using keywords seem to make life easier, but this may be illusory in that they can be so directed as to preclude encounters with the unexpected (or expected but in an unexpected context).

8. What do you think is the next “big thing” in plant biology?
The next big thing in plant biology will be a uniquely computer-savvy investigator or group of investigators who learns how to walk through proteins, grapple with the protein subterranean, in his/her mind at his/her workstation to discover the basic principles needed for inferring the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their primary structure. This will provide the biomedical research community, of which we are becoming an increasingly visible/vocal part, with computer algorithms for deducing the likely structures of proteins from their ORF [open reading frame]. This will open the way for deep mechanistic analyses of how functions are executed at the systems level—the biochemical renaissance—in one of the most tractable metazoa, after worms and flies, namely the weed (Arabidopsis), and therefore all or most plants.

9. What person, living or dead, do you most admire?
Immediate family (especially Jenny, my ultimate inspiration and guiding light even in the darkest of times) and close friends apart, the people (no single person, however) who first come to mind when I am asked this question are John Lennon, Richard Feynman, Albert Lehninger, Peter Mitchell, and Jack Dainty and Enid MacRobbie. I discovered John Lennon largely “after the event,” shortly before he died, literally a couple of weeks before the UK release of Double Fantasy…and his sad demise outside his Manhattan apartment. “Life’s what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” A rebel thinker, a poet who dreamed of a better world, an ordinary boy of the people, for the people, who came from nowhere but with a huge wealth of creativity as a songwriter, performer, graphic artist, and activist. Richard Feynman was simply a genius physicist and genius generalist, with an enchanting down-to-earthness, sense of humor, and capacity to explain the most sophisticated of principles using the simplest of terms. He was a truth seeker, a model of a teacher. Immediately before starting a new series of lectures, I listen to CDs of Feynman’s Lost Lectures in physics to get a mental picture of what I should be striving for when teaching biochemistry. No harm in wishing! Albert Lehninger was not only a superb bioenergetic biochemist but also the sole author of the first few editions of Biochemistry, the second of which (I think) got me hooked on the explanatory power and sheer beauty of biochemistry for the very first time. I literally trembled with anticipation when I first leafed through the book in my digs in Brighton, England. Peter Mitchell—what can I say? One of the fathers of chemiosmosis (he, Robertson, and Lundergard and probably a few others who did not get the publicity) and its strongest protagonist who had to suffer the utter disbelief, and in some cases disdain, of many of his colleagues for more than a decade but who was so right as to be frighteningly incisive (but only in retrospect) about how organisms harness redox energy through the establishment of transmembrane “delta mu bar Hs.” And Jack Dainty and Enid MacRobbie, who unknown to them to this day, gave seminars that I attended as a first-year undergraduate. They set my mind alight not only by what they were saying about transport across plant membranes but also because of the realization that these two outstanding scientists (the “father” and “mother” of two of the principal investigators with whom I was to postdoc many years later—Ron Poole and Dale Sanders) who were talking to little me were real scientists who had, themselves, contributed directly through their research activities to the subject they were teaching. This discovery, hand in hand with recognition of the fact that even people who were active in the field could not answer many of the basic questions and were prepared to admit to this, filled me with admiration for their humility and impelled me to learn more so that I might, one day, have the opportunity to tackle some of these questions myself.

10. What are you reading these days?
Now that our kids can now take care of their reading for themselves, though Harry Potter and Redwall still make a terrific read, I am (almost as I write) revisiting Lewis Thomas (Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony) because one of his other collections of essays (The Lives of a Cell), which I read in my late teens, made a lasting impression on me in terms of his deep aesthetic appreciation of what modern biology has to tell us about the world using language that anyone can understand. Another reason for my sneaking a peek at Thomas’s work is that I have started doing the same but from a more biochemical vantage point. The other book I am reading is QUANTUM: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Jim Al-Khalili. The flyer for this book says it all— “Quantum mechanics is the most fundamental scientific theory known to man...and even underpins reality itself. And yet it has been said that if you are not shocked by it, you clearly have not understood it.” My favorite recreational nonfiction reading is physics because it, like much art (I do not see a fundamental division between science and art), invariably takes us to the very edge of existence and beyond.

11. What are your hobbies?
I thought it would swing the other way, but the older I get the more blurred the division between work and play, profession and hobby gets. How does it go— “science is the hobby we get paid to do”? All the same, when I’m not in the lab or in my office or study, or traveling for scientific purposes, I’m on the track or running on the trail. I cannot speak too highly of what this does for you intellectually, spiritually, and physically. This is what gets me up in the morning. My other hobbies, in addition to enjoying the enjoyment of family and friends, are photography (especially black-and-white work verging on the abstract), creative writing, reading, and people watching.

12. What is your most treasured possession?
This one is a no-brainer—health, when we have it (and especially when we or others do not). If this question means “inanimate material thing,” then I would have to say “Mizuno running shoes and 35-mm SLR camera with 24-80-mm zoom lens and macro capability.” Oh yeah, I should also be honest and say that my “higher-end laptop computer” is high on my list because it’s the hub that I take everywhere for doing science, writing, photography, and both professional and recreational e-mail communication.

13. What do you still have left to learn?
How to do everything better with more understanding.