OBITUARIES

A Formative Encounter with George Rédei

In the spring of 1978 we were living in Paris, thinking about what we should do next. The writings of people like Paul Ehrlich and Norman Borlaug had impressed on us the related facts that human population growth was creating environmental problems and technology could help avert some aspects of the problem by intensifying production, thereby reducing the demand for undeveloped land. Therefore, we were thinking about how we might participate in bringing new technology to plant improvement. We spent our mornings reading in the beautiful, small library at the Institute Pierre and Marie Curie, where Antoine Danchin had graciously permitted us to visit, and our afternoons in the cafés of Paris discussing what we had read.

Just before arriving in Paris we had been playing around with a gift of EcoRI from Howard Goodman and had read a paper from Mary Dell Chilton and collaborators proposing that Agrobacterium tumefaciens transferred DNA into the host genome during pathogenesis. We inferred that it was going to be possible to transform plants using the Ti plasmid and began thinking about what that meant. One insight we had was that in order to exploit the emerging tools of molecular biology, plant biologists needed a better model organism for molecular genetics; something diploid and small with a rapid life cycle and a low DNA content that was suited to laboratory work. This led us to a compelling article written the year before by George Rédei for Annual Reviews of Genetics, extolling the virtues of Arabidopsis for plant genetics. The fact that George had been able to identify auxotrophic mutants and had good numbers for the frequency with which such mutants could be isolated was quite exciting for us because we took it as an indication that it was going to be relatively easy to isolate mutations in a wide variety of genes. During the next several months we tracked down and read as many of George’s papers as we could obtain access to in the Rothschild and Institute Pasteur libraries. George’s papers were extremely helpful because they had good numbers about frequencies of genetic events and detailed methods sections. On the basis of his papers, we were able to envision how to do experiments without having ever seen the plant; we were able to carry out gedankenexperiments that led us to the ideas we eventually carried to Bill Ogren’s lab at Illinois.

After our money ran out, we returned to the University of Alberta, where we had both been graduate students, to wait for our visas and to write fellowship proposals to work with Bill. The graduate students had funding to invite a speaker and we convinced them to invite George Rédei and to let us be his hosts.We cannot remember how it happened, but somehow George ended up visiting for almost three days. Presumably in our enthusiasm for his work, we talked him into coming for an extended visit. We could not get enough faculty members to meet with him to fill three days, so, to our delight, we had the better part of several days with George, during which we talked through everything he knew about Arabidopsis in particular and plant genetics in general. We talked about the details of every manipulation, such as crossing the minuscule flowers, and we tested our ideas against his view of reality and feasibility. It was really a wonderful and memorable occasion—for us. We think George also enjoyed it. He was passionate about his work and had probably not experienced a level of interest in his work comparable to ours. It probably helped that we had read all of his papers that were available in the libraries we had access to. He was certainly very patient with us, and after he returned home he showered us with resources, such as the marker lines he had developed for mapping and our first M2 population, which allowed us to begin screening for mutants immediately. We think back to that time now as our micro-postdoc with George.

We never had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with George after that brief but formative encounter. However, from our correspondence and chance encounters at meetings, we had the impression that he took considerable satisfaction in seeing the explosion of Arabidopsis research and in having directly helped many of the early members of the Arabidopsis community get started. The use of the Columbia wild type (named by George for Columbia, Mo.) as the standard accession for Arabidopsis research memorializes George’s founding contributions.

Chris Somerville and Shauna Somerville
University of California at Berkeley