Tag Archive

Joanne Chory: Be Bold!

By Shlomo Maital

Joanne Chory

               Be bold!

               This is the advice to young people by the late Joanne Chory, a plant scientist, whose creative out-of-the-box thinking has changed forever how we view plants.   She died a few years ago of Parkinson’s. 

                Geneticists made breakthroughs by focusing on fruit flies.  They have a very short life cycle, so it is possible to make genetic changes and study their impact with quick results.    Chory had a similar idea.  Let us plant scientists focus on a single ‘fruit fly’ plant, and learn everything there is to know about plants in general.   Among other things, she managed to mutate a plant so that somehow, it grew in darkness – defying the assumption that all plants need light for photosynthesis. 

                Prof. Chory had a vision for saving the planet from global warming:   Here is how a colleague explained it, on the The Leap podcast, with Flora Licthman: 

            “…. she had this inspiring thought that what we have done in the last 150, 200 years or so, we have dug up dead plants. And we have burned dead plants. And that’s why there is a lot more CO2 out there. And Joanne said, well, let’s just reverse the process. Let’s put the CO2 back into the plants.”

          Chory explained, that  “as our world edges closer to a crisis of sustainability. I hope it will catalyze greater awareness of the positive impact that plants can have in the quality of human life.”

         Lichtman explains, “Plants vacuum CO2 out of the air and store it. But when plants die or decompose, that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. So Joanne thought, what if we could engineer plants, specifically crops that we’re planting already, to store carbon more permanently by making their roots bigger and deeper and better at holding carbon underground?”

                Simple.  Revolutionary. Feasible.  Why didn’t we think of this before?

                Be bold, Chory advised young scientists.  Or just don’t bother doing it.

                As a professor, I learned early on that the path to success was incremental baby-steps, elucidating what others had done, so that as referents, they would approve and get you published.  I tried a different approach, and sought with my wife to incorporate psychology into economics.  And, at the same time, to try to explain economics to non-economists, baffled by the jargon and math.  My rejection letters tore strips off me, for ‘populizing’.  

       Take the road less travelled.  Here is how poet Robert Frost said it:  I shall be telling this with a sigh      Somewhere ages and ages hence:    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by,   And that has made all the difference.

       Maybe some day, we will cover the earth with CO2 hungry plants, who swallow billions of tons of it and bury it deep in their roots, in the ground, to halt or even reverse climate change.  Because – one iconoclast plant scientist took the road less travelled.