Corn Crew Achieved Genetic First, And Then They Were All Let Go

Dorothy Pierce was a good pal to the four people who worked for her. They all called her “Dottie.” But as a supervisor, she also had to be tough enough to motivate her team of biotech researchers when the going got rough—and it did, it got very rough at Richmond, Calif. based Stauffer Chemical. The team’s moniker? The corn transformation group. Its task? To become the first scientists in the world to implant a foreign gene into maize. That was a year ago. Today, the five of them—Dottie and her teammates—have been-scattered to the wind, like seed. One would guess, if one had never heard of them, that they must have been unsuccessful as a research team. What one probably wouldn’t guess is that, on the contrary, they achieved a feat that previously had stymied dozens of other agricultural researchers—a feat with commercial ramifications down the road that could earn their employer millions. The truth is, despite their considerable accomplishment, their employer chose to let them go. For years before Dottie and her crew began their work, geneticists suspected that it might be possible to introduce a foreign gene into a monocot, the class of plants to which corn belongs. If you could do that, they reasoned, you could create plants that are resistant to certain insects or diseases. The problem was: How do you regenerate whole maize plants from protoplasts—the basic plant cells that have been stripped of the protective cell wall? No one knew, but a lot of folks were trying to answer that question. Gene transfers into plants in the dicot class, including tobacco and petunias, had been successful. But these didn’t have to be grown from the fragile protoplasts; they took advantage of a bacterium capable of transferring DNA—a bacterium to which most monocots are resistant. At Stauffer, the corn transformation group was attacking this problem. While Carol Rhodes was working on growing the plants, her colleagues Desmond Mescarenhas and Jill Detmer were constructing the genes they would use in the transformation. Irvin Mettler performed all of the transient assays—a procedure in which a researcher looks at gene expression after putting alot of DNA into a few cells, just to see how well the gene works—to identify the genes that worked best in corn. For everything to fall together, the protoplasts had to be capable of growing into plants; the genes had to be carefully chosen and meticulously inserted, and then the protoplasts had to grow up. If the team could do it, it would be the first to produce mature corn plants that express the inserted gene. But nobody had done that with a major cereal. In fact, according to Rhodes, researchers working with rice were able to grow protoplasts to plants two and a half years ago, but they still haven’t been able to regenerate plants that were genetically transformed. “That’s a big time lag there,” says Rhodes, “and perhaps part of the reason is because the people doing the protoplast culture didn’t have direct access at that time to either the correct gene constructs or methods for getting the DNA into the protoplasts.” Luckily for Rhodes, she had both. One day, all the pieces just seemed to be germinating. As soon as Rhodes felt the protopleats were successfully growing into plants, she recalls, “I was able to ask Irv, ‘Okay, which is the best gene right now?’ and simply go to Dottie and Desmond and say ‘Give me 500 micrograms of such and such a plasmid,’ which they were able to do.” Rhodes was excited—but not too excited. At her first indication that the protoplasts were regenerating, she “told everybody that it wasn’t time to pop the champagne yet, but that it was definitely time to run out and buy a bottle to keep in the fridge.” And she was right. The only trouble was, there was a canker in the seed. That very day, the biotechnology group found out that Stauffer Chemical’s profitable seeds division—the research team’s raison-d’etre, was being put up for sale by Stauffer’s parent company, Cheseborough-Pond’s in an effort to raise some capital. “Even though we were not being put up for sale, the purpose of our being there was put up for sale,” says Mescarenhas. That was in November 1986. For five months the group continued under a cloud of uncertainty. “We worked with the knowledge that our division was up for sale and that we were going to be laid off at any time—it could be tomorrow, it could be next week, it could be next month,” says Mescarenhas. But this threat galvanized the team, rather than defeating it, and—under Dottie’s direction, the researchers pushed on. The motivation was high: “Although we hadn’t yet really regenerated plants,” she says, “it was clear that transformation had occurred, and we were the first group to have ever done that.” But they were running a race, not knowing where the finish line was, working constantly under the threat of being forced out at any minute. The corn transformation group won the race, and just in the nick of time before the Stauffer seed division, in March 1987, was sold to Sandoz Crop Protection Corp. As the end approached, says Rhodes, “There were several people who really were plugging away with long hours when there really wasn’t any reason to do that other than the science.” In one way the effort paid off. In April of this year, the group’s paper was published in Science (“Genetically Transformed Maize Plants from Protoplasts,” 240:204-207,8 April 1988). In a way, though, it didn’t pay off. Sandoz offered positions to everyone on the team, but by the time it did, most had made other commitments. Rhodes and Mettler, however, did accept positions with Sandoz and are continuing the corn research. Mescarenhas and Detmer have moved to another firm called Biogrowth, where they are doing pharmaceutical work. And Dorothy Pierce has moved on to Enichem, a startup where she will be doing plant work as soon as her administrative duties settle down. At Stauffer, she says, “We were just at the beginning with that success, with being able to apply the technology in a number of commercially useful ways. Once the basic technology was successful, that really should have been the starting point, not the end point.”

Corn Crew Achieved Genetic First, And Then They Were All Let Go

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