In the end, Braun accepted the new theory. "[Braun] said, 'Mary-Dell, you have convinced me there was DNA moving from the Agrobacterium into the plant,'" relates Andrew Binns, biology department head and Carolyn Hoff Lynch professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked with Chilton. "He had to swallow that the previous 15 years of his work was incorrect. She was a good teacher."
Chilton, who left academia in the 1980s to join the private sector, has leaned on that teaching skill more often than she perhaps ever reckoned. As a pioneer in the science of transgenic plants, she is sometimes forced to defend her work to environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and Environmental Defense, who want to stem international trade in genetically engineered food crops. "I never envisioned that that could happen—the environmentalists' slap," she says. "I'm still astonished at that, I don't understand it."
In 1977, ...
