ENGINEERING A BETTER TOMATO: Plant geneticist Harry Klee moved from a postdoc in academia to an industry lab at Monsanto. After a decade of research there, he made the switch back to basic research at a university. TYLER JONES, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA/IFAS
Plant geneticist Harry Klee always assumed that, after finishing his postdoc, he’d pursue an academic career. But one afternoon in the mid-1980s, he opened up an issue of Science to find a paper reporting the first “transgenic plant in the history of mankind,” he recalls. It wasn’t the accomplishment so much as the fact that the paper was written by scientists at Monsanto that blew him away.
At the time, industry was considered the career path for scientists who couldn’t cut it in academia, he says. Yet, although he’d gotten a job offer as an associate professor, when the time came to set out on his own, Klee decided to join the agricultural science company. “All the stuff Monsanto was doing was what I wanted ...
