Chris R. Somerville

Based on Wikipedia: Chris R. Somerville

The Man Who Made a Weed Famous

In the world of biology, choosing the right organism to study can make or break a career. Charles Darwin had his finches. Thomas Hunt Morgan had his fruit flies. And Chris Somerville had a scraggly little weed that most gardeners would yank out without a second thought.

That weed was Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant in the mustard family. Today it's one of the most studied organisms on the planet, with thousands of scientists worldwide dedicating their careers to understanding its every gene and protein. But it wasn't always this way. Someone had to see the potential in this humble plant and convince the scientific community to take it seriously.

That someone was Chris Somerville.

From Mathematics to Mustard Plants

Somerville's path to plant biology took an unusual route. He started as a mathematics major at the University of Alberta in Canada—about as far from greenhouse work as you can get. But something pulled him toward the living world, and he eventually completed a doctorate in genetics at the same university.

What draws a mathematician to genetics? Perhaps it's the underlying logic. Genetics, at its heart, is about patterns and rules. Genes follow predictable laws of inheritance. Proteins fold according to physical principles. The cell operates like a fantastically complex computer, running programs written in a four-letter alphabet. For someone trained to see patterns, biology offers endless puzzles.

After his PhD, Somerville did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of William Ogren, where he began working on a process called photorespiration. This might sound like plants breathing, and in a sense it is—but it's actually a wasteful quirk of photosynthesis that costs plants significant energy. Understanding it requires getting deep into the biochemistry of how plants convert sunlight into food.

Why Arabidopsis?

To understand Somerville's contribution, you need to understand why scientists need model organisms in the first place.

Imagine you want to understand how a car engine works. You could study a Ferrari, a pickup truck, a motorcycle, and a lawnmower separately. Or you could pick one well-designed engine and study it in exhaustive detail, knowing that the principles you discover will apply broadly to all internal combustion engines.

Biology works the same way. The fundamental processes of life—how genes are read, how proteins are made, how cells divide—are remarkably similar across species. Study them in one organism, and you learn something true about all organisms. The trick is picking the right one.

For genetics, the ideal model organism has several properties. It should have a small genome, making it easier to find and study individual genes. It should reproduce quickly, so you can run experiments across multiple generations in a reasonable timeframe. It should be easy and cheap to grow in the laboratory. And ideally, it should be amenable to genetic manipulation.

Arabidopsis thaliana checks all these boxes spectacularly well. Its genome is tiny by plant standards—about 135 million base pairs, compared to wheat's 17 billion. A single plant can produce thousands of seeds in just two months. It's small enough that you can grow hundreds of plants in a single growth chamber. And crucially, it's relatively easy to create mutants and introduce foreign genes.

But none of this was obvious when Somerville began his career. Arabidopsis was considered a curiosity, studied by only a handful of researchers. The plant science establishment was focused on crops like corn, wheat, and rice—plants with obvious economic importance.

Somerville saw what others missed. He recognized that the fastest path to understanding plant biology wasn't to study economically important crops directly, but to first crack the fundamental code in a simpler system. Once you understood the principles in Arabidopsis, you could apply them anywhere.

The Spark

Part of what drew Somerville to Arabidopsis was a review article written by a Hungarian-American geneticist named George Rédei. In the 1970s, Rédei had been quietly championing this little weed, collecting mutants and arguing for its potential as a model system.

Scientific revolutions often start this way—with someone reading something that resonates, seeing a path that others have overlooked, and having the courage to pursue it. Rédei planted the seed. Somerville made it bloom.

Biochemical Genetics: A New Approach

Somerville didn't just study Arabidopsis—he pioneered a new way of studying it. His approach, which he called "biochemical genetics," combined classical genetic techniques with modern biochemistry to understand how plants work at the molecular level.

Here's how it worked. First, you create mutants—plants with broken or altered genes—by exposing seeds to radiation or chemicals. Then you screen these mutants for interesting traits. Maybe one can't photosynthesize properly. Maybe another produces unusual fatty acids. Maybe a third has cell walls that don't form correctly.

Once you find an interesting mutant, you work backward. What gene is broken? What protein does that gene encode? What does that protein normally do in the cell? By answering these questions, you build a picture of how the plant works, one gene at a time.

This approach sounds straightforward now, but it was revolutionary at the time. Somerville and his collaborators used it to make fundamental discoveries about photorespiration, lipid metabolism, and cellulose synthesis—the process by which plants build their rigid cell walls.

Cloning the First Arabidopsis Gene

In the early days of molecular biology, "cloning" a gene meant isolating it from the genome and determining its exact DNA sequence. This was painstaking work, requiring years of effort for a single gene.

Somerville's group achieved the first "map-based cloning" of an Arabidopsis gene. Map-based cloning means using the gene's position on a chromosome—its genetic address—to find and isolate it. This was a technical tour de force, demonstrating that the sophisticated molecular techniques developed in bacteria and animals could work in plants too.

This might seem like a small step, but it opened the floodgates. Once you could clone one gene, you could clone any gene. The entire Arabidopsis genome became accessible to study.

Teaching Plants to Make Plastic

Science is often driven by curiosity alone, but sometimes practical applications emerge from unexpected places. One of Somerville's most striking projects came during his time at Michigan State University, funded by the Department of Energy.

The goal was audacious: teach plants to produce plastic.

Specifically, Somerville's team worked on polyhydroxybutyrate, or PHB for short. This material is a biodegradable plastic naturally produced by certain bacteria. Companies were already manufacturing it commercially, growing bacteria in giant fermentation tanks. But bacteria need to be fed sugars, and sugars are expensive. Plants, on the other hand, make their own sugars from sunlight and air through photosynthesis.

What if you could engineer plants to produce PHB directly? You'd have a plastic factory that ran on sunshine.

Somerville's team pulled it off. They took genes from two different bacteria—the instructions for making PHB—and inserted them into Arabidopsis. The modified plants dutifully produced the plastic in their cells.

The immediate vision was to move this technology into crop plants like potatoes. Farmers could grow fields of plastic-producing plants. The plastic would be harvested, processed, and used for packaging or other applications. When discarded, it would biodegrade naturally, unlike petroleum-based plastics that persist in the environment for centuries.

This work was decades ahead of its time. Today, as the world grapples with plastic pollution and climate change, the idea of plant-based biodegradable plastics seems more relevant than ever.

Building the Community

Great scientists don't just make discoveries—they build communities. A single researcher can only do so much. But if you train dozens of talented students and postdocs, and they each start their own labs and train their own students, your impact multiplies exponentially.

Somerville was extraordinarily prolific in this regard. The list of scientists who trained in his laboratory reads like a who's who of plant biology: Mark Estelle, Peter McCourt, George Haughn, Christoph Benning, Clint Chapple, John Browse, Dominique Bergmann, and dozens more. Many of these researchers went on to make major discoveries of their own, training yet another generation of scientists.

This network effect is hard to quantify but enormously important. When you train a great scientist, you don't just add one person to the field—you create a lineage that persists for generations.

TAIR: Making Data Accessible

As Arabidopsis research exploded in the 1990s and 2000s, the community faced a new problem: information management. Thousands of researchers were generating data about thousands of genes. How could anyone keep track of it all?

Somerville led the development of The Arabidopsis Information Resource, known as TAIR—a comprehensive database and web resource that collected and organized everything known about Arabidopsis. Gene sequences, protein functions, mutant phenotypes, scientific papers—all of it centralized in one searchable location.

This might sound like a mundane technical achievement, but it was transformative. TAIR became the backbone of Arabidopsis research, the place every scientist visited before starting a new project. It made the collective knowledge of the field accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Good science requires good infrastructure. Databases like TAIR are as important to modern biology as telescopes are to astronomy.

From Model Plant to Model Institution

Somerville's career took him through a remarkable series of institutions. After faculty positions at the University of Alberta and Michigan State University, he moved to Stanford University, where he directed the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Later, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the Energy Biosciences Institute.

The Energy Biosciences Institute represented a new model for academic research. Funded partly by BP (the oil company), it brought together researchers from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois to work on bioenergy—the production of fuels from biological sources.

This was controversial. Should universities accept large grants from oil companies? Could researchers maintain their independence when their funding came from corporations with obvious commercial interests? Somerville navigated these waters, arguing that the partnership could accelerate research that would benefit society.

He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 2017, though "retirement" for someone like Somerville doesn't mean stepping away from science. He took on a role as a Program Officer at Open Philanthropy, a foundation that directs funding toward high-impact causes. In this position, he could influence which scientific projects received support—a different kind of impact, but impact nonetheless.

The Entrepreneur

Academic science is one way to change the world. Entrepreneurship is another. Somerville pursued both.

He co-founded Mendel Biotechnology, serving as Executive Chairman. The company focused on applying genomic approaches to improve crop plants—taking the fundamental knowledge generated in Arabidopsis and translating it into agricultural applications.

He also co-founded several other companies: Poetic Genetics, LS9, and Redleaf Biologics. Each represented an attempt to move scientific discoveries out of the laboratory and into the real world, where they could affect farmers, consumers, and the environment.

This entrepreneurial streak reflects a philosophy: basic research and practical application are not opposed but complementary. You need fundamental science to generate new knowledge. But you also need translation mechanisms—companies, institutes, partnerships—to turn that knowledge into technologies that help people.

Public Engagement

Scientists sometimes retreat into their laboratories, leaving public debates about science to others. Somerville chose differently.

He contributed to societal debates about transgenic crops—plants modified to contain genes from other species. These crops, often called "genetically modified organisms" or GMOs, are controversial. Critics worry about environmental impacts, corporate control of the food supply, and unknown health effects. Supporters argue that genetic modification is simply a more precise version of the plant breeding humans have practiced for millennia.

Somerville also engaged in debates about biofuels—fuels derived from plants rather than petroleum. Can we grow enough crops to replace fossil fuels? What are the environmental tradeoffs? How do we balance food production with fuel production?

These are complicated questions with no easy answers. What's notable is that Somerville, despite having a full plate of research, teaching, and administration, chose to participate in these public conversations. Scientists have knowledge that society needs. But that knowledge only helps if scientists share it.

Perhaps his most delightful public engagement came when he appeared on the television show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" in an episode titled "Pollution Solutions." There, he explained his research on biodegradable plant-based plastics to a young audience. The Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said that if you can't explain something to a child, you don't really understand it. Somerville could explain it to children—and millions of them watched.

Recognition

Awards and honors accumulated throughout Somerville's career. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the Royal Society in Britain, and the Royal Society of Canada—the three most prestigious scientific societies in the English-speaking world.

In 2006, he shared the Balzan Prize with Elliot Meyerowitz for their work developing Arabidopsis as a model plant. The Balzan Prize is one of the most valuable awards in science, recognition of contributions that have fundamentally changed a field.

Other honors followed: the Mendel Medal from the Genetics Society, the Hopkins Medal from the Biochemical Society, the EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Award, and honorary degrees from universities around the world—York, Michigan State, Guelph, Wageningen, Alberta, Queen's.

These awards represent more than personal recognition. They validate a scientific strategy. Somerville bet that a small, obscure weed could teach us fundamental truths about plant biology. The scientific community agreed.

The Legacy

What makes a scientist great? You could measure papers published or citations accumulated. You could count awards and honors. You could tally grants received or companies founded.

But perhaps the truest measure is impact on the field—how different the world looks because of your work.

Before Somerville and a handful of other pioneers, plant molecular biology was a backwater. The exciting action was in bacterial genetics, animal development, human disease. Plants were studied mainly for agriculture, not for fundamental understanding.

Today, Arabidopsis thaliana is one of the best-understood organisms on Earth. Its genome was sequenced in 2000—the first plant genome ever completed. Thousands of researchers in hundreds of laboratories study its every aspect. The insights from this work have transformed our understanding of how plants develop, respond to their environment, and produce the food and materials on which civilization depends.

None of this was inevitable. It happened because people like Chris Somerville saw potential where others saw weeds, built communities where others worked alone, and connected basic research to practical applications in ways that benefited science and society alike.

The mustard plant didn't choose to become famous. But someone had to choose it. And in making that choice, Somerville helped create a revolution in plant biology that continues to this day.