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Dr Jim Peacock was interviewed in 2008 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Peacock's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers’ notes. The extract discusses how he and his colleagues came to isolate and characterise some of the genes involved in the control of flowering in plants. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
William James (Jim) Peacock was born in Leura, New South Wales, in 1937. He was educated at the University of Sydney where he received a BSc (Hons) in 1958. His interests were in botany and genetics and after his honours year, he won a CSIRO scholarship for further studies. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Sydney in 1962.
Peacock began working at CSIRO as a visiting research worker in the Genetics section in 1963. Later that year he moved to the University of Oregon, where he worked as a post-doctoral fellow (1963–64) and visiting associate professor (1964–65). He continued his genetics studies as a research consultant in the biology division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, in 1965.
On returning to Australia and CSIRO, Peacock joined the division of Plant Industry. He worked as a senior research scientist (1965–69), principal research scientist (1969–73), senior principal research scientist (1973–77) and chief research scientist (1977–78). He was chief of the division from 1978 to 2003 and then became a CSIRO fellow.
Over his career, Peacock has been a leader in introducing new molecular biological techniques to Australian plant science. In addition to his original research, he has had extensive industry involvement through companies such as Gene Shears, GrainGene and the High Rainfall Zone Wheat Company. Peacock has also been a fervent champion of science education in schools and public awareness of science. He has served on numerous boards and committees for agricultural, scientific and academic bodies both in Australia and internationally.
From 2006 to 2008, Peacock served as Australia’s Chief Scientist.
Peacock has received numerous national and international awards including the University of Georgia Bicentennial Medal (1985), the BHP Bicentennial Prize for the pursuit of excellence in science and technology (1988), the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (2000, jointly with Dr Elizabeth Dennis for their work in discovering the flowering switch gene which is important in determining when plants stop vegetative growth and begin flowering) and the CSIRO Lifetime Achievement Award (2005). He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1994 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001.
In 1982, Peacock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1990 he became a Foreign Associate of the USA National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.
Peacock was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1976 and served as its president from 2002 to 2006. In 1989 he received the Academy’s Macfarlane Burnet Medal for distinguished contributions in the biological sciences.
During your time as Chief you also diversified your own science into other areas, into different genes – in particular, looking at control of flowering and the transition from vegetative growth to reproductive flowering. Why were you interested in that?
First of all I have to say that I think I was the luckiest guy in Australia: even though I was head of a big division in CSIRO – and in the end it was about 900 people, all round Australia – I never did give up all my science. That was because of colleagues like you, in that by then you had taken over the running of our lab, and because being able to continue my association with colleagues and postdocs and students really kept me alive. It was the special thing about CSIRO. I don’t think I would have stayed in the Chief’s job otherwise.
We had an interest in flowering. I was always interested in the switch that was made from vegetative growth to reproductive growth by the same growing apex. We came across a system in tobacco tissue culture that looked promising, and at the same time, because we had a good name in the United States, the National Science Foundation supported our lab with marvellous postdocs. One of them helped us to get that system going, but we later dropped it because, although it was good in itself, it simply wasn’t powerful enough and it didn’t have the obvious benefits of the plant whose use in the lab was just developing, Arabidopsis. That had a special affinity for CSIRO, because it was originally proposed as an ideal laboratory plant by John Langridge, of Plant Industry. (As a matter of fact, he was the reason I went back to Plant Industry in the first place.) But then he’d got out of that, and we brought Arabidopsis back in a big way – along with several other labs in the world who were using it.
So we were interested in the shift to flowering. Jimmy Rendel’s lectures had talked about, among other things, the paths of development and how different patterns of genes were responsible for them. And I remember reading one evening a Scientific American article by Robin Holliday about ageing and cancer cells, saying what happened to the genes and their controls – that there was a chemical change that was known in DNA in animals, a methylation of a cytidine residue – and people had thought, ‘Well, that’s in animals.’ It occurred to me that the properties of DNA methylation were exactly parallel to the induction of the switch to flowering by a cold treatment, which many crops have, like winter wheats and so on. Many plants have this ‘vernalisation’ requirement. So the next morning I came in, very excited about this, and I got together our two flowering experts in the division, Lloyd Evans and Rod King, and you. We sat in one of those little rooms and I talked about the idea. You saw immediately how important this could well be, while the other two weren’t at all interested!
But they weren’t molecular biologists.
No, that’s true. Anyway, then we had to have the courage of our convictions. I suppose I was lucky, in that I was the Chief, although I am sure I would have let other people go on. And we got into that.
We also had Jo Byrne, who had come on an Australian Research Council fellowship.
Yes, we did, and it was good to have another postdoc from America, one who was so interested. Those first experiments we did on chemical control of methylation started to give us a real breakthrough. Then we happened upon the FLC gene, ‘flowering LOCUS C’, which now is probably the best-known gene system in plants, in relation to both genetic and epigenetic controls. Our work has triggered huge numbers of labs to follow up those systems, and I guess one of the most important things we ever did was to get into that system.
It led to the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, so someone else thought it was important!
Well, that was okay too. [laugh]
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
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