David Baulcombe


Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. he was Head of Group, Gene Expression, in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and the Edward Penley Abraham Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany Emeritus at Cambridge. He held the Regius botany chair in that department from 2007 to 2020..

Early life and education

David Baulcombe was born on 7 April 1952 in the United Kingdom, in Solihull, Warwickshire,, into "a non-scientific family".
As a child growing up in England’s West Midlands, David Baulcombe developed a fascination for algae, mosses, and other ‘lower plants’, which eventually led him to study botany at Leeds before shifting his focus to molecular biology.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in botany from the University of Leeds in 1973, and continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1976/1977.

Career

After his doctoral research, Baulcombe spent the next three years as a postdoctoral fellow in North America, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and then in Athens, Georgia, in the United States. Baulcombe returned to the United Kingdom then, where he was given the opportunity to create his own research group at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. At the PBI, Baulcombe initially held the position of Higher Scientific Officer, and was promoted to Principal Scientific Officer in April 1986.
In August 1988 Baulcombe left Cambridge for Norwich. He joined the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich in 1988, and as of 2007 was a senior research scientist, and also served as head of laboratory between 1990 and 1993 and between 1999 and 2003. In 1998 he was appointed honorary professor at the University of East Anglia, and given a full professorship there in 2002. In March 2007 it was announced that Baulcombe would become the next professor of botany at the University of Cambridge, taking up his post in September 2007. Accordingly, in 2008, Baulcombe was also named as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2009, the Cambridge professorship was renamed "Regius Professor of Botany". He was succeeded in the chair by Ottoline Leyser in 2020.
Baulcombe "serves on several committees and study sections", and was president of the International Society of Plant Molecular Biology from 2003 to 2004. In the approximate period of 2007-2009, Baulcombe was a senior advisor to The EMBO Journal. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2015.

Research

An annotation regarding Baulcombe's 2001 nomination to The Royal Society read that he had
made an outstanding contribution to the inter-related areas of plant virology, gene silencing and disease resistance... discover a specific signalling system and an antiviral defence system in plants... to the development of new technologies that promise to revolutionise gene discovery in plant biology.
Hence, his research interests have mainly been in botany and fundamental biology, in the fields of virus movement, genetic regulation, disease resistance, and RNA and more generally, gene silencing.
In 1998 Craig Mello, Andrew Fire, and colleagues reported a potent gene silencing effect—observations on the mechanism of RNA interference—after injecting double stranded RNA into Caenorhabditis elegans, a discovery notable as a detailed description of what proved to be the correct mechanism of a broad class of phenomena. Baulcombe then, with Andrew Hamilton, discovered a small interfering RNA that is the specificity determinant in RNA-mediated gene silencing in plants. Baulcombe's group demonstrated "that while viruses can induce gene silencing some viruses encode proteins that suppress gene silencing". After these initial observations, many laboratories around the world searched for the occurrence of this phenomenon in other organisms.
With other members of his research group at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Baulcombe also helped unravel the importance of small interfering RNA in epigenetics and in defence against viruses.

Honours and awards

In June 2009, Baulcombe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2009 Birthday Honours List, "for services to plant science".
Baulcombe has also received the following honours and awards:
Baulcombe stated in a post dated 2017 that outside of the laboratory, he "promote the use of plant biotechnology for crop improvement... particularly interested in technologies addressing problems in developing countries." He has said he works on plants "because their products are good to eat and wear and write on - and also because plants are often good models for general biology.
As of mid-2024 Baulcombe resided in Norwich. He has been married to Rose Eden since 1976, and they have four children. His interests include music, sailing, and hill walking.