Top Plant Biologist Coming to Institute

An internationally known biologist whose work is central to genetic engineering of disease-resistant plants is joining the faculty at Scripps Research Institute, bringing with him formidable scientific and fund-raising capabilities.

Roger Beachy, 46, is director of the plant biotechnology unit at Washington University in St. Louis, a center that helped inaugurate genetic engineering of crop plants. He will join Scripps July 1.

“I think the significance for Scripps investing in this kind of division is the recognition that plants contribute novel information to biological research,” Beachy said in a telephone interview. “They have a likelihood of being used in biomedical research.”

Christopher Lamb, a plant biologist at the Salk Institute, called Beachy an international leader in the field.

“Roger’s pioneered our knowledge of plant viral genes. That’s given us big insights into how viruses infect and spread through a plant, and also provided the basis for genetic engineering of viral resistance in the crop plant,” Lamb said.

Beachy also is widely known as an engaging and articulate spokesman for science, one whose good looks once earned him the tag “the Robert Redford of plant biology.”

Beachy’s hiring is part of another expansion in the number of departments at the Research Institute. In July, the institute will add a Department of Cell Biology, bringing the number of departments to six.

Just a year ago, Scripps added a fifth research department, chemistry, as part of the institute’s continuing effort to expand its drug development capability.

The new cell biology department will incorporate existing groups of cell biologists and plant genetics researchers. Both are currently part of the Department of Molecular Biology, headed by Peter E. Wright.

Norton B. Gilula, a Scripps cell biologist who will be chairman of the new cell biology department, declined to say how many researchers would move from that department or from other departments.

However, Beachy’s hiring clearly will be another step in Scripps establishment of a biomedical infrastructure that can find new ways to identify, synthesize and genetically produce monoclonal antibodies and other substances aimed at specific human problems.

It also will add new strength to the small plant molecular biology division, which has had difficulty finding grants from the industrial sources that are common at Scripps.

“My knowledge of what is and is not likely to be a product in the market will help me to focus the group,” Beachy said. “It’ll bring a visibility that they haven’t had before, simply because they hadn’t had a senior member with the kind of visibility I have.”

In St. Louis, Beachy heads a research group with $1.8 million in annual funding, not all of which will follow him to La Jolla. He said he expects to continue to have strong ties with the Monsanto Co., which has been a major player internationally in the effort to engineer disease-resistant plants.

He also has funding from large seed companies, which he declined to identify.

Beachy said he has been promised an increase in the size of the division, from three members to eight, and a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse. That would be built across North Torrey Pines Road from the existing research complex, near the planned chemistry building.

In addition to solidifying the plant genetics group at Scripps, Beachy said, he will be expanding its efforts to make better plants. This will help agricultural conglomerates, he said, but also provide the means to accomplish another of his interests: ending world hunger by engineering tropical food plants that resist diseases.

Those studies are being done on tropical food staples such as cassava, rice and sweet potatoes.

Gilula said Beachy’s hiring would be one of three major hirings for the new cell biology department, which will be complete within the next two months.

On Jan. 1, protein chemist Stephen H. B. Kent left the California Institute of Technology to join Scripps. Kent is known for the preparation of one of the enzymes essential to basic research on the AIDS virus. Gilula would not identify the third hire.

“All three of them are probably important enough on their own to be of real interest by themselves,” Gilula said. “And I think that there are a number of events that are going to occur in the next couple of months which are going to make the importance and the value to the institution of these people clear.”

He would not say whether that involved the possible announcement of major funding for new research projects from government or industrial sources.