Mary-Dell Chilton
Mary-Dell Chilton (born February 2, 1939, in Indianapolis, Indiana) is one of the founders of modern plant biotechnology. Early life and education Chilton attended private school for her early education. She earned both a B.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She later completed postdoctoral work at the University of Washington at Seattle Career and research Chilton taught and performed research at Washington University in St. Louis. While on faculty there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she led a collaborative research study that produced the first transgenic plants. Chilton was the first (1977) to demonstrate the presence of a fragment of Agrobacterium Ti plasmid DNA in the nuclear DNA of crown gall tissue. Her research on Agrobacterium also showed that the genes responsible for causing disease could be removed from the bacterium without adversely affecting its ability to insert its own DNA into plant cells and modify the plant's genome. Chilton described what she had done as disarming the bacterial plasmid responsible for the DNA transfer. She and her collaborators produced the first genetically modified plants using Agrobacterium carrying the disarmed Ti plasmid (1983). She has been called the "queen of Agrobacterium." Chilton is