Robert Martiennsen on Epigenetics and Other Research
  Robert Martiennsen     Biography    
Recorded: 20 Feb 2001

She actually wrote a paper on the clonal analysis of the endosperm development using some of these techniques, but she was acutely aware of other sorts of pattern, patterns that weren't stochastic and actually were developmentally controlled. To some extent, that had led to her theories of epigenetics, in which she'd proposed that these controlling elements actually controlled development. Probably we wouldn't think of it in these terms now, but it turns out that epigenetics is crucially involved in development and that relationship is something you can now read in her papers. It's interesting. Her papers are easier to read now than they were twenty years ago or thirty years ago because the molecular basis of what she was saying is now known. We now know a lot more about what chromosomes are really constituted of and, of course, transposable elements have been molecularly isolated. So many of the interactions between genes are now much more easily thought about because we know the molecules involved. And then you can really start to see some of the really extraordinary things that she thought and proposed—especially about the nature of chromosomal organization. Heterochromatin was one of her major areas of research: knobs, heterochromatic knobs. It's actually been a real pleasure to be able to be part of the modern view of that. So now, with the genome project, and what we know about transposable elements, we've been able to interpret some of the things that she was saying then at a molecular level. So actually, it's funny, but it really is easier to read her work now than it was then.

Dr. Robert Martiennsen is a plant biologist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator, and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Martiennsen attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, completing his BA in 1982 and continuing on to his PhD in 1986 on the molecular genetics of alpha-amylase gene families in common wheat. He received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship with University of California, Berkeley. In 1989, he was hired as a principal investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As a young scientist, he worked closely with Barbara McClintock. His awards and honors include the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, McClintock Prize, and Science’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2002 and the Kumho International Science Award in Plant Biology and Biotechnology (2001).