I don’t think there was one great moment. I guess there were two—I mean one was there—it wasn’t a moment. It was just that the time I was in Cold Spring Harbor was just one of those times when—it was like you were surfing. I mean cresting a wave and just—everything worked. It wasn’t Nobel Prize work or anything but it was exciting. And it was really opening up the field of understanding how proteins move through cells. And just day after day it was a great comfort. I mean lab work is, on the face of it, boring! You know, you move one colorless liquid from one tube into another and you do enormously repetitious things and so on. But you—it was like every day I was getting another new little results that added on. And it wasn’t that brick wall time that comes so often in science that you, you know, hit your head against a brick wall for ages until you finally work out how to do something and then you get the rewards of these days and days and days where things happen. And it just coincided with the time I was there.

Mary-Jane Gething, biochemist is Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne where she earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1974. Subsequently she went to Cambridge to do post-doctoral work.

In 1976, she moved to London to work on protein sequencing and in 1980, Gething and Joseph Sambrook received a NATO grant for travel to collaborate on virus research. She began working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1982 where she continued her research of proteins. In 1985, Gething and Sambrook moved to Dallas to work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. They moved back to Australia in 1994.

Her current research involves protein folding in the cell and the role of molecular chaperone BiP.