Merilyn Sleigh on Mike Botchan
  Merilyn Sleigh     Biography    
Recorded: 17 Jan 2003

And some of the people there at the time I remember Mike Botchan who was there and very bright and incredibly ambitious to succeed. And so people would continually leave messages—we had this big blackboard in the corridor in the labs. People would leave messages: Mike, call this phone number and it would turn out to be the phone number of the Nobel Committee. Or Mike, Nobel Committee called, please call back, things like this, lots of sort of funny little jokes and playing on people’s oddities and so Mike of course was very, he was pretty young at the time and very competitive and so there was some really interesting interactions with some of the other competitive people.

Merilyn Sleigh is a pharmacologist, molecular biologist and dean in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of New South Wales. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney in pharmacology and another PhD in molecular biology at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), she came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to work under Joe Sambrook as a postdoctoral fellow researching the protein production of SV40. She returned to CSIRO, establishing one of the first laboratories in Australia using genetic engineering approaches to study influenza virus structure, evolution and gene regulation. She has become involved in developing the biotechnological industry in Australia. Sleigh is founding director of the Australian Biotechnology Association and is currently Chief Executive of EvoGenix, a start-up biotechnology company located in Australia.