Recorded: 16 Jan 2003
We moved back from America to Australia in 1994 and I went back to the University of Melbourne. Actually to the same department where I had been both an undergraduate and a Ph.D. student. So after something like twenty-four years away I went back again and started up a lab there. And then, oh about, three or four years ago I became head of that department which was a funny full circle. Although it’s decided in the intervening years that it isn’t what I want to spend the rest of my life being.
So we live in this house in the city of Melbourne quite near to the university. Joe [Sambrook] is at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Research Institute which is just a short walk across a very beautiful park from here.
We’re very lucky cause we also have a beach house, only about an hour and a half away. And then also a house out at my parent’s farm only about forty minutes away. So it’s a wonderful life here.
Scientifically it’s not as fast a life. Or perhaps as interesting a life, but we knew that when we were moving back. So it’s actually has been a wonderful time to be back with my parents and also my young daughter. It’s the best country in the world for a child to grow up.
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.