Science Friday - The Leap: Be Bold Or Just Don't Do It

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

As a young plant scientist, Joanne Chory shook up the research establishment with her unconventional approach to figuring out how plants work. Her methods and success changed the field, and led her to her biggest project yet—tackling climate change, with the help of millions of plants. Colleagues Steve Kay, Detlef Weigel, and Jennifer Nemhauser describe what made Joanne outstanding in the field of plant scientists. Plus Joanne’s sister, Mary Ann Chory, describes their early family life and the sibling relationships that shaped them. Joanne Chory died in November 2024 at age 69 from complications due to Parkinson’s disease.“The Leap” is a 10-episode audio series that profiles scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. It premieres on Science Friday’s podcast feed every Monday until July 21. “The Leap” is a production of the Hypothesis Fund, brought to you in partnership with Science Friday.Transcript is available on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It's pretty bold to stand up publicly, like at your TED talk, and say, you know, one of the biggest, most intractable problems we face right now? I think I personally can do something about it. I recently had an epiphany. But that's what plant biologist Joanne Corey did. This was in 2019. I realized that I could actually play a role in solving one of the biggest problems that faces mankind today. and that is the problem of climate change. The idea was to enlist plants.

Joanne had spent her career studying them. Her discoveries into how plants respond to light made her famous and revered among plant scientists. Her work is so fundamental, it's in textbooks. And it led her to this big idea. Maybe her study subject could be harnessed to fight climate change. And every experiment that I have done in my lab over the last 30 years has been directed

toward doing the really big experiment, this one last big experiment. She knew it was her last big experiment because she was diagnosed with Parkinson's, a fact she also shared in her TED talk. This gives me a sense of urgency that I want to do this now while I feel good enough to really... I called Joanne in the fall of 2024. And even though her Parkinson's was more advanced, she was still working. She didn't even really seem like she'd slowed down much. She was even doing interviews.

I think we should just wait it. All right, let's swing it. Let's just dive in. Okay. I wanted to hear more about the work and what she was trying to achieve. And most of all, I wanted to understand this aspect of Joanne's personality that seems so remarkable to me. She just seemed undaunted. Like, she launched this project to save the world from a global problem in the face of her own declining health, knowing she probably won't be able to see it all the way through.

How do you do that? What makes Joanne able to stare profound challenges right in the face and say, I got this? Joanne is fearless. She is fearless. She's always been very courageous. So many people describe Joanne this way. Where'd that come from?

This is The Leap, a series about scientists who are risking it all to make a breakthrough. I've heard a lot of people do. described Joanna's fearless. Was she like that as a kid? No. This is Marianne Corey, Joanne's older sister. Fearless wouldn't come to mind. I mean, she was easily spooked by my brothers, like at five.

I mean, they could go in the closet and go boo, and she would, like, jump up to the ceiling. Joanne's training to become a scientist began early, because in her household, just like in science, she had to be tough. There were six kids. They grew up outside of Boston. Mary Ann was the oldest. Joanne was number three. Number three.

I'm a middle child getting up. I'm like looking for attention. We had four brothers and we were the two girls that united together, Carol Solidarity, you know, Go Girl Go type stuff. Joanne, you said that your brothers helped you cultivate a thick skin. How did they torture you? Tell me all the ways. My brothers tortured me by telling me how ugly I was, how fat I was.

You know, this and that I want to say, were always my judgments. The other thing they did, they all were wrestlers. And, like, you'd walk through the house, and all of a sudden you'd be down on the floor, and they're saying they're practicing their guillotine, you know, or something like that. Literally toughened her up.

Yeah, we got literally toughened up, too. But my sister's the oldest. She set the tone for the family, I think. So we all ended up in science because she was a scientist. Really? Really? She was the one with a mathematician. Wait, all your siblings are in science?

They're either engineers or scientists. Wow. It is kind of weird. Neither of my parents are scientists. What do you think? What accounts for that, do you think? I don't know. My sister has a strong personality.

I always talk to her. It is true since I'm the old, does he get credit for a lot of stuff. But I give it to my father and my mother more than me. Growing up there, they were the first generation, both of them, of Lebanese parents. So they were always about us, you know, doing well in school. Nothing made them more proud than that we all went to college.

In college, Joanne studied biology and then went on to get a Ph.D. in microbiology. And my father especially loved it when Joanne got a Ph.D. He put her thesis on the bookcase. I don't know if he could understand it, but he would pull it out to show people the book of scientific pearls that his daughter had written. After completing her Ph.D., Joanne took a leap. Microbiology seemed crowded. She decided to move into plant research, which was not the sexiest field at the time. It was horrible being a plant scientist.

You know, I always say to people, people always ask me, is it hard to being a woman in science? I don't know. It's hard to be a plant woman in science because no one cares what you say, you know. But being away from the crowds was part of the appeal. And Joanne just loved plants. They're pretty. They're beautiful.

I love flowers. So that's one reason why I came to plants. But another reason why I came to plants was the fact that we knew so little about them. Joanne went to Fred Ossabelle's lab at Harvard Medical School for a postdoc. I came and said, I want to study plants. And you go, okay, what are you going to do? I'm like, I don't know. Every day I would read this biology book about plants.

And he would come in the morning and say, where did he come up with the last day? And each day she'd have a new answer, a new project she wanted to try. Some of them were pretty good and some of them were pretty audacious. Looking back now on those early audacious projects, you can see the rock star scientist emerging, the kind of scientist who would one day take on saving the entire planet. But in those early days, Joanne was content to just, you know, upend the entire field of plant science.

She kind of woke up the plant world. Biologist Steve Kay remembers when he first heard about Joanne and this project of hers that would end up rocking the field. It was a conference where they met for the first time. And she came up to me after my talk and said, you know what you're doing is just going to take way too long. And that was about the very first. introduction that I had. When she said that to you, this is your first meeting, were you like, who are you? Totally.

Like, what was your response? You can imagine, right? We're all in our young 20s. And so, Joanne, me, other sort of postdocs from these, you know, big famous labs. There is that kind of culture and science. We were pretty full of ourselves. So, yeah, I think I probably pleasantly bristled in a very British way. Something like, do you really think so?

This is signature Joanne, being very direct. But also, Joanne had data to back up her point of view that Steve wasn't going about things in the best way. What I learned to that meaning is she had done something absolutely inconceivable, which is the opposite of what we were all doing. This is cool. allow me to get a little bit into the weeds here. So when Joanne was presenting at this conference,

there was this, like, accepted way of doing plant science. At that time, we were all working on a different plant species. The field hadn't coalesced around one model system. There wasn't, like, a fruit fly of plants. So some people were advocating that there should be, and Joanne was one of them. The idea was we should all pick one plant, study it, and use it to understand plants generally. This is why it was born, they picked the plant that he picked to study.

It's called the rabidopsis. A rabidopsis is not a flashy plant. It looks like something you'd see growing out of the crack of a sidewalk. But if you're doing genetics experiments like Joanne wanted to do its handy, because it's not too big, if it's in a lab, it goes to seed quickly, and it has a small genome. So Joanne took this plant, soaked its seeds in DNA-damaging liquid to give it mutations, germinated those seeds in the dark and then looked for weird traits.

She took plants, mutated them, and found mutants that grew in the dark as if they had seen light. Like they had leaves and long stems. But that was strange because growing in the dark is a death sentence for a plant. Plants need light to live. So in these mutants,

it seemed like a basic light sensor had gone haywire. So Joanne was like, Whoa, weird. Maybe we can use these mutants to figure out how plants usually detect and respond to light. And that's what she did. She found a gene that seemed to be responsible for this behavior. Mutate that one gene and the plant grew in the dark. Because responding to light is like, I don't know, the most fundamental thing of plant does. So people were like, no way, this is impossibly complex. You can't untangle this root ball.

Joanne's former trainee Jennifer Nemhouser can explain. If you want to talk about audacious, thinking you can get a plant. to grow like it thinks it's in the light when it's growing in the dark, that that's going to be like a one gene change, and suddenly the plant is going to make the worst decision it could make, like absolute certain death decision. I mean, no wonder everybody looked at her like she was totally nuts.

But she was right, and that was just the beginning. This work eventually led Joanne to another huge finding, a hormone that before people had completely overlooked. Joanne proved, over many years, it's crucial to a plant's growth and form. Her lab mapped out basically every molecular link in the chain, the whole pathway connecting the hormone to the genes that control growth. Yeah, the entire pathway of what people thought didn't exist. So how did Joanne rock out thinking?

That's how. And it's not to say the other approaches are not valid. They are. It's just everybody was clustered around them. and Joanne was out here thinking in a different way. Joanne's findings made the case for using this model plant, Arabidopsis, and for her whole approach. And it changed the field. Plant science started getting attention from new places.

Yeah, I mean, it really transformed the whole landscape, the funding landscape. You know, and she was also among the first plant biologist to be getting NIH money. And, you know, and then she became like really the first full-time plant biologist to become an H-HMI. investigator. Oh, wow. So she, like, really pushed open those doors. Now, as is often true, when you're out there thinking in a different way and pushing open doors that had previously been boarded up tight, some people throw a fit. Joanne was threatening the norm. And so if you've really contributed to kind of a framework or a dominant way of addressing a scientific problem, and somebody comes up with something orthogonal

that looks like it's going to add a, you know, a significant leap. Some people find that threatening. Or to put it in, you know, American speak. Sometimes people are going to be pissed. And what they do is they set a higher standard in order to believe it because it's so new and challenging. Especially when some people feel like you're too young, you're the wrong gender, like you're using the wrong tools,

Like, you know, you haven't paid your dues. But after a childhood full of guillotines and chokeholds, Joanne was ready for it. That's when you have to have a big skin. You have to keep at it, you know. If you go through a trial like this where people naysay you and doubt you, cast you as fringe, and you end up being right, like so right, it shapes you.

It makes you more fearless the next time. And that's what happened with Joanne. She came to realize that pushback isn't always a bad sign. In fact, it might mean you're on to something. A lot of papers get rejected. People don't understand it. But those are the papers you want to have, I think. You know, you might say if you don't have 10 failures for every success,

you're not doing interesting enough science. You want people to say, get out of here. What are you talking about, you know? And you want people to come in on both sides of the spectrum, the lowest score and the highest score, you know. That would be good. But most people don't see it that way. Joanne wasn't afraid to swing for the fences, even if sometimes she whiffed. And sometimes she did.

Things happen in a lab that is working that hard at the cutting edge where sometimes you publish things that end up being wrong. And Joanne, I think one of the most inspiring things I ever saw her do was be like, okay, like we now have the evidence that this was wrong and be like, okay, I want to be the first people who publish what's right. This is how science works, right? Sometimes you're wrong. Okay. So let's be the ones who actually show what is true.

Joanne is a rigorous thinker. and not in a nitpicky way. It isn't grandstanding, it isn't egotistical. She always just had this passion. You know, there was that look in her eyes where she wanted to know how plants work. I think Joanne has always been someone who's like, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to go for it.

Like forget the low-hanging fruit. Like, I'm going for the best fruit. There's such a lesson there for young people, which is, if you're not going to be bold, just don't do it. Joanne was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2004. She was 49, a professor at the SOC Institute in La Jolla. Jennifer remembers when Joanne told the lab. I swear we were, like, gathered in the kitchen area, like not in a conference room or anything. And she told us, and I think, you know, people gasped.

And, you know, for a lot of us, I think we instantly thought about our kids. They were so young. I had two kids that we adopted, my husband and me. And they were around for just a couple of years when I got diagnosed. They never really knew me without anything but a disease state. You know, so I feel bad about that. But I worked hard with just being happy. And so if it was happy, that was good.

Did your Parkinson's diagnosis make you think differently about how you wanted to spend your time? Or did it change your relationship with taking risks? I think he did. You know, I definitely have a different person now because of that. It's emotional. It's really hard. It's really hard for me to think about a world that doesn't have her in it. And, yeah, I think she knows that her time is limited.

And so, of course, of course it changes you. Joanne started thinking about her legacy and how best to use her time. Her climate change project was germinating. And then came an opportunity to plant the seed. Our $3 million breakthrough prize is awarded to Joanne Corey. In 2018, Joanne won the breakthrough prize. It's one of the most prestigious awards in science. and it also has a star-studded ceremony.

To introduce you to the scientist who worked out how it happens. Morgan Freeman was an announcer of Joanne's award. What was cool about that moment, though, is you've got to look at it. There's all these guys in, like, Black Tux, and then Joanne's there, with her pink sequence count on. She had to, like, hold on to people a little bit because she can't, like, she needs, like, a cane or a walker. You've got to admit, she's really iconic.

moment. An award like this is often a capstone of a person's career, a way to honor their contributions at the end of their run. But Joanne in her iconic pink sequin dress was not there for a victory lap. Joanne realized that in this moment she had the attention of people with power and money and influence. And so if she wanted to launch a project that could have real impact on the world, impact that would outlast her, now was her moment. She thought about, you know, what could she advocate for? This is Dietlif Weigel, Joanne's friend and colleague who remembers talking to Joanne about this. The obvious thing would have been to say something plants feed us and, you know, I'm a plant scientist and so on and so forth.

But she had this inspiring thought that what we have done in the last 150, 200 years or so, we have dug up dead plants and we have burned dead plants. And that's why there is a lot more CO2 out there. And Joanne said, well, let's just reverse the process. Let's put the CO2 back into the plants. She carefully crafted her message. ...reaching as a world edges closer to a crisis of sustainability. I hope it will catalyze greater awareness of the positive impact that plants can have in the quality of human life.

The idea was simple. Plants vacuum CO2 out of the air and store it. But when plants die or decompose, that CO2 goes back. into the atmosphere. So Joanne thought, what if we could engineer plants, specifically crops that were planting already, to store carbon more permanently,

by making their roots bigger and deeper and better at holding carbon underground? On the one hand, it seems so obvious, but it was so inspiring because all of a sudden, all the plant scientists were like, hey, why did we not think of this? A lot of young people were there

who really felt like I gave them a hope. It was very interesting, people coming up to you and telling you, you gave me hope that it could be done. Well, it's because no one's ever given anybody hope about climate change, like ever. No, the climate, and the climate change, people are really depressing. Joanne's plan was working. She was invited to apply for an audacious project grant, affiliated with Ted. We wrote her budget for $34 million.

Don't ask me why. Was that a lot or a little? That's a lot. I mean, for genetic genetic, it's like heaven, you know. I don't know. I didn't have to grant that day. Well, it's pretty cheap for saving the world, so. Yes.

I was very cheap. I learned that later. They gave us the whole 34. You got it all. Yeah. It's pretty exciting. They called it the harnessing plants initiative, and they began focusing on food crops like rice and corn and wheat.

looking for genes that controlled traits that would make them better carbon keepers. Not unlike the work that Joanne did as young scientist. They estimated if they improved crops modestly, they could capture 10 to 20 percent of current annual emissions. When you get a winner, you just can't not do the project, you know? Can I ask you a question about this? Yes. Here's the thing that I keep coming back to when I think about this.

Climate change is such a big problem. many people hit this wall where they feel so powerless. You pushed through that. And I wanted to know, where did you get the boldness or the audacity to say, like, yeah, okay, huge global problem. I can do something about that. I think it partly came from the fact that I was naive. And I let the naivities drive me. You know, someone would suggest a really nice problem.

I was going to, okay, I was trying. You know, I'm always one jumping in. I asked Marianne what she thought about this answer, that Joanne's fearlessness comes from being naive. I don't think it's because she's naive. I think she knows this hard. Does that make sense? But I think her felicit comes from that she really,

you know, maybe you could call it arrogance or maybe it's confidence or maybe it's both. But I don't think she thinks she's going to fail. I mean, I think when she decides she's going to do something, that's when she becomes. fearless. I mean, she might not go jump out of a plane. Maybe she doesn't want to do that. But if she did, she would be the best at it. Does that make sense? Once she's decided, this is something to solve, I don't think she thinks failure is an option. I don't even think it enters into her brain that

it's not going to work. She's very confident that way. I guess some people could look at that as as a negative thing. I think it's a huge strength. I think it's just a huge strength. And here's the thing. She has a history of doing it. Does that make sense? I mean, And look at her science, right? Look at her science, you know. So she has the right to think she can solve things because she has. I didn't think I could do it. I don't know.

I have kind of a person who believes, I guess, that we all can do something to make the planet a better place to live and make your family happier or whatever. A few weeks after I had all these conversations in November, 2020, Joanne Corey passed away. She was 69. She'd put another colleague in charge of the harnessing plants initiative. It'll live on without her. Around 70 people work on the project now.

They've already identified genes involved in making roots better carbon keepers. But beyond harnessing plants, Joanne's legacy is also harnessing plant scientists. She really inspired an entire generation. of plant scientists and said, you know, we plant scientists should really think about how we can deal with climate change. She's like idolized by so many people. She's such a warrior.

I call her a badass old woman. Maybe I was the oldest in a model for a while, but she's like a role model for way more than our family, but for the whole world. And we're all very, very proud of her. The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. It's hosted by me, Floral Lictman, and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Devin Taylor, Pajau-Vangay, and David Zanperd.

Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Fact-checking by Nicole Tusulka. Thanks to Lynn Artel, Victoria Johnson, and Alyssa Midcalf. And thanks to you for listening. SciFright is back tomorrow with a conversation with Rosemary, Moscow, about the surprisingly high-stakes world of birding. plus a misconception about female birds that just will not fly.

That's tomorrow on the pod.