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The scientist-gardener who is harnessing tobacco’s power to heal

Molecular immunologist Audrey Teh is passionate about converting plants into pharmaceutical producers.
  1. Virginia Gewin

    1. Virginia Gewin is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

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Audrey Teh poses for a portrait in an artificially lit room surrounded by seedlings growing in pots

Audrey Teh is a molecular immunologist at St George’s, University of London. Credit: Leonora Saunders for Nature

I work in a greenhouse that my team and I call Skylab, on the top floor of St George’s, University of London, where we can grow hundreds of plants. We lost roughly 90% of them between March and June, when we closed because of the pandemic, but since then we’ve regrown them. Our experiments are back up and running.

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Nature 586, 636 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02938-6

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 04 November 2020: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that Malaysia does not have state health care. It also overstated how some families have been affected and misstated Teh’s affiliation.

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