Simon Bright, director, Warwick HRI, University of Warwick, UK

Simon Bright's career in plant science mirrors the evolution of the field, as its intellectual vanguard shifted from botany to biochemistry, and from molecular biology to biotechnology, and its professional frontiers shifted from academia to industry and back again (see Naturejobs 4–5; 10 October 2002).

His career didn't start out in plant science. A childhood curiosity about chemistry led Bright to an undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge and a PhD under Don Northcote. His mentor's attitude of “go out and make it happen yourself” has served as a major source of inspiration, says Bright, as has keeping in touch with 150 or so other scientists who did PhDs with Northcote. (see CV)

Bright went straight into a staff research job after his PhD. “I skipped the postdoc completely, which was very lucky,” he says. Rothamsted Research, near London, had just created three new positions to bring new skills into its mix of agricultural research.

He realized that biochemistry could help him understand problems in plant metabolism, but that only molecular biology and biotechnology would enable him to do something with the knowledge, such as change the nutritional composition of plants. By the early 1980s “it was clear that the next thing I had to do was molecular biotech,” he says.

He took a one-year sabbatical at Arco PCRI in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the “extraordinary hub of entrepreneurism and scientific creativity” was so beguiling that he almost didn't return to England. But he decided there were opportunities at home, at a time when the first genetically modified crop plants were being created. He found it “very exciting” to be doing more than just cloning genes, and considers his contributions to the first genetically modified product in the UK — a tomato paste — a highlight in his career.

In industry, Bright learned valuable skills in project management that he will bring back to the academic sector. He is making the switch in part because life-sciences companies are now more interested in development than in basic research. He is convinced that there are discoveries “below the radar” of product-oriented plant-science companies that he calls “the vegetable equivalent of orphan drugs”.