PAULA JAMESON
Plant scientist
There comes a time in many careers when even the high-flyers are surpassed by hot new technologies and younger people with the skills to use them.
So it’s been for Dr Paula Jameson, the University of Canterbury plant biologist and science administrator.
She was awarded her doctorate in 1983 and since then there’s been an explosion of DNA tools, techniques and research.
She understands perfectly well what can be done with DNA, but was increasingly aware of her limitations in the laboratory.
‘‘That’s mostly why I retired,’’ she says. Plus she’s 65, which is a good age to bow out.
She capped a 36-year career by winning the New Zealand Association of Scientists’ 2019 Marsden Medal for her ‘‘lifetime of outstanding service to … science’’.
Canterbury also named her an Emerita Professor, an honorary title awarded for outstanding service as an academic.
She was also, for the record, Massey University’s first pregnant professor.
She exits academia with a message – for Parliament, environmentalists and the public – about DNA technology and research.
Initially, it was reasonable and wise for New Zealand to be sceptical about genetic engineering.
‘‘In those days, the early 2000s, there wasn’t a lot of good information out there,’’ she says. ‘‘I felt New Zealand needed to be relatively cautious about releasing crops [before] substantive field tests were conducted under New Zealand conditions.
‘‘I could see advantages for other countries, but not necessarily advantages for New Zealand,’’ she says.
But technology has changed again and we’re now talking about gene editing with hot new tools like Crispr. Don’t worry, we’re not going to get too technical here.
‘‘It’s the precision,’’ she says. ‘‘Using editing, we can target a very specific site and cause a mutation.’’
This must be compared to other types of genetic manipulation that have been going on for 80 years, including in New Zealand.
An important one has various names but let’s go with ‘‘mutation breeding’’.
For the purpose of mutating the DNA of plants, they are irradiated with something like cobalt 60 or treated with a mutagenic chemical.
The result increases yield or enhances traits such as disease resistance, herbicide tolerance and drought tolerance. Sometimes mutation breeding makes food more desirable for humans – grapefruit with a deeper red colour for example.
Mutation breeding also produces ‘‘random, multiple and unspecific genetic changes’’ to plants, Jameson says.
About 25 per cent of ornamental and decorative plants and about 75 per cent of crop plants like rice, wheat, barley, peas, grapefruit and pears have been mutated by these methods at some point.
There are about 3200 mutant varieties registered in more than 170 plant species.
In New Zealand in recent years, a herbicidetolerant brassica has been released and these techniques were investigated in kiwifruit to find resistance to the vine-killing disease Psa.
There is no New Zealand legislation covering these mutation breeding processes, which are ‘‘generally regarded as safe’’ (GRAS).
There are big differences between ‘‘random, multiple and unspecific genetic changes’’ and ‘‘targeting a single gene and mutating that’’, which is gene editing.
An example here is helpful. About 2005, Japanese scientists observed that some rice has a natural mutation in the gene that controls a hormone called cytokinin.
The more hormone available, the higher the number and size of rice grains – desirable results when feeding humans and animals.
About a decade later, another group of scientists edited the gene that controls the hormone. They copied or mimicked the natural mutation, what nature had already done.
And they got the same results – higher yields. What could be wrong with that?
Well, it risks a ‘‘wild west of gene editing that puts at risk the environment, people’s health and consumer trust in . . . food,’’ according to lobby group GE Free NZ.
‘‘We are not growing any genetically engineered crop plants commercially in New Zealand,’’ Jameson says, ‘‘but we should look to be growing gene-edited plants, as gene editing is so much more precise.’’
Her beef is that New Zealand’s current legislation governing genetic engineering is ‘‘very, very restrictive’’ and also bans gene editing. The legislation should be ‘‘urgently’’ changed, she says.
‘‘... We should look to be growing geneedited plants, as gene editing is so much more precise.’’
Paula Jameson was born and raised in Christchurch to a family closely tied to the land, trees and gardening. She’s the great-granddaughter of Harry Ell, a Christchurch member of Parliament from 1899 to 1919. He was a prohibitionist, unionist and progressive reformer.
He is now best remembered for the Summit Road, a network of reserves and rest houses linked by a scenic road on the Port Hills above Christchurch. It is today the city’s playground for lovers of the outdoors.
Her father was John Jameson, who founded the Summit Road Society to carry on the Ell dream. He also ran Arbor Days for local schools for ‘‘many decades’’, she recalls.
This early exposure to plants, trees and the outdoors led Paula Jameson to the University of Canterbury.
She was a good student and remembers someone suggesting medical school. However, she thought ‘‘without plants, we don’t need doctors’’ – because humans would be extinct.
So she honed her interest in plant chemistry, what’s going on inside plants and trees.
After a stint lecturing at Otago, she wound up at Massey and married to fellow plant biologist Dr John Clemens. She was head of department at 39 and had Massey’s first professorial child.
The family moved to Christchurch in 2004 and she became head of the School of Biological Sciences, a much larger operation.
She liked university administration and its endless meetings because she got to ‘‘facilitate the careers of my colleagues’’.
She also sometimes facilitated people out of their careers or off the campus. Sacking students and academics came with the management job.
Meanwhile, she was rising through the PBRF ranks. Performance-based research funding is a chunk of government money divided among tertiary education organisations depending how their academics rank.
Most of these people have PhDs and most have been A+ students their entire lives.
Every six years, their peers rank their work and many get Bs and some – horrors – Cs. Many complain PBRF is harsh and unfair.
Jameson was the principal moderator for PBRF 2018. ‘‘I was essentially the final arbiter of every PBRF grade nationally,’’ she says. There was facilitating under way here too. The role required a ‘‘wise and dispassionate voice while superintending a fair process’’, according to the University of Canterbury.
Despite these administrative duties, Jameson kept up her teaching and research.
Her main speciality was the hormone cytokinin, mentioned above, and she has written 120 peer-reviewed academic publications, which is a good number.
She is in the ‘‘top 1 per cent of cited plant/ animal scientists’’, according to one international benchmarking service.
Her citation from the NZ Association of Scientists mentions all this, plus her research on Aotearoa’s indigenous flora, her major collaborations with industry in forage and seed production, and her life fellowships from the agricultural, horticultural and plant biology communities.
‘‘It was nice to be recognised with the [Marsden Medal] because it’s beyond being an academic. It includes all the service and community work,’’ she says.
Her retirement is not final. She’s got a sweet gig in China with a former student and collaborator that could produce 100 new wheat breeding lines. She has committed to assisting for nine months over three years.
And she’s probably not done advocating for gene editing. It’s likely, she says, that New Zealand’s big environmental issues – climate change and agricultural issues – could be ameliorated by editing. Grasses could be edited to reduce nitrogen runoff or reduce methane emissions.
But before that, we’ll need to change the country’s genetic engineering legislation?
‘‘I believe it should be,’’ Jameson says.