# David Baulcombe

Sir David Charles Baulcombe FRS FMedSci (born 7 April 1952) is a British plant scientist and geneticist. As of October 2024 he was Head of Group, Gene Expression, in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and the Edward Penley Abraham Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany Emeritus at Cambridge. He held the Regius botany chair in that department from 2007 to 2020.

## Early life and education

David Baulcombe was born on 7 April 1952 in the United Kingdom, in Solihull, Warwickshire, (in England's Midlands), into "a non-scientific family".
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in botany from the University of Leeds in 1973, at the age of 21, and continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1976/1977 (for research on Messenger RNA in vascular plants supervised by John Ingle).

## Career

After his PhD, Baulcombe spent the next three years as a postdoctoral fellow in North America, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and then in Athens, Georgia, in the United States (respectively, at McGill University from January 1977-November 1978, and then the University of Georgia thereafter, until December 1980). Baulcombe returned to the United Kingdom then, where he was given the opportnity to create his own research group at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge (PBI, the John Innes Centre). At the PBI, Baulcombe initially held the position of Higher Scientific Officer, and was promoted to Principal Scientific Officer in April 1986.
In August 1988 Baulcombe left Cambridge for Norwich. He joined the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich in 1988, and as of 2007 was a senior research scientist, and also served as head of laboratory between 1990 and 1993 and between 1999 and 2003. In 1998 he was appointed honorary professor at the University of East Anglia, and given a full professorship there in 2002. In March 2007 it was announced that Baulcombe would become the next Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge (as a Royal Society Research Professor), taking up his post in September 2007. Accordingly, in 2008, Baulcombe was also named as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2009, the Cambridge professorship was renamed "Regius Professor of Botany". He was succeeded in the chair by Ottoline Leyser in 2020.
Baulcombe "serves on several [professional] committees and study sections", and was president of the International Society of Plant Molecular Biology from 2003–2004. In the approximate period of 2007-2009, Baulcombe was a Senior Advisor to The EMBO Journal. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2015.

## Research

An annotation regarding Baulcombe's 2001 nomination to The Royal Society read that he had
   made an outstanding contribution to the inter-related areas of plant virology, gene silencing and disease resistance... discover[ing] a specific signalling system and an antiviral defence system in plants... [leading] to the development of new technologies that promise to revolutionise gene discovery in plant biology.
Hence, his research interests have mainly been in botany and fundamental biology, in the fields of virus movement, genetic regulation, disease resistance, and RNA and more generally, gene silencing.
In 1998 Craig Mello, Andrew Fire, and colleagues reported a potent gene silencing effect—observations on the mechanism of RNA interference—after injecting double stranded RNA into Caenorhabditis elegans, a discovery notable as a detailed description of what proved to be the correct mechanism of a broad class of phenomena. Baulcombe then, with Andrew Hamilton, discovered a small interfering RNA that is the specificity determinant in RNA-mediated gene silencing in plants. Baulcombe's group demonstrated "that while viruses can induce gene silencing some viruses encode proteins that suppress gene silencing". After these initial observations, many laboratories around the world searched for the occurrence of this phenomenon in other organisms. (The leaders of the team reporting the correct mechanism of the phenomena, Fire and Mello, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006 for their work, although some have argued that Baulcombe was among those overlooked for that year's prize.)
With other members of his research group at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Baulcombe also helped unravel the importance of small interfering RNA in epigenetics and in defence against viruses.

### Honours and awards

In June 2009, Baulcombe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2009 Birthday Honours List, "for services to plant science".
Baulcombe has also received the following honours and awards:
* 1997 election to EMBO Membership;
* 2001 election as Fellow of the Royal Society;
* 2002 election as Member of the Academia Europaea;
* 2002 recipient of the Ruth Allen Award of the American Phytopathological Society;
* 2002 recipient of the Kumho Science International Award in Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, awarded by the Kumho Cultural Foundation, Korea;
* 2003 co-recipient (with Thomas Tuschl, Craig Mello, an Andrew Fire), of the Wiley Prize in the Biomedical Sciences, awarded by the Wiley Foundation at Rockefeller University;
* 2004 recipient of the M. W. Beijerinck Virology Prize, awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences;
* 2005 election as a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences;
* 2005 co-recipient (with Craig Mello and Andrew Fire) of the Massry Prize, awarded by the Massry Foundation and the University of Southern California;
* 2006 recipient of the Royal Medal of The Royal Society, "For his profoundly significant recent discoveries for not only plants but for all of biology and for medicine.";
* 2008 co-recipient (with Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros) of the Benjamin Franklin Medal, awarded by The Franklin Institute, "for their discovery of small RNAs that turn off genes";
* 2008 co-recipient (with Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun) of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research;
* 2009 recipient of the Harvey Prize, granted by the Technion Israeli Institute for Technology;
* 2010 recipient of the Wolf Prize in Agriculture “for pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants is of profound importance, not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine”. ;
* 2010 Humphry Davy Award of the Royal Society, in its last year of issue, a part of the Humphry Davy and Claude Bernard Lectures, occasional prizes and exchange lectures established by The Royal Society and Académie des Sciences, in this case, given to a senior British scientist with its lecture to be given on a visit to France;
* 2012 recipient of the Balzan Prize for Epigenetics;
* 2014 recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics;
* 2014 recipient, the inaugural recipient, of the Barbara McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies, from the Maize Genetics Cooperation, for "exceptional contributions in the field of plant epigenetics";
* 2015 election as Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh;
* 2020 election as an Academician in The Pontifical Academy of Sciences;
* 2023 recognition as an honorary Doctor of Science of University of Warwick.

## Personal life

Baulcombe stated in a post dated 2017 that outside of the laboratory, he "promote[s] the use of plant biotechnology for crop improvement... [and that he is] particularly interested in technologies addressing problems in developing countries." He has said he works on plants "because their products are good to eat and wear and write on—and also because plants are often good models for general biology.
As of this date, Baulcombe resided in Norwich. He has been married to Rose Eden since 1976, and they have four children. His interests include music, sailing, and hill walking.