Rice by Chance: Dave Mackill pioneer interview
Channel: International Rice Research Institute
Date: 2011-06-13

In this Pioneer Interview excerpt, David Mackill, who departed the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI; http://irri.org) as a principal scientist in the Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Biotechnology Division in February 2011, discusses how he got involved in rice by chance. 

He was the program leader for rainfed rice production at IRRI and led the development of more than 20 rice cultivars adapted to the challenging growing conditions in southern Asia.  He also oversaw  the IRRI project Stress-Tolerant Rice for Poor Farmers in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa or STRASA  - http://irri.org/strasa - for which he helped secure a grant worth US$19.9 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Over the last 28 years, Dr. Mackill held critical positions for rice genetics and breeding, including 10 years as a U.S. Department of Agriculture research geneticist stationed at the University of California, Davis. In the last 17 years, Dr. Mackill and colleagues identified and transferred a gene conferring submergence tolerance into new high-yielding rice varieties. Monsoonal rains plague southern Asia with flooding that destroys crops. These new rice strains are being adopted on a large scale and will translate into millions of tons of new rice for developing countries. He is now the strategic rice expert within the research and development arm of Mars Incorporated.

Interview excerpt on rice by chance:

"More or less by chance, I ended up getting a job working as an undergraduate in a rice research project at UC Davis. There was a project on rice genetics and I started working with the team there until I graduated. That was in 1975 and basically I spent my entire career since then working with rice except for a brief period at ICRISAT [International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid-Tropics; http://http://www.icrisat.org/ ]. 

Being there at Davis working on rice, I got to know some of the people who visited from IRRI such as Gurdev Khush [IRRI rice breeder and principal scientist, 1967-2001] and Ronnie Coffman [IRRI plant breeder, 1971-81]. 

I became aware of a project of the Rockefeller Foundation that gave students fellowships to work overseas at one of the international centers. So [in 1978], Ronnie Coffman helped me set up my thesis research on heat tolerance in rice at IRRI. 

After obtaining my PhD, I was looking for job and, since I was still interested in staying in agriculture, I had an opportunity to work on sorghum as an international intern at ICRISAT. I found that working on sorghum was quite different than working on rice. I missed the work at IRRI in particular. 

So, about a year after that, IRRI expressed an interest that I come back and work on rice breeding in the Philippines and so I jumped on that opportunity to come back and resume my career in rice."