Plant geneticist Harry Klee always assumed that, after finishing his postdoc, he’d pursue an academic career. But one afternoon in the mid-1980s, he opened up an issue of Science to find a paper reporting the first “transgenic plant in the history of mankind,” he recalls. It wasn’t the accomplishment so much as the fact that the paper was written by scientists at Monsanto that blew him away.
At the time, industry was considered the career path for scientists who couldn’t cut it in academia, he says. Yet, although he’d gotten a job offer as an associate professor, when the time came to set out on his own, Klee decided to join the agricultural science company. “All the stuff Monsanto was doing was what I wanted to do,” he says—and when he visited the facilities, his inclination was confirmed: “It was clear that they were the best lab to do plant molecular biology in the world, bar none.”
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