The highest honor given by the Society for In Vitro Biology is the Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is presented to scientists who are considered pioneers or highly influential researchers to the science and art of cell culture. They are men and women who have devoted their careers to exemplary research and/or teaching. The recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award are selected by vote of the Board of Directors from a list of nominations recommended by the Awards Committee. The Society for In Vitro Biology honored Dr. John Harbell, Dr. Ray Shillito, and Dr. Bill Gordon-Kamm with the SIVB Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 In Vitro Biology Meeting. This issue of the In Vitro Report highlights Dr. Gordon-Kamm’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Shillito’s and Dr. Harbell’s Lifetime Achievement Award articles were included in the previous issues of the In Vitro Report.
Bill Gordon-Kamm
Awarded the Society for In Vitro Biology Lifetime Achievement Award at the SIVB’s Annual Meeting, June 2023
The Society for In Vitro Biology established the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989 to recognize outstanding late-career scientists who have made significant contributions to the field of in vitro biology and/or in the development of novel technologies that have advanced in vitro biology.
Dr. Bill Gordon-Kamm receives the SIVB’s Lifetime Achievement Award from President Addy Alt-Holland
Dr. Bill Gordon-Kamm is the 2023 recipient of the SIVB Lifetime Achievement Award for the Plant Biotechnology section. Dr. Gordon-Kamm is currently a Distinguished Laureate at Corteva agriscience and he has been focused on maize, and monocot, transformation research for most of his career in industry. Over the span of 35+ years in the private sector, Dr. Bill Gordon-Kamm has, without question, met and exceeded every qualification for the SIVB Lifetime Achievement Award. While working at DeKalb Plant Genetics in the 1980s, Bill was quick to adopt a new technology, the “biolistic” particle gun developed at Cornell University, to introduce DNA molecules into maize cells and enable the stable genetic transformation of maize. The work led to Bill becoming the lead author on the seminal paper describing the stable transformation and regeneration of maize in 1990, and he has been pushing the boundaries of maize transformation research ever since. In the past decade, Bill and his team have published several papers describing the use of “morphogenic genes”, transcription factors like WUS and BBM, that have enabled rapid, efficient, genotype-independent transformation of maize and other cereal species. With the development of morphogenic gene-based transformation methods, Bill and his team have rewritten the book on cereal transformation. As Dr. Peggy Lemaux (UC-Berkeley) stated in her letter of support, “Without Bill’s pioneering work, it would likely have been decades before such achievements would have been realized. And this was all due to his decade-long pursuit of introducing and fine-tuning the expression of these developmental genes to realize these extraordinary advancements.” Recently, Bill and the team at Corteva have extended this work to enable cereal transformation and editing from leaf base tissue across many cereal species, eliminating the constraint of generating immature embryos as explants for transformation. Bill continues to extend the limits of what is possible and already has a litany of legendary achievements in plant tissue culture and transformation. He is an innovative, visionary plant scientist without peer, whose contributions to science extend well beyond plant transformation, including developing systems for inducible gene expression and gene excision mechanisms. Bill epitomizes the criteria for the SIVB Lifetime Achievement Award, and his work is the very definition of “development of novel technologies that have advanced in vitro biology.”
Congratulations to Bill on this very well-deserved honor!
Submitted by Todd Jones and Peggy Lemaux
