Be Bold Or Just Don’t Do It

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s pretty bold to stand up publicly, like at your Ted Talk and say, one of the biggest, most intractable problems we face right now, I think I personally can do something about it.

[APPLAUSE]

JOANNE CHORY: I recently had an epiphany.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But that’s what plant biologist Joanne Chory did. This was in 2019.

JOANNE CHORY: I realized that I could actually play a role in solving one of the biggest problems that faces mankind today, and that is the problem of climate change.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The idea was to enlist plants. Joanne had spent her career studying them. Her discoveries into how plants respond to light made her famous and revered among plant scientists. Her work is so fundamental, it’s in textbooks. And it led her to this big idea. Maybe her study subject could be harnessed to fight climate change.

JOANNE CHORY: And every experiment that I have done in my lab over the last 30 years has been directed toward doing the really big experiment, this one last big experiment.

FLORA LICHTMAN: She knew it was her last big experiment because she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a fact she also shared in her Ted Talk.

JOANNE CHORY: This gives me a sense of urgency that I want to do this now, while I feel good enough to really–

FLORA LICHTMAN: I called Joanne in the fall of 2024. And even though her Parkinson’s was more advanced, she was still working. She didn’t even really seem like she’d slowed down much. She was even doing interviews.

JOANNE CHORY: I think we should just wing it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: All right, let’s wing it. Let’s just dive in.

JOANNE CHORY: OK.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I wanted to hear more about the work and what she was trying to achieve. And most of all, I wanted to understand this aspect of Joanne’s personality that seems so remarkable to me.

[SOFT MUSIC]

She just seemed undaunted. She launched this project to save the world from a global problem in the face of her own declining health, knowing she probably won’t be able to see it all the way through. How do you do that? What makes Joanne able to stare profound challenges right in the face and say, I got this.

SPEAKER 1: Joanne is fearless.

SPEAKER 2: She is fearless. She’s always been very courageous.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So many people describe Joanne this way. Where’d that come from?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is The Leap, a series about scientists who are risking it all to make a breakthrough.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’ve heard a lot of people describe Joanne as fearless. Was she like that as a kid?

MARY ANN CHORY: No.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Mary Ann Chory, Joanne’s older sister.

MARY ANN CHORY: Fearless wouldn’t come to mind. I mean, she was easily spooked by my brothers at five. They could go in the closet and go, boo, and she would jump up to the ceiling.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne’s training to become a scientist began early because in her household, just like in science, she had to be tough. There were six kids. They grew up outside of Boston. Mary Ann was the oldest.

MARY ANN CHORY: Joanne was number three.

JOANNE CHORY: Number three, I’m a middle child. Tough. I don’t like looking for attention and things.

MARY ANN CHORY: We had four brothers, and we were the two girls that united together. Girl solidarity, go girl, go type stuff.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne, you said that your brothers helped you cultivate a thick skin. How did they torture you? Tell me all the ways.

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE CHORY: My brothers tortured me by telling me how ugly I was, how fat I was, how this and that I was. They were always laying judgments.

MARY ANN CHORY: The other thing they did, they all were wrestlers. And you’d walk through the house, and all of a sudden you’d be down on the floor. And they’re saying they’re practicing their guillotine or something like that.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Literally toughened her up.

MARY ANN CHORY: Yeah, so we got literally toughened up too.

JOANNE CHORY: But my sister is the oldest, and she set the tone for the family, I think. So we all ended up in science because she was a scientist, but she was–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

JOANNE CHORY: She was more of a mathematician.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait, all your siblings are in science?

JOANNE CHORY: They’re either engineers or scientists. So it is kind of weird. Neither of my parents are scientists.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you think– what accounts for that, do you think?

JOANNE CHORY: I don’t know. My sister has a strong personality. I always attach it to her.

MARY ANN CHORY: It is true. Since I’m the oldest, you get credit for a lot of stuff. But I give it to my father and my mother more than me. Growing up, they were the first generation, both of them of Lebanese parents. So they were always about us doing well in school. Nothing made them more proud than that we all went to college.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In college, Joanne studied biology and then went on to get a PhD in microbiology.

MARY ANN CHORY: And my father especially loved it when Joanne got a PhD. He put her thesis on the bookcase. I don’t know If he could understand it, but he would pull it out to show people the book of scientific pearls that his daughter had written.

FLORA LICHTMAN: After completing her PhD, Joanne took a leap. Microbiology seemed crowded. She decided to move into plant research, which was not the sexiest field at the time.

JOANNE CHORY: It was horrible being a plant scientist. I always say to people, people always ask me, is it hard being a woman in science? I go, no, it’s hard to be a plant woman in science because no one cares what you say.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: But being away from the crowds was part of the appeal. And Joanne just loved plants.

JOANNE CHORY: They’re pretty. They’re beautiful. I love flowers, so that’s one reason why I came to plants. But another reason why I came to plants was the fact that we knew so little about them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne went to Fred Ausubel’s lab at Harvard Medical School for a postdoc.

JOANNE CHORY: I came and said, I want to study plants. And they go, OK, what are you going to do? And I’m like, I don’t knwo. Every day, I would read this biology book about plants. And he would come in the morning and say, what did you come up with last night?

FLORA LICHTMAN: And each day she’d have a new answer, a new project she wanted to try.

JOANNE CHORY: Some of them were pretty good, and some of them were pretty audacious.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Looking back now on those early audacious projects, you can see the rock star scientist emerging, the kind of scientist who would one day take on saving the entire planet. But in those early days, Joanne was content to just upend the entire field of plant science.

STEVE KAY: She kind of woke up the plant world.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Biologist Steve Kay remembers when he first heard about Joanne and this project of hers that would end up rocking the field. It was at a conference where they met for the first time.

STEVE KAY: And she came up to me after my talk and said, you know what you’re doing is just going to take way too long. And that was about the very first introduction that I had.

FLORA LICHTMAN: When she said that to you– this is your first meeting– were you like, who are you?

STEVE KAY: Totally.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What was your response?

STEVE KAY: You can imagine. We’re all in our young 20s. And so Joanne, me, other postdocs from these big famous labs– there is that kind of culture in science– we were pretty full of ourselves. So yeah, I think I probably pleasantly bristled in a very British way, something like, do you really think so?

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is signature Joanne, being very direct. But also, Joanne had data to back up her point of view, that Steve wasn’t going about things in the best way.

STEVE KAY: And what I learnt at that meeting is she had done something absolutely inconceivable, which is the opposite of what we were all doing.

[MUSOIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is cool. So allow me to get a little bit into the weeds here. So when Joanne was presenting at this conference, there was this accepted way of doing plant science.

STEVE KAY: At that time, we were all working on a different plant species.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The field hadn’t coalesced around one model system. There wasn’t a fruit fly of plants. So some people were advocating that there should be, and Joanne was one of them. The idea was we should all pick one plant, study it, and use it to understand plants generally.

JOANNE CHORY: First of all, it was bold that I picked the plant that I picked to study. It’s called Arabidopsis.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Arabidopsis is not a flashy plant. It looks like something you’d see growing out of the crack of a sidewalk. But if you’re doing genetics experiments like Joanne wanted to do, it’s handy because it’s not too big if it’s in the lab. It goes to seed quickly, and it has a small genome. So Joanne took this plant, soaked its seeds in DNA-damaging liquid to give it mutations, germinated those seeds in the dark, and then looked for weird traits.

STEVE KAY: She took plants, mutated them, and found mutants that grew in the dark as if they had seen light.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They had leaves and long stems. But that was strange because growing in the dark is a death sentence for a plant. Plants need light to live. So in these mutants it seemed like a basic light sensor had gone haywire. So Joanne was like, whoa, weird. Maybe we can use these mutants to figure out how plants usually detect and respond to light. And that’s what she did. She found a gene that seem to be responsible for this behavior. Mutate that one gene, and the plant grew in the dark– because responding to light is, I don’t know, the most fundamental thing a plant does. So people were like, no way. This is impossibly complex. You can’t untangle this root ball. Joanne’s former trainee, Jennifer Nemhauser can explain.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: If you want to talk about audacious, thinking can get a plant to grow like it thinks it’s in the light when it’s growing in the dark, that’s going to be like a one-gene change. And suddenly, the plant is going to make the worst decision it could make, absolute certain death decision. No wonder everybody looked at her like she was totally nuts.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But she was right, and that was just the beginning.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This work eventually led Joanne to another huge finding, a hormone that before people had completely overlooked. Joanne proved over many years it’s crucial to a plant’s growth and form. Her lab mapped out basically every molecular link in the chain, the whole pathway connecting the hormone to the genes that control growth.

STEVE KAY: Yeah, the entire pathway of what people thought didn’t exist. So how did Joanne rock our thinking? That’s how. And it’s not to say the other approaches are not valid. They are. It’s just everybody was clustered around them, and Joanne was out here thinking in a different way.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne’s findings made the case for using this model plant, Arabidopsis, and for her whole approach. And it changed the field. Plant science started getting attention from new places.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: Yeah, it really transformed the whole landscape, the funding landscape. And she was also among the first plant biologists to be getting NIH money. And then she became really the first full-time plant biologist to become an HHMI investigator.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, wow.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: So she really pushed open those doors.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Now, as is often true when you’re out there thinking in a different way and pushing open doors that had previously been boarded up tight, some people throw a fit.

STEVE KAY: Joanne was threatening the norm. And so, if you’ve really contributed to a framework or a dominant way of addressing a scientific problem and somebody comes up with something orthogonal that looks like it’s going to add a significant leap, some people find that threatening.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Or to put it in American speak.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: Sometimes people are going to be pissed.

STEVE KAY: And what they do is they set a higher standard in order to believe it because it’s so new and challenging.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: Especially when some people feel like you’re too young, you’re the wrong gender, you’re using the wrong tools. You haven’t paid your dues.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But after a childhood full of guillotines and choke holds, Joanne was ready for it.

JOANNE CHORY: That’s when you have to have a thick skin. You got to keep at it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: If you go through a trial like this where people naysay you and doubt you, cast you as fringe and you end up being right, so right, it shapes you. It makes you more fearless the next time. And that’s what happened with Joanne. She came to realize that pushback isn’t always a bad sign. In fact, it might mean you’re on to something.

JOANNE CHORY: A lot of papers get rejected. People don’t understand it. But those are the papers you want to have, I think. You might say, if you don’t have 10 failures of every success, you’re not doing interesting enough science. You want people to say, get out of here. What are you talking about?

[LAUGHTER]

You want people to come in on both sides of the spectrum, the lowest score and the highest score. That would be good. But most people don’t see it that way.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Joanne wasn’t afraid to swing for the fences, even if sometimes she whiffed. And sometimes she did.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: Things happen in a lab that is working that hard at the cutting edge, where sometimes you publish things that end up being wrong. And Joanne, I think one of the most inspiring things I ever saw her do was be like, OK. We now have the evidence that this was wrong, and be like, OK. I want to be the first people who publish what’s right. This is how science works. Sometimes you’re wrong. OK. So let’s be the ones who actually show what is true.

STEVE KAY: Joanne is a rigorous thinker and not in a nitpicky way. It isn’t grandstanding. It isn’t egotistical. She always just had this passion. There was that look in her eyes where she wanted to how plants work.

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: I think Joanne has always been someone who’s like, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to go for it. Forget the low-hanging fruit. I’m going for the best fruit.

STEVE KAY: And there’s such a lesson there for young people, which is if you’re not going to be bold, just don’t do it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004. She was 49, a professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. Jennifer remembers when Joanne told the lab–

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: I swear we were gathered in the kitchen area, not in a conference room or anything. And she told us, and I think people gasped. And for a lot of us, I think we instantly thought about our kids. They were so young.

JOANNE CHORY: I had two kids that we adopted, my husband and me. And they were just a couple of years when I got diagnosed. They never really knew me without anything but a disease state. So I feel bad about that. But I worked hard to just be happy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And so if it was happy, that was good.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did your Parkinson’s diagnosis make you think differently about how you wanted to spend your time? Or did it change your relationship with taking risks?

JOANNE CHORY: I think it did. I definitely am a different person now because of that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: It’s emotional. It’s really hard. It’s really hard for me to think about a world that doesn’t have her in it. And yeah, I think she knows that her time is limited. And so, of course, of course it changes you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne started thinking about her legacy and how best to use her time. Her climate change project was germinating. And then came an opportunity to plant the seed.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 3: Our $3 million Breakthrough Prize is awarded to Joanne Chory.

[APPLAUSE]

FLORA LICHTMAN: In 2018, Joanne won the Breakthrough Prize. It’s one of the most prestigious awards in science, and it also has a star-studded ceremony.

MORGAN FREEMAN: To Introduce you to the scientist who worked out how it happens–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Morgan Freeman was an announcer of Joanne’s award.

MARY ANN CHORY: What was cool about that moment, though, is you got to look at it. There’s all these guys in black tux, and then Joanne’s there with her pink sequined gown on. She had to hold on to people a little bit because she needs a cane or a walker. But you got to admit, she’s really iconic in that moment.

[APPLAUSE]

FLORA LICHTMAN: An award like this is often a capstone of a person’s career, a way to honor their contributions at the end of their run. But Joanne in her iconic pink sequined dress was not there for a victory lap. Joanne realized that in this moment she had the attention of people with power and money and influence. And so, if she wanted to launch a project that could have real impact on the world, impact that would outlast her, now was her moment.

DETLEF WEIGEL: She thought about what could she advocate for.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Detlef Weigel, Joanne’s friend and colleague who remembers talking to Joanne about this.

DETLEF WEIGEL: The obvious thing would have been to say some plants feed us, and I’m a plant scientist, and so on and so forth. But she had this inspiring thought that what we have done in the last 150, 200 years or so, we have dug up dead plants. And we have burned dead plants. And that’s why there is a lot more CO2 out there. And Joanne said, well, let’s just reverse the process. Let’s put the CO2 back into the plants.

FLORA LICHTMAN: She carefully crafted her message.

JOANNE CHORY: –far reaching as our world edges closer to a crisis of sustainability. I hope it will catalyze greater awareness of the positive impact that plants can have in the quality of human life.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The idea was simple. Plants vacuum CO2 out of the air and store it. But when plants die or decompose, that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. So Joanne thought, what if we could engineer plants, specifically crops that we’re planting already, to store carbon more permanently by making their roots bigger and deeper and better at holding carbon underground?

DETLEF WEIGEL: On the one hand, it seemed so obvious, but it was so inspiring because all of a sudden all the plant scientists were like, hey, why did we not think of this?

JOANNE CHORY: A lot of young people with it who really felt like I gave them a hope. It was very interesting, people coming up to you and telling you, you gave me hope that it could be done.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, it’s because no one’s ever given anybody hope about climate change, ever.

JOANNE CHORY: No, the climate– and the climate change people are really depressing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joanne’s plan was working. She was invited to apply for an audacious project grant affiliated with Ted.

JOANNE CHORY: We wrote a budget for $34 million. Don’t ask me why.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Was that a lot or a little?

JOANNE CHORY: That’s a lot. For a plant geneticist, it’s like heaven. I don’t what to say. I never had a grant that big.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, it’s pretty cheap for saving the world, so–

JOANNE CHORY: Yes, I was very cheap. I learned that later. They gave us the whole $34.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You got it all.

JOANNE CHORY: Yeah, it’s really exciting.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: They called it the Harnessing Plants Initiative, and they began focusing on food crops, like rice and corn and wheat, looking for genes that control traits that would make them better carbon keepers, not unlike the work that Joanne did as a young scientist. They estimated if they improved crops modestly, they could capture 10% to 20% of current annual emissions.

JOANNE CHORY: When you get a winner, you just can’t not do the project.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Can I ask you a question about this because here’s the thing that I keep coming back to when I think about this. Climate change is such a big problem. Many people hit this wall where they feel so powerless.

JOANNE CHORY: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You pushed through that, and I wanted to know where did you get the boldness or the audacity to say, yeah, OK, huge global problem. I can do something about that.

JOANNE CHORY: I think it partly came from the fact that I was naive, and I let the naivete drive me. Some of this is just a really hard process. OK. I’ll try it. I’m always the one jumping in.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I asked Mary Ann what she thought about this answer, that Joanne’s fearlessness comes from being naive.

MARY ANN CHORY: I don’t think it’s because she’s naive. I think she knows it’s hard. Does that make sense? But I think her fearlessness comes from that she really– maybe you could call it arrogance, or maybe it’s confidence, or maybe it’s both. But I don’t think she thinks she’s going to fail. I think when she decides she’s going to do something, that’s when she becomes fearless. She might not go jump out of a plane. Maybe she doesn’t want to do that. But if she did, she would be the best at it. Does that make sense?

Once she’s decided this is something to solve, I don’t think she thinks failure is an option. I don’t even think it enters into her brain that it’s not going to work. She’s very confident that way. I guess some people could look at that as a negative thing. I think it’s a huge strength. I think it’s just a huge strength. And here’s the thing. She has a history of doing it. Does that make sense? Look at her science. Look at her science. So she has a right to think she can solve things because she has.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE CHORY: I didn’t think I could do it. I don’t know. Yeah, I am a person who believes, I guess, that we all can do something to make the planet a better place to live and make your family happier or whatever.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: A few weeks after I had all these conversations, in November 2024, Joanne Chory passed away. She was 69. She’d put another colleague in charge of the Harnessing Plants Initiative. It’ll live on without her. Around 70 people work on the project now. They’ve already identified genes involved in making roots better carbon keepers. But beyond harnessing plants, Joanne’s legacy is also harnessing plant scientists.

DETLEF WEIGEL: She really inspired an entire generation of plant scientists and said, we plant scientists should really think about how we can deal with climate change.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JENNIFER NEMHAUSE: She’s idolized by so many people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARY ANN CHORY: She’s such a warrior. I call her a badass warrior. And maybe I was the oldest and a model for a while, but she’s a role model for way more than our family but for the whole world.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we’re all very, very proud of her.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE CHORY: The Leap is a production of the hypothesis fund. It’s hosted by me, Flora Lichtman and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Devon Taylor, Pajau Vangay, and David Sanford, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Budo Karp, fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Thanks to Lynn Artell, Victoria Johnson, and Alyssa Medcalfe. And thanks to you for listening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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