Within a year, David and six of the scientists at Agrogen found themselves on the street when they discovered the lab doors chained shut one morning and a notice on them announcing the company’s bankruptcy. in Botany at Montana before taking a position as a research scientist with Agrogen Biotechnologies in Vancouver, Canada. He worked in timber sales in the mountains of Montana for the US Forest Service while completing undergraduate degrees at the University of Montana (BA in Botany and BSc in Forestry, both with honors). “If you focus solely on being a genebank manager, then you are never viewed by your scientific peers as a research scientist and that can mean fewer opportunities for collaboration.” It is a hard balance to achieve but it would seem that David has done it.ĭavid’s life-long interest in plant biodiversity has taken him on a career path that has traversed academia, private industry, and public service. “If you focus purely on the science, then management of the genebank suffers,” he says. The entrepreneurial botanist who co-founded forestry biotech startups and created a “self-illuminating Christmas tree” (a fantasy story involving a firefly luciferase gene in a Douglas fir cell culture) eventually became the manager of one the world’s most important collections of potato diversity.ĭavid argues that genebank managers need to balance science with the management of their collections. “You not only have to be well grounded in science but you also need to know how to manage budgets and people and how to essentially run a business.”ĭavid, who has just retired as leader of the International Potato Center’s (CIP) genebank in Lima, Peru, has had a taste of all of that in his career. Recipient of the inaugural Crop Trust Legacy Award David Ellis was once asked how to prepare for a career as a genebank scientist.
The need to conserve crop diversity within a rational, efficient global system has been recognized in various international agreements
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