John Bowman grew up in Montana and later during secondary school Illinois, obtaining a BS degree in biochemistry from the University of Illinois in 1986. During his PhD studies with Elliot Meyerowitz at the California Institute of Technology (1986–1991), he studied the genetic basis of flower development in the model flowering plant Arabidopsis. He continued to study aspects of flower development as a postdoc with David Smyth at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and briefly during a Fulbright stay at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. In 1995 he was hired as an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis where he subsequently became full Professor in 2004, where his laboratory investigated the genetic basis of leaf development. In 2006 he moved back to Monash University as a Federation Fellow (2006–2011) and has remained in Melbourne as a Professor through to the present. During the past few decades his laboratory has focused on the evolution of land plants, using the liverwort Marchantia as a comparative model system. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2014.What turned you on to biology in the first place? When growing up in Montana during primary school years, we would go on family camping trips from Yellowstone south through the canyons of southern Utah, and after moving east these trips became extended summertime tours of the western third of the US and Canada. This corner of the world contains amazingly varied and spectacular natural habitats, landscapes and biomes. Upon entering every new national park, I recall the anticipation of reading the literature describing the unique biology and geology of the region (this was back in the time when the parks provided such material gratis). Some of my fondest memories were of experiences hiking, where walking ahead on trails or waiting for my parents to observe birds (before I became a twitcher myself) allowed me times of solitude to absorb the natural environs and become fascinated by the diversity of life, from the lodgepole pine forests and meadows of Yellowstone to the pinyon-juniper woodlands of canyon country. These moments to hours of observation, sometimes lying down with my face centimetres from the ground and other times gazing to observe the sweeping vistas, allowed all five of my senses to absorb the natural world’s diversity. The immersion in nature was a better science education than I ever received in any classroom. As a kid, I soaked this in, and in a past life I would have become a ‘natural historian’, albeit more in the vein of Wallace than Darwin owing to financial circumstances. However, during high school I read a book by Salvador Luria (36 Lectures in Biology) and knew that I wanted to study genetics, as it provided an elegant approach to understanding biology. Despite this, for my undergraduate degree I primarily took classes in physics and chemistry, thinking that I would not be diligent enough to study these subjects on my own as I would for biology.
And what drew you to your specific field of research? When I started graduate school at Caltech, I did not arrive with preconceived ideas of a specific problem that I wanted to investigate, but rather — and this is a strength of the US system of graduate school — I wandered about campus talking to various professors about projects, and the idea of studying floral homeotic mutants in Elliot Meyerowitz’s lab struck me as a beautiful application of genetics. Then, as now, there exists a prejudice for some models, e.g. animals over other forms of life perhaps because we are an animal and innately want to know ourselves. However, the spectrum of life is as varied as anyone’s imagination, and now that molecules have given us an unprecedented view of life it is humbling that metazoans are but a single twig on an expansive tree of life. I did not know it at the time, but the decision to work on flowers has led to a lifetime of pursuing questions in plant development and evolution. And since there are fewer researchers (and money) for plant research, this has also provided an opportunity to make more fundamental discoveries than if I had chosen to work in an already crowded field. Retrospection is always easier than future gazing, but my advice to younger scientists is to follow the question (not the organism) — and with the tools available today, such as genome sequencing and CRISPR, which we could only dream of when I was a PhD student, any organism can become a model if you have an interesting question.
Thinking back, what had drawn me into biology initially — the amazing diversity of life and how it came to be — was difficult to study in the late 1980s using genetics, and the path I pursued was examining the diversity one could generate in an individual species using forward genetics, which is still my favourite experiment, as you are letting the organism tell you how it works rather than relying on any preconceived notions you might have. Only later, with tools now available, did we enter the study of the origins of biological diversity, now often referred to as evo–devo. This endeavour has opened the world of liverworts to me, which has excited my curiosity once again in a multitude of directions.
If you had to choose a different field of science, what would it be? My father was trained as a physicist, but he also taught astronomy and geology, and thus I was exposed to a broad spectrum of science from an early age (and being from Montana, the home of T. rex et al., this also meant an early interest in palaeontology). I recall having ‘lectures’ at the dinner table on topics ranging from the optics of rainbows and refraction to the nature of matter as a particle or wave. Both astronomy and geology were therefore considered options, but in both I found looking backwards into deep time a bit depressing, and it made my younger self feel insignificant, and thus I chose to study the immediacy of living things.
When choosing what to study, I was reminded of a filmstrip (a common medium of the 1970s) called powers of ten, where your perspective was successively magnified by factors of ten as one zoomed into cells then molecules then atoms and finally quarks or alternatively zoomed out into forests then continents and so on until one saw the Milky Way and then the vastness of a universe of galaxies. This variation in perspective returned to me when considering my science: I am interested in investigating within a limited power of ten, from organisms down to gene products and their interactions, but I lose interest when it is magnified more than this, though I am happy that others are investigating the powers of ten that I neglect. As one ages, one’s eyesight fades a bit, and for me this has meant zooming out to ponder about how land plants first evolved and diversified, coming full circle to consider deep time, but being older I no longer consider it depressing.
I have been fortunate to have been a professor for nearly half my life, a privilege that should not be underestimated as it has allowed me to change different fields of study periodically whenever a discovery prompted such a change. In this sense, science is like surfing: it usually takes a bit of hard work to paddle out, but a single discovery or observation can become a wave that you can ride until the thrill has dissipated, and then it is time to paddle out again. During my career, I have been in the right place to catch successive waves, e.g. flower development, the development of leaf polarity, the evolution of land plant life cycles, and the genetic origins of land plants. The transitions between each were spurred by intriguing observations that hinted at something larger, and hence my advice to not be hesitant to follow the mystery, and even if it is a red herring there is time to paddle out again and enjoy the swim.
Who were your key early influences? The mentors I have mentioned above, my father, my PhD advisor (Elliot Meyerowitz) and postdoc advisor (David Smyth), all inspired in me an awe for the natural world in different ways. The latter two afforded me an enormous amount of freedom when I was in their laboratories, and it is a model I have followed with my own scientific offspring, sometimes with incredible synergy and other times somewhat less successfully. However, all of them are afforded the freedom to make projects and discoveries their own — one of the most satisfying moments as a scientist is the realisation that you know something that no one else does, and seeing this in one of your students is even better.
Do you have a favourite paper or science book? While there are a multitude of papers and books that have influenced me, I will mention only two here. First, The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins is a masterpiece in evolutionary thinking and inspired me on the organisation of a chapter I wrote on human evolution in Genetic Analysis, a textbook co-written with Mark Sanders, who convinced reluctant me to be an author, but in looking back it is something that I am proud to have done. Second is a paper that I presented on in the very first journal club I attended at Caltech entitled ‘A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila’ by Ed Lewis (Nature (1978) 276, 565–570). To put it mildly, the paper is complex, and at times I struggled to present with clarity to the other new PhD students, but a kindly older professor sitting in the back of the room gently guided me on the journey. Again, little did I know at the time that Lewis’s work would influence the direction of my science for the next decade and beyond.
Which aspect of science, your field or in general, do you wish the general public knew more about? There are two aspects to this question: processes and facts. With respect to the former, the processes, the general public (especially in some parts of the world where dogma often reigns) lacks a nuanced view of science as a process: that science is performed by scientists who are people (who can be fallible); that the scientific process is not linear with advances sometimes negating previous beliefs and that the new advances may fall to the same fate; and that science is about hypotheses that can be tested. The lack of understanding about the scientific process was on full display earlier this decade during the COVID pandemic. Understandably, people wanted answers (in an age where people expect to just search the internet for an answer they agree with) and were distraught when hypotheses and advice shifted with the observations. But this is just the way science is supposed to operate — except in a twist, we found out how easily (mis)information and (mis)representation of the scientific process were hijacked for more nefarious purposes.
With respect to the latter, facts (the non-alternative variety), the general public is largely uneducated about much of the scientific progress in the past century and how much it has altered the planet. For example, awareness that humans can change the planet’s atmosphere just as we have changed the land use on its surface: look out from a plane window and see how much agriculture has altered the biomes of Earth. Due to the limits of the human lifespan, perceptions of the environment suffer from a creeping baseline, with one generation seeing a degradation of biodiversity and a later generation seeing it as normal. Deep time for humans in general is difficult. Another example that arises in classes I teach is the lack of knowledge on the origin of our modern food supply, including the genetics behind the crops that are sown and the fruit that is harvested. Domestication via genetic selection has modified crops from the wild plants from which they are derived and continues to do so, revealing another common misconception: that the world is static as was thought at the beginning of the Renaissance. Rather, one of the most astonishing revelations of genomics, to me at least, is the variation among genomes within species and the rapidity with which changes occur — evolution in real time, just as is used for new influenza vaccines every season.
These misconceptions of science and changing knowledge are ironic on two levels. First, on a superficial level, people are always keen to use the latest technology without thought to the science that enabled it. And second, on a deeper level, we all begin our lives as scientists, being curious about the world, how it works and how it came to be, and performing ‘experiments’ to place ourselves in it. Our curiosity lingers throughout childhood, and in scientists both curiosity and in some ways childhood extend throughout our lives. The challenge is how to foster this extension more broadly.
What do you think is the biggest problem science as a whole is facing today? In two words, climate change. It is an existential crisis for humanity, not for life on Earth — as life has survived many and oftentimes more severe calamities that changed the climate in the past and thus evolutionary trajectories — but for human civilisation as we know it in the past hundred years. In some sense, my lifetime may have been the golden age of science, where we had the luxury of asking fundamental questions about the nature of life and the universe. One attribute noticeable in some younger scientists is that of an applied outlook: how can I use science to not just understand the world but to better the world — a comforting vision, as the upcoming generations of scientists have been saddled with a climate problem that my and previous generations have bestowed upon them. Optimistically, both fundamental (blue sky) science and its application will generate ideas and technologies that will stabilise the climate at a comfortable level. Pessimistically, geopolitical realities might hinder our comfortable future, and we may go the way of countless other species that have once inhabited the planet (long before any colonisation of Mars fantasy).
For the sake of my daughter, I end on a more optimistic note. You are inheriting a most wondrous planet, with an almost unimaginable diversity of life, and I predict enough scientific and technological advances such that humans can control Earth’s destiny in the near geological time frame.
Republished from Current Biology.
