Profile of Richard Dixon
- Melissa Marino, Freelance Science Writer
Designer diets. Cleaner burning fuels. Healthier, less flatulent cows. Richard Dixon hopes to make these lofty goals come to pass by tinkering with plant genes to utilize the natural treasures locked inside some of the most mundane vegetation. Dixon, senior vice president and director of the Plant Biology Division at the Noble Foundation (Ardmore, OK), is driven by a sense of scientific curiosity about the complicated chemical processes plants use to make their natural products. He has spent his career studying and, more recently, manipulating natural product pathways in plants, particularly in legumes such as alfalfa.
Dixon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007 for advancing the understanding of the synthesis of plant natural products, which carries possible applications to human health, agriculture, and biofuel production. In his Inaugural Article published in a recent issue of PNAS, he and his colleagues describe how two harmful events—pathogen attack and physical wounding—activate an important chemical defense pathway in plants through two divergent mechanisms (1).
Organic Interest
Growing up in Burton-on-Trent, England, Dixon had to decide the course of his life at an early age. In the British school system in the 1960s, students were required to choose by age 14 whether they were going to study arts or sciences.
“I was a timorous schoolboy, and it was a really tough decision whether to go into the arts or sciences,” Dixon recounts. He easily could have gone on to study literature, he says, without some helpful advice from his headmaster. “[He] was a chemistry Ph.D., and he called me up on the phone one day and told me, in no uncertain terms, ‘you're going to be a scientist!”’
Chemistry grabbed Dixon's attention during his last two years of secondary school. “I had a chemistry lab upstairs in my bedroom. I probably …
