Mike Gale
Mike at a CGIAR Science Council Meeting in 2009.
UK Royal Society “Food Security Report” team, July 2009. The published report (November 2009) is dedicated to Mike.
Mike (1985) in experimental plots at the Plant Breeding Institute Cambridge.

OBITUARIES

Michael Denis Gale FRS

Professor Mike Gale, one of the world’s leading plant geneticists, died suddenly on July 18. Mike made numerous seminal contributions to genetics and genomics research on cereals, particularly wheat.

Mike was born August 25, 1943, and was brought up on a dairy farm in the West Country of England, where he attended West Buckland School, Barnstaple. From there, he went on to Birmingham University as an undergraduate, where he specialized in genetics under the tutorship of Professor Sir Kenneth Mather. He lived university life to the fullest and ended up with an upper second class degree. During those formative years, he met his future wife, Sue, who was doing microbiology at Birmingham.

The close connection at that time between the Birmingham Genetics Department and the Agricultural Botany Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, resulted in Mike disappearing across the border in 1965 to do a PhD under the supervision of Professor Hubert Rees. Mike thrived in Aberystwyth, enjoying life, working in the lab, and playing a lot of golf and the occasional game of poker, another of his lifelong interests. Indeed, Mike was twice Wales’s amateur poker champion!

Mike’s PhD was on the “Cytological and Biometrical Studies in the Gramineae,” but he was recalcitrant in finishing his thesis and was offered a job at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge in 1968 by Professor Sir Ralph Riley, then head of the Cytogenetics Department, without completing his degree. That took another year! The PBI employed Mike as a geneticist and encouraged him into developmental genetics and physiology. He began on a path at PBI that would lead him to make groundbreaking discoveries on the genetics of height and pre-harvest sprouting, and later on wheat genomics. In collaboration with Colin Law, then head of the department, Mike investigated the inheritance of height in wheat and was the first to map the “Green Revolution” dwarfing genes and show their mode of action and agronomic potential in the UK. He made several other insightful and useful discoveries in wheat genetics during this time. His contributions to agricultural research led to the award of the Royal Agricultural Society of England’s gold medal for research in 1994.

In the mid- to late 1980s, Mike became increasingly interested in genetics at the protein and DNA level, and started programs to discover genetic marker polymorphisms. He began an extensive program to discover and exploit isozyme polymorphisms, and published widely in this area. At the end of the 1980s, his interest turned to DNA polymorphisms in cereals and his group modified technology developed in human studies to wheat. This led to the development of the first comprehensive genetic maps of wheat, and Professor Gale’s lab led the world in this field.

In 1990, following the privatization of the breeding activities of PBI, Mike, together with his colleagues on the research side of PBI, moved to Norwich on the site of the John Innes Institute at Colney, into what, at that time, was known as the Cambridge Laboratory. Following restructuring after privatization, Mike became head of Cereal Genetics at the Cambridge lab in 1988 and then director in 1992, following the retirement of Colin Law. In 1994, the Cambridge lab combined with the John Innes Institute and the Nitrogen Fixation Lab (recently moved to Norwich from the University of Sussex in Brighton) to form the John Innes Centre (JIC). Mike became associate research director of JIC.

The years that followed were the most scientifically productive of Mike’s research career. His research group, in collaboration with Graham Moore, extended the DNA marker work to analyze the genetic relationships between wheat and other grass species, particularly rice. This led to the seminal discovery that, despite being separated by many millions of years of evolution, the genetic content and gene order in the major grasses had been conserved over time, which in turn led to the “Lego model” and “crop circles” concepts, where the genomes of all grass species could be aligned into a common framework. For this work he was awarded the Rank Prize in Nutrition in 1997, and, with Graham Moore, the Royal Society Darwin Medal in 1998. At this time, Mike, together with Katrien Devos, also extended his research into tropical cereals, making major contributions to genetics and genomic studies in millet species. For his accumulated scientific discoveries and achievements, Mike was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996. He also took on a greater administrative load at JIC and rose to become director of the JIC.

Mike was always interested in international agricultural research. During the 1980s and 1990s, he had become an important figure in the Rockefeller Rice Biotechnology Program, and also worked extensively for the Plant Breeding Division of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. This led him to express a passionate view that science, and genetics in particular, has a major role to play in alleviating world food shortages and poverty. Mike became increasingly involved with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and, in 2004, was elected to the Science Council, the major group that directs the strategic directions of the CGIAR Institutes. In this capacity, Mike played a major role in the directions that international agricultural research has taken over the past few years with respect to crop improvement strategies.

Mike officially retired from JIC in 2003, but became an Emeritus John Innes Foundation Professor in the Crop Genetics Department. Following retirement he kept busy continually working or traveling on business and pleasure. As well as his CGIAR role, he worked as a consultant to numerous national and international organizations, public and private, involved in agricultural science.

As well as having a full professional life throughout his career, Mike lived a busy domestic and social life. He traveled extensively in his role in international agriculture, often accompanied by his wife, Sue, and daughters, Hazel and Tess, and often combined business with pleasure. As a lifelong golfer, and formidable opponent with an 8 handicap, he would invariably look for a golf course in the most unexpected corners of the world. He was also a good poker player and thoroughly enjoyed side visits to the casinos as well.

Mike passed away from a heart attack while attending the Latitude Festival in Suffolk on July 18, 2009, following a game of golf in the morning and catching up with the British Open Tournament, which he always enjoyed.

John Snape
John Innes Centre