The Leap: Be Bold Or Just Don't Do It

Plant biologist Joanne Chory spent her career trying to grow plants that could sequester CO2 in their roots. Her wild ideas took hold.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Flora Lichtman?

  It's pretty bold to stand up publicly, like at your TED Talk and say, you know, one of the biggest, most intractable problems we face right now? I think I personally can do something about it.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I recently had an epiphany.

• 0:19Flora Lichtman?

  But that's what plant biologist Joanne Corey did. This was in 2019.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:34Flora 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.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04Flora 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.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  This gives me a sense of urgency that I want to do this now while I feel good enough to really...

• 1:16Flora 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.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  I think we should just wing it.

• 1:29Flora Lichtman?

  All right, let's wing it. Let's just dive in.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33Flora 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. She just seemed undaunted. Like 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? Joanne is fearless.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  She is fearless. She's always been very courageous.

• 2:16Flora Lichtman?

  So many people describe Joanne this way. Where'd that come from?

• 2:23Flora Lichtman?

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

• 2:38Flora Lichtman?

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

• 2:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:46Flora Lichtman?

  This is Mary Ann Corey, Joanne's older sister.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Fearless wouldn't come to mind.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  I mean, she was easily spooked by my brothers, like, at five. I mean, they could go in the closet and go boo, and she would, like, jump up to the ceiling.

• 3:01Flora 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.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Joanne was number three.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Number three. I'm a middle child, getting tough. And I'm, like, looking for attention and things.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  We had four brothers, and we were the two girls that united together. Girl solidarity, you know, go-girl-go type stuff.

• 3:28Flora Lichtman?

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

• 3:36Speaker 04

  My brothers tortured me by telling me how ugly I was, how fat I was, you know, how this and that I was. They were always my judgments.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  The other thing they did, they all were wrestlers. And, like, 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, you know, or something like that.

• 3:55Flora Lichtman?

  Literally toughened her up.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got literally toughened up, too.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  But my sister's the oldest. She set the tone for the family, I think. So we all ended up in science because she was a scientist.

• 4:09Flora Lichtman?

  Really?

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Well, she was only a mathematician.

• 4:12Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, all your siblings are in science?

• 4:14Speaker 04

  They're either engineers or scientists. So it is kind of weird. Neither of my parents is scientists.

• 4:22Flora Lichtman?

  What do you think? What accounts for that, do you think?

• 4:25Speaker 04

  I don't know. My sister has a strong personality. I always adopted to her.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  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, you know, doing well in school. Nothing made them more proud than that we all went to college.

• 4:48Flora Lichtman?

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

• 4:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:07Flora 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.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  It was horrible being a plant scientist. You know, I always say to people, people always ask me, is it hard being a woman in science? I don't know. It's hard to be a plant woman in science because no one cares what you say, you know?

• 5:34Flora Lichtman?

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

• 5:39Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:55Flora Lichtman?

  Joanne went to Fred Osibell's lab at Harvard Medical School for a postdoc.

• 6:00Speaker 04

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

• 6:15Flora Lichtman?

  And each day, she'd have a new answer, a new project she wanted to try.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Some of them were pretty good and some of them were pretty audacious.

• 6:23Flora 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, you know, upend the entire field of plant science.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  She kind of woke up the plant world.

• 6:44Flora 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 a conference where they met for the first time.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:06Flora Lichtman?

  When she said that to you, this is your first meeting. Were you like, who are you?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 7:11Flora Lichtman?

  Like, what was your response?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  You can imagine, right? We're all in our young twenties. And so Joanne, me, other sort of postdocs from these, you know, you know, big, famous labs. There is that kind of culture in science. We were, we were pretty full of ourselves. So, yeah, I, I, I think I probably pleasantly bristled in a very British way. Something like, do you really think so?

• 7:42Flora 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.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  What I learned at that meeting is she had done something absolutely inconceivable, which is the opposite of what we were all doing.

• 8:03Flora 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.

• 8:14Speaker 02

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

• 8:18Flora 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.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  First of all, it was boom that I picked the plant that I picked to study. It's called a Rabidopsis.

• 8:42Flora Lichtman?

  A Rabidopsis 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 a 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.

• 9:08Speaker 02

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

• 9:18Flora Lichtman?

  Like 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 seemed 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.

• 10:01Speaker 05

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

• 10:23Flora Lichtman?

  But she was right, and that was just the beginning.

• 10:28Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, the entire pathway of what people thought didn't exist. So how did Joanne rock out 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.

• 11:12Flora 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.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it really transformed the whole landscape, the funding landscape, you know. And she was also among the first plant biologists to be getting NIH money. And, you know, and then she became like really the first full-time plant biologist to become an HHMI investigator.

• 11:40Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, wow.

• 11:40Speaker 05

  So she like really pushed, opened those doors.

• 11:44Flora 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.

• 11:56Speaker 02

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

• 12:18Flora Lichtman?

  Or to put it in, you know, American speak.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  Sometimes people are gonna be pissed.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  And what they do is, is they set a higher standard in order to believe it because it's so new and challenging.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Especially when some people feel like you're too young, you're the wrong gender, like you're using the wrong tools, like, you know, you haven't paid your dues.

• 12:42Flora Lichtman?

  But after a childhood full of guillotines and chokeholds, Joanne was ready for it.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  That's when you have to have a big skin. You gotta keep at it, you know.

• 12:55Flora 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, like, 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.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  A lot of papers get rejected. People don't understand it. But those are the papers you want to have, I think. You know, you might say, if you don't have 10 failures for every success, you're not doing interesting enough science. You want people to say, "Get out of here. What are you talking about?" You know? And you want people to come in on both sides of the spectrum, the lowest score and the highest score, you know? That would be good. But most people don't see it that way.

• 13:56Flora Lichtman?

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

• 14:04Speaker 05

  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, "Okay, like, we now have the evidence that this was wrong." And be like, "Okay, I want to be the first people who publish what's right." This is how science works, right? Sometimes you're wrong. Okay. So let's be the ones who actually show what is true.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  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. You know, there was that look in her eyes where she wanted to know how plants work.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  I think Joanne has always been someone who's like, "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to go for it." Like, forget the low-hanging fruit. Like, I'm going for the best fruit.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:25Flora Lichtman?

  Joanne was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2004. She was 49, a professor at the Sauk Institute in La Jolla. Jennifer remembers when Joanne told the lab.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  I swear, we were gathered in the kitchen area, like, 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.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  I had two kids that we adopted, my husband and me. And they were around for 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 and I'm just being happy.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  And so if it was happy, that was good.

• 16:28Flora 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?

• 16:37Speaker 04

  It really did. You know, I definitely am a different person now because of that.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  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.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  And, yeah. I think she knows that her time is limited. And so, of course, of course, it changes you.

• 17:13Flora 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.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  Our $3 million breakthrough prize is awarded to Joanne Corry.

• 17:37Flora 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.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  To introduce you to the scientist who worked out how it happens.

• 17:49Flora Lichtman?

  Morgan Freeman was an announcer of Joanne's award.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  What was cool about that moment, though, is you've got to look at it. There's all these guys in like, black tux, and then Joanne's there with her pink sequins gown on. She had to like, hold on to people a little bit because she can't like, she needs like, a cane or a walker. You've got to admit, she's really iconic in that moment.

• 18:16Flora 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 sequin 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.

• 18:44Speaker 08

  She thought about, you know, what could she advocate for?

• 18:47Flora Lichtman?

  This is Dietle Feigl, Joanne's friend and colleague, who remembers talking to Joanne about this.

• 18:52Speaker 08

  The obvious thing would have been to say, "Some plants feed us, and you know, 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."

• 19:20Flora Lichtman?

  She carefully crafted her message.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  ... 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 on the quality of human life.

• 19:34Flora 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?

• 19:56Speaker 08

  On the one hand, it seems 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?

• 20:05Speaker 04

  A lot of young people were there 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.

• 20:18Flora Lichtman?

  Well, it's because no one's ever given anybody hope about climate change, like ever.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  No, the climate and the climate change, people are really depressing.

• 20:30Flora Lichtman?

  Joanne's plan was working. She was invited to apply for an audacious project grant affiliated with TED.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  We wrote a budget for 34 million. Don't ask me why.

• 20:43Flora Lichtman?

  Was that a lot or a little?

• 20:45Speaker 04

  That's a lot. I mean, for a plant geneticist, it's like heaven, you know? I don't know. What'd you say? I never had a grant that big.

• 20:55Flora Lichtman?

  Well, it's pretty cheap for saving the world, so.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Yes. I was very cheap. I learned that later. They gave us the whole 34.

• 21:04Flora Lichtman?

  You got it all.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, pretty exciting.

• 21:10Flora 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 controlled 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.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  When you get a winner, you just can't not do the project, you know?

• 21:37Flora Lichtman?

  Can I ask you a question about this?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:39Flora Lichtman?

  Because I, 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.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:49Flora Lichtman?

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

• 22:02Speaker 04

  I think it partly came from the fact that I was naive. And I let the naivety drive me. You know, some of them were suggested really hard process. And I was like, OK, I'll try it. You know, I'm always the one jumping in.

• 22:19Flora Lichtman?

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

• 22:25Speaker 03

  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 failures comes from that she really, you know, maybe you could call it arrogance, or maybe it's confidence, or maybe it's both. But I don't, I don't think she thinks she's going to fail. I mean, I think when she decides she's going to do something, that's when she becomes fearless. I mean, 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, as a negative thing. I think it's a huge strength. I think it's just a huge strength. And, and here's the thing.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  She has a history of doing it. Does that, does that make sense? I mean, look at her science, right? Look at her science, you know? So she has a right to think she can solve things because she has.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  I didn't think I could do it. I don't know. I am kind of 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.

• 23:57Flora Lichtman?

  A few weeks after I had all these conversations in November 2024, Joanne Corry passed away. She was 69.

• 24:08Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 24:28Speaker 08

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

• 24:41Speaker 05

  She's idolized by so many people.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  She's such a warrior. I call her a badass of warrior. 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.

• 25:05Speaker 03

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

• 25:26Flora Lichtman?

  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, Pajao Van Ghe, and David Zanperd. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Thanks to Lynn Artel, Victoria Johnson, and Alyssa Midcalf. And thanks to you for listening.

• 25:59Flora Lichtman?

  Sci-Frite is back tomorrow with a conversation with Rosemary Moscow about the surprisingly high stakes world of birding. Plus, a misconception about female birds that just will not fly. That's tomorrow on the pod.