Joanne Chory, a Salk Institute biologist widely admired by climate scientists for her efforts to get plants to absorb greater amounts of greenhouse gases, died Tuesday at a hospital in La Jolla, the institute said. She was 69.
Chory, who lived in Del Mar much of her life, passed away “due to complications from Parkinson’s disease,” the institute said in a statement. “She was diagnosed with the disease in 2004 and, despite the challenges, continued to lead her lab until her death.”
Her children were in kindergarten and third grade when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which she described as “a pretty horrible break.” Some of the best work of her career followed that diagnosis.
Earlier this year, Chory was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The 200-year-old science education and development center praised the way she used genetics to decipher how plants sense and respond to light, an important branch of climate science.
Previous winners of Franklin medals include Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
Chory was born on March 19, 1955, in Boston, a community that has been home to many renowned plant scientists, including Elisabeth Gantt and Asa Gray.
Her interest in science developed early, leading her to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology at Oberlin College in Ohio and a doctorate in microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
Chory joined the Salk faculty in 1988 and became a stand-out scientist, which was no small thing to do. The institute had many stars, including Nobel laureates Francis Crick, Roger Guillemin and Renato Dulbecco.
Her work, in most basic terms, focused on understanding how plants respond to their environment.
“You don’t have to cut open plants to see what’s going on, the way you would have to with an animal,” Chory told the Del Mar Times earlier this year. “So it made sense to work with plants if you want to do genetics.”
This work helped her pursue ways to improve the ability of plants to capture and store carbon, research that helped bring the Salk a great deal of grant money and donations.
In 2019, the Salk was awarded more than $35 million by The Audacious Project to seek ways to fight climate change using plants. Chory was project leader.
The following year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave the Salk $30 million to look for ways to get plants to capture and store atmospheric carbon — a gift partly tied to Chory’s research.
“Her brilliant work will live on, and just might save the world,” Salk President Jerry Joyce said in a statement.
The institute said that Chory is survived by her husband, Stephen, and her two children, Katie and Joe.
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