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Chris and Shauna Somerville finished grad school at the Faculty of Science in 1978, he in math and genetics, she in plant breeding and genetics. Wondering what to do next, they borrowed money and rented a flat in Paris.

Ensconced at the Bibliothèque Universitaire Pierre et Marie Curie, they read research papers that interested them, discussing them later in cafés and bars. They kept returning to the question of how to feed Earth’s growing population. Shauna, ’76 BSc(Hons), ’78 MSc, proposed they focus on applying the new tools of molecular genetics to the productivity of crop plants.

Chris, ’74 BSc, ’76 MSc, ’78 PhD, ’97 DSc(Honorary), had done research on E. coli, which was a favourite bacterium to study biochemistry and genetics, so he understood the importance of a model organism to facilitate research. At the time, there was no plant analogue to E. coli. Researchers needed a single plant with a short lifetime, simple genetics and small size, so it could be grown and studied easily.

Chris and Shauna settled on Arabidopsis, a tiny mustard-type plant with a six-week life cycle. It had the smallest known amount of DNA of any plant at the time. Others had suggested Arabidopsis as a lab model, but it hadn’t caught on because it wasn’t a crop plant. But all flowering plants are relatively recently evolved from a common ancestor, and the Somervilles figured that discoveries made using Arabidopsis would be applicable to crops. After a few productive months in Paris, they returned to North America to introduce Arabidopsis as the lab mouse of the plant world.

“We were purposeful in our approach,” Shauna says. “We built an open community, based on sharing data around Arabidopsis.” Before browsers were invented, they built an online community, bouncing emails to subscribers from a server they’d set up. They focused on experiments that gave examples of how to use Arabidopsis genetics. Papers by the Somervilles and others attracted a new generation to molecular biology. By 1984, community members had published 34 papers.

“Now, more than 99,000 papers have been published on Arabidopsis, and our goal to accelerate knowledge acquisition exceeded what we imagined in Paris,” Chris says. 

The couple have been academic leaders through their careers at American universities. Now Chris spends his days allocating money for biomedical research at Open Philanthropy, a funder that identifies and supports neglected and tractible projects.

The Somervilles personally donated to the º£½ÇÉçÇø Science, Creativity and Innovation Fund, and recently committed to research with a $1 million gift for undergraduate and graduate research. “We were motivated by gratitude to the Faculty of Science for the education and encouragement,” Shauna says. “We believe our support will foster the curiosity and creativity of students in scientific activities beyond the classroom.” Their gifts are foundational to a new generation of researchers.