Christine Guthrie and thoughts beyond

Christine Guthrie passed away on July 1, 2022 at the age of 77, after a 30-years-long battle with cancer.  She was a researcher at UCSF who arguably contributed the most to our mechanistic understanding of mRNA splicing, a fundamental process in eukaryotes.  She was well known and respected among biologists and loved by her trainees, many of who are now authorities in their own fields.  Journals such as Cell and RNA have published obituaries and tributes, and a memorial symposium will be held at UCSF on Oct 28.  Her contribution to science was immense.

I had seen her and heard her talks at meetings.  Now I can’t miss the fact that she seemed to have no Chinese trainees (students from China or ABCs), as none of the people writing about her are Chinese, nor were any Chinese mentioned in their or her writings.  This is a very surprising and truly unique situation and makes one wonder why.  Perhaps UCSF is an elite institution and she was an elite scientist?  But this is obviously not a valid explanation.  UCSF has had many Chinese trainees, as well as other elite schools, and almost all, if not all Nobel Prize winners, and other prominent scientists, in the US in the last 40 years have had Chinese in their labs.  That is why Guthrie’s case is so peculiar.  A few causes can be speculated.

The first is that Guthrie was 6-foot-tall, and talked straight and tough and joked (she was kind and supportive at the same time), which might be a minor shock to the newly arrived Chinese seeking labs right away at UCSF.  The first impression being tough might have been too intimidating for them even trying to get in, as her being kind would have to come later when you settled down in her lab.   The second is that a few of her students took a long 7 years to get a PhD, which likely also presented a warning to later students.  But these two reasons are unlikely the major ones.

The third is that Guthrie did her most important work in the 80s.  At that time Chinese students were only beginning to come to the US.  There were simply fewer Chinese then, compared to late 1990s and afterwards.  The fourth and likely the most explanation, however, is her experimental model, yeast genetics.  It doesn’t escape my notice that few Chinese, in the US or China, use budding or fission yeast as their experimental models.   And this actually has something to do with the third cause above, too.

Since the mid-1990s genomics has started to overtake biological research.  Previous work feasible only in single cells like bacteria and yeast was suddenly doable and became easier and easier in multicellular organisms such as worms, flies, and mammals.  This trend has continued to this date.  The Chinese newcomers clearly saw the changes and opportunities and followed the fads.  Yeast became old-fashion and got ignored as a choice for PhD studies.  So Guthrie having no Chinese trainees was indeed an oddity but not entirely out of the blue, as many yeast genetics labs also had few Chinese.  Ultimately, it is a big loss for Chinese, and a big loss for yeast genetics as well.