She was a great listener—she was always a really good listener—and, in fact, she didn't like to influence people's thinking too much, so she would listen to what you had to say and then try to guide you—maybe using some of her experiments as examples—but try to guide you rather than try to tell you what you should be thinking. So in that sense, she was a really wonderful teacher. She also actually taught a few practical things. I probably didn't benefit from that as much as others but she did show how to do some microscopy techniques, looking at the maize chromosomes. These are classical techniques, and actually they're being lost now because very few people know how to do this. And she showed me how to take sporocytes out of a corn plant, which is quite fun, in the greenhouse here at Cold Spring Harbor. That was an entertaining experience and she showed me how to look at these chromosomes and interpret them. But really most of my memories are of her are more discussing scientific principles and some of my own experiments. And that was really an important thing to be able to do.

Dr. Robert Martiennsen is a plant biologist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator, and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Martiennsen attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, completing his BA in 1982 and continuing on to his PhD in 1986 on the molecular genetics of alpha-amylase gene families in common wheat. He received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship with University of California, Berkeley. In 1989, he was hired as a principal investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As a young scientist, he worked closely with Barbara McClintock. His awards and honors include the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, McClintock Prize, and Science’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2002 and the Kumho International Science Award in Plant Biology and Biotechnology (2001).