Mary-Dell Chilton

Mary-Dell Chilton (1939 to 2026) was an American biochemist and inventor regarded as one of the founders of modern plant biotechnology. Working at Washington University in St. Louis and later as a Distinguished Science Fellow at Syngenta Biotechnology, she discovered in 1977 that DNA fragments from the Agrobacterium Ti plasmid could be found in the nuclear DNA of crown gall tumor tissue, a finding that underlies modern methods of genetically engineering plants. She was awarded the World Food Prize in 2013 and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2023, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.