David Baulcombe

Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist born April 7, 1952, in Solihull, Warwickshire, England, who served as Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge until becoming professor emeritus in 2019 and has held the office of biological secretary and vice president of the Royal Society. In 1999, working with Andrew Hamilton, he identified small interfering RNA as the specificity determinant in RNA-mediated gene silencing in plants, a discovery that founded much of the subsequent study of RNA silencing and its role in viral defense, and his laboratory went on to describe further mechanisms of plant epigenetics. He was knighted in 2009, received the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2010, the Balzan Prize for Epigenetics in 2012, and the inaugural McClintock Prize in 2014, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.