June 30th 2021 marks the retirement of Dr. Rosemary (Rosie) Redfield from the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Redfield holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and a Master's of Science from McMaster University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University with Richard Charles (“Dick”) Lewontin and at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with Hamilton O. Smith, an American microbiologist and Nobel Laureate. She joined UBC Zoology as a faculty member in 1993.
Throughout her career Rosie has been a scientific iconoclast in the very best sense of the word. She has never been afraid to take on the key assumptions in her field, and make those around her think more rigorously and incisively, even when it made her a scientific outsider. She has a genius for seeing the big picture and making connections across disciplines that brings new insight to her research areas.
Rosie’s primary research focus has been on the evolution and molecular biology of natural competence in bacteria, or the process via which bacteria take up DNA from their environment. This DNA uptake can sometimes result in transformation, or the incorporation of the DNA into the genome, which can allow the acquisition of novel genes and their functions. Indeed, it is broadly assumed in the field that this acquisition of new genes is the main purpose of competence. In the words of the abstract of her paper “Do Bacteria Have Sex? (Nature Reviews Genetics volume 2, pages634–639 (2001)): “The idea that the bacterial processes that cause genetic exchange exist because of natural selection for this process is shared by almost all microbiologists and population geneticists. However, this assumption has been perpetuated by generations of biology, microbiology and genetics textbooks without ever being critically examined”.
Rosie provided this critical examination and championed an alternative hypothesis – that integration of DNA from the environment into the genome of bacteria is an unselected side effect, and that the real purpose of natural competence is nutritional. Over the years, she has marshalled an impressive body of evidence supporting this idea including deciphering the molecular mechanisms that regulate competence, showing that the regulatory circuits involved are consistent with selection for a nutritional function.
Rosie has championed other “outsider” perspectives in microbiology, including her work on quorum sensing in bacteria. Quorum sensing is often described as a bacterial cell–cell communication process that involves the production, detection, and response to extracellular signaling molecules, but Rosie has suggested that quorum sensing did not evolve for communication, but instead is a simple side effect of more general environmental sensing of diffusion.
A particularly clear example of Rosie’s unwillingness to tolerate fuzzy thinking and sloppy science comes from her involvement in critiquing a NASA-funded research study claiming that arsenic can replace phosphorus in DNA, and which was heavily promoted in the media as redefining the chemistry of life and providing hints about the chemistry that might support extraterrestrial life. Rosie exposed egregious experimental and technical flaws in this paper, first, through her blog, and then through a formal Letter to Science. Her blog pulled no punches stating “If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I'd send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.” This use of her blog was also an opportunity for Rosie to showcase the utility of openness in research.
Rosie has been a proponent of openness in research for many years, and uses her blog as a living lab notebook that is open to the public and allows anyone to see the process of science in real time, showing how research really happens, with all of its fumbles and missteps, as well as its successes.
Rosie’s iconoclastic streak also led her to question the way that genetics is traditionally taught to undergraduates. To test her hypothesis that there is a better way to teach genetics, she was an early adopter of MOOCs (Massive, open, online courses), developing one of UBC’s first MOOCs “Useful Genetics”. This course had the goal of replacing the usual introductory genetics syllabus that emphasizes Mendelian genetic analysis with topics that were more useful to our students. She later used this MOOC as the foundation for an on-campus credit course for UBC students that is available as an alternative to the traditional genetics course.
Even before this experiment with MOOCs, Rosie was an early adopter of what is now termed “mastery learning” and was involved in the development of a self-paced autotutorial for genetics that aimed to help students become more active participants in their learning, as opposed to passive consumers of information.
Dr. Redfield’s contributions will be felt within the Biology program, the Department of Zoology and UBC for years to come. Rosie was pioneer in what are now increasingly used approaches in undergraduate teaching: flipped classrooms, blended learning, assessment of mastery and emphasis on real world applications and skill building. Similarly, her contributions to our understanding of the evolution of competence in bacteria will have long-lasting effects on her research area.
The Department of Zoology wishes Dr. Redfield all the best in this new life journey.