Serendipity shaped this biologist’s research career
Jeffery Dangl, co-winner of the 2025 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, credits his success to open-mindedness and collaboration.
On the banks of the Sacramento River in Northern California, a 7-year-old boy reeled in a prize catch. As his father prepped the fish, young Jeffery L. Dangl observed the salmon’s still-beating heart.
“I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” recalled Dangl, now the John N. Couch Distinguished Professor of Biology in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “I think that was my initial burst of enthusiasm for biology.”
The chance observation of a beating fish heart is one of several moments of serendipity Dangl credits with influencing his decorated career as a plant immunologist. Dangl is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology; a Foreign Member of the Royal Society; and one of Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers in 2024.
Most recently, Dangl won the 2025 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, sometimes called “the Nobel Prize in agriculture,” alongside two longtime collaborators and friends, Jonathan D.G. Jones of the Sainsbury Laboratory in the United Kingdom and Brian J. Staskawicz of the University of California, Berkeley.
But Dangl didn’t start out as a plant biologist. As an undergraduate researcher in 1978, he worked in mammalian immunology with the scientists laying the groundwork for recombinant antibody technology.
Then, while flipping through a scientific journal in the early 1980s, Dangl saw a curious study about plant cells, one that his immunology background allowed him to interpret in a unique way. The researchers had found that plant cells in a culture dish changed their gene expression in response to extracts from a pathogenic fungus.
“The data implied that the plant cells recognized the fungal cell wall extract, which meant there must be something like a receptor-based immune system in plants,” Dangl explained.
The chance encounter led Dangl to seek a postdoctoral fellowship with Klaus Hahlbrock, senior author of that paper. Hahlbrock eagerly accepted, but he warned Dangl that he was relocating his lab from Freiburg, Germany, to Cologne. As luck would have it, Dangl’s girlfriend was also seeking a postdoctoral fellowship in Cologne. His girlfriend was Sarah R. Grant, who is now Dangl’s wife of 40 years, a research professor emerita of biology at UNC-Chapel Hill and one of Dangl’s closest collaborators.
Dangl leveraged these moments of serendipity to explore the mechanisms by which plants — including agricultural crops — defend themselves against diseases that can lead to significant yield losses and threaten the global food supply.
Dangl’s lab has recently shifted to exploring the plant microbiome, or the specific bacteria that live on, in or around the plant.
Dangl credits his Wolf Prize, which will be awarded June 25 in Jerusalem, to being in the right place at the right time. But he stressed that a large part of serendipity is what you do with the opportunities you’re given.
“Serendipity is not luck. It’s the confluence of preparedness and an open eye toward something new,” he said. “It’s often said that chance favors the prepared mind, and I really believe that. You have to seek out moments of serendipity.”
Dangl suggested that the public can facilitate scientific serendipity by supporting funding for basic research.
“Many potential solutions to real-world problems are now being worked on by biotech and academic labs that sprang up from basic science,” he said. “This is an absolute example of why public funding for basic research is important.”
