So Joe and I got a grant from NATO, which was sort of strange cause you know NATO was military mostly and so on, But we decided that this grant that we got that I think was 6,000 dollars was one tank shell less for NATO so it was a good thing to get this grant. And it wasn’t for the science it was always, it was just for the collaboration to get from one. You had to have two scientists, at least two scientists, who were in at least two different NATO countries. And it just funded the travel between and the sort of expenses while you were in the other country. And it was fantastic times cause it was the day of Freddie Laker and standby flights. And it cost 57 pounds to fly from London to New York and 114 dollars to fly back. So I used to go, I went more often because Joe obliviously had more responsibilities more in Cold Spring Harbor and—but I never worked when I was there. I mean we would talk work, but I didn’t do any experiments there, but we would talk about what experiments and so on. And so I would work really hard in London and then get up at five o’clock on Friday morning and go down to Waterloo station where you got standbys and get the ticket—the standby ticket—go back to work, work for the day and then go to the airport in the evening, fly to New York and then come back about—I might just go for the weekend. Sometimes I went for longer, But just really just jumping across the channel. I mean, not the channel. It felt like the channel. Across the Atlantic all the time. All the time, doing this work and it worked wonderfully well. We expressed huge amounts of the proteins and then started to do the mutagenesis.

Mary-Jane Gething, biochemist is Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne where she earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1974. Subsequently she went to Cambridge to do post-doctoral work.

In 1976, she moved to London to work on protein sequencing and in 1980, Gething and Joseph Sambrook received a NATO grant for travel to collaborate on virus research. She began working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1982 where she continued her research of proteins. In 1985, Gething and Sambrook moved to Dallas to work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. They moved back to Australia in 1994.

Her current research involves protein folding in the cell and the role of molecular chaperone BiP.