Professor Mike McGrew on developmental biology in birds

I was drawn to biology because I am interested in how different pathways interact to make something that’s alive and grows. Figuring out how living things work is extraordinarily complicated.  

I fell into becoming an avian specialist. To study how the body forms, you can use any animal, but the chicken is very practical because you can study the embryo in an egg. My PhD at Boston University was in developmental biology with mouse embryos as a model system, and afterwards at the Marseille Developmental Biology Institute (IBDM), I focused on the chicken embryo for developmental biology, and it became my focus. 

I came to Roslin in 2001 to help develop transgenic chickens and became Roslin’s first career track fellow, and now I run my own lab. I moved away from developmental biology, and everything I do now is about applying avian research to real-world challenges.  

I’ve been trying to develop ways to conserve chicken breeds efficiently. This involves freezing embryonic reproductive cells, turning them back into sperm or eggs, then using surrogate birds, gene-edited to be sterile, to host these germ cells, and produce an egg of the intended breed.  

This could help us to save rare breeds. 

The big challenges to this have been growing reproductive cells in the lab, and removing the germ cells from the surrogate before transplanting the new cells. My group has led the way in both of these developments.  

Roslin is well placed for this applied work, as we have the necessary infrastructure such as the National Avian Research Facility. 

Looking ahead, we have to make this process more efficient so that it’s taken up by industry and by communities globally. I want to be able to apply it to all bird species.  

I’m very proud of becoming a professor, and my late parents would have been incredibly pleased about that, and of the recognition I have for leading a field of research. 

I’m very proud to have led the development of a gene-edited chicken in one generation using my lab’s surrogate technology. I’m also pleased that my team has made progress towards developing bird flu-resistant chickens. We used gene editing to alter a small section of bird DNA and this was able to restrict – although not completely block – the flu virus from infecting chickens.  

I’ve had a few moments when members of the public contacted me to say how excited they are about my research into birds. It’s a payoff that people value what I’ve done.  

Good leadership in science means inspiring people, leading by example, leading from the front.  

I was taught to plan research so that all experiments will contribute to a publication - and that’s the approach I try to teach to my students.  

Being a good communicator is vital too. I’ve been fortunate and only worked for good communicators. I’ve slowly become a better mentor. I think I’m more empathic now, compared with the pre-Covid me.

At the Roslin Institute, we want to develop people and keep them, but I think it’s valuable to see how other places are run, or you just don’t know other ways to work. I always tell people to move on despite having been here for so long myself – I still get embarrassed by that – but with the funding systems, once you get established it’s hard to leave. 

I love to travel, visit labs, and talk to students in different places, that’s the fun. I like talking to PhD students and early career researchers, and hearing the perspectives of the next generation of scientists.

Funding and security are a concern, especially in the current fiscal and political climate. I worry about people’s contracts and I’m always aware of what’s ahead for them for future funding.  

I was fortunate at the start of my career because I had core funding, but It’s hard to encourage young people into science now when opportunities are so limited. Discovery science is not valued as it once was, even in the UK. Despite that, we still need young people to study science and help promote an evidence-based view of the world.  

And we must work towards representation and diversity, which are so important for fairness and equity. There is nothing as boring as sitting in a room where everyone looks and speaks the same as you.