Dame Ottoline Leyser | How Plants Decide What To Do : Thinking Like A Vegetable

About this episode

Dame Ottoline Leyser discusses the intelligence of plants and their decision-making processes.

A plant’s existence may seem rather uneventful, spending its days rooted to the spot, seemingly at the mercy of the things around it. Can plants think? Well, plants are intelligent creatures able to adapt in ways we animals can only imagine. Rather than having a brain – a central decision making centre – they can alter their entire body in response to their surroundings. Dame Ottoline Leyser has spent her career passionately unearthing the mysterious mechanisms that underpin this process. She’s pieced together the finely-tuned network of signals which plants use for distributed decisions making processes. These new insights into what plants get up to are so remarkable that Ottoline is determined to change the way we think about them. DAME OTTOLINE LEYSER Regius Professor of Botany Clare College Cambridge University Dame Henrietta Miriam Ottoline Leyser DBE FRS is a British plant biologist and Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge. From 2013 to 2020 she was the director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge. From 2020 to 2025 she was CEO of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

People in this episode

Guest: Dame Ottoline Leyser

Topics covered

• plant intelligence
• decision making
• botany
• adaptation
• science communication

Keywords

• plants
• intelligence
• decision making
• botany
• adaptation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Clare College Cambridge University, UK Research and Innovation

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