Sten Gustaf Stymne (born 28 November 1949 in Gävle) is a Swedish biochemist and professor emeritus in plant breeding at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. During the years, Stymne has been one of the leaders in plant lipid biochemistry and was awarded the 2008 Terry Galliard Award as a recognition for his contributions to the field. Stymne has for many years been a frequent debater in various news media, criticizing Sweden and the European Union for its negative attitude towards plant biotechnology. Academic career Stymne received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Stockholm (1976) and soon after enrolled as a PhD-student at the Swedish University of Agricultural science from where he received his doctorate degree in 1981 with the dissertation "The biosynthesis of linoleic and linolenic acids in plants". The following year, Stymne was appointed associate Professor of Food Biology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Stymne's research has throughout his career been focused towards how plants produce oil and the model he and Allan Stobart presented in 1987 are still featured in textbooks on plant biology and physiology. Stymne realized early that the forthcoming biotechnology development would revolutionize our way of looking at plants and biochemical processes and that these processes would be possible to manipulate in order to improve or add new properties. Through systematic and careful labeling- and enzyme activity studies in the 1980s and 90s, he was able to demonstrate several previously unknown biochemical pathways for oil production in seeds and which later proved to be true for plant cells in general. Later in his career, Stymne focused on studying the biochemical processes involved in the biosynthesis of exotic fatty acids, an area where Sten have had great impact by increasing the knowledge of how specialized acyltransferases and phospholipases are essential for the enrichment of exotic fatty acids in the oil. Furthermore, Stymne's group could identify and describe a whole new plant family of enzymes (PDATs) previously identified only in animals and responsible for transferring fatty acids between phospholipids and diacylglycerol molecules which play an important role in oil synthesis not only in plants but at all higher organisms. Stymne's group was also the first to clone and characterize plant genes for membrane lipid synthesis (LPCATs) and synthesis of sterol esters (PSAT). These discoveries have been indispensable to identify essential stages of plant lipid metabolism. As an acknowledgment of his efforts in