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Strength in Numbers

Leonid Kruglyak did his graduate work in physics, but when he dove into biology, he jumped with both feet. “The first thing I wrote about genetics was an eight-line letter to Nature,” he says. In it, he defended Dean Hamer’s 1993 discovery of a genetic basis for homosexuality—and took on Nature’s editor. “John Maddox had written...
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Skipping Retirement

Jan-Åke Gustafsson never got an official retirement notice from the University. But that’s because the 63-year-old chairman of the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at the Karolinska Institutet didn’t wait around for it. When a recently retired colleague warned Gustafsson, who was quickly approaching Sweden’s upper mandatory retirement...
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Radical Thinking

As a graduate student at Stanford University in the late 1970s, Tom Tullius hung upside down off piers to pluck gelatinous, green-blooded tunicates off the pilings. He took to the fields to harvest bag after bag of bean leaves. And he imported envelopes filled with suspicious-looking, powdered Pseudomonas from an overseas chemical and biological warfare facility. All for the sake of his science. ...
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Administrating Science

When Susan Henry was a young professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine she found herself acting as a liaison between graduate students and faculty; she says she just had a “knack” for that kind of work. Henry’s first administrative position was the director of PhD students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Acting in this position Henry says she...
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Carpe Datum

A Rhodes scholarship changed Gregory Petsko’s life—before he even set foot in England. Petsko, now a professor of biochemistry and chemistry at Brandeis University, majored in classical literature as an under-graduate at Princeton in the early 1970s. “By the time I was a senior, I had applied to law school, medical school, and graduate school—in both the...
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Are Women Better PIs?

When Sue Rosser was doing her postdoc in zoology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she got pregnant with her second child. She went to her principal investigator (PI) to discuss how to proceed with her project. He said there was no way her science could survive another baby, and advised her to get an abortion, she recalls. Appalled at the suggestion, “I decided ...
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Death Star

As an incoming graduate student at MIT in the late 1980s, Michael Hengartner knew he wanted to work with David Baltimore on the transcription factor NF-kappaB. “He’s such a great scientist and NF-kappaB is such a cool protein,” he says. “So I thought, OK, I’ll go to David Baltimore’s lab and work on NF-kappaB.” Back then, first-year students didn’t...
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A Transforming Field

For a few months in 2001 and the beginning of 2002, there was a jar on Julia Serano’s lab bench at the University of California, Berkeley full of quarters. Each quarter had belonged to a member of her lab, which focused on Drosophila genetics and developmental biology, and each represented a time when someone mistakenly called her “he,” or “Tom.” It was a reasonable...
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Aaron Wheeler: Big ideas, little chips

Even when approached with a seemingly outlandish research idea, the one word that isn’t in analytical chemist Aaron Wheeler’s vocabulary is “no.” Instead, he might be skeptical, says Mais Jebrail, one of Wheeler’s PhD students, but he’ll say, “Try it out and convince me.”...
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Monetize your Science

Brian Fahey walked into Stanford University Hospital looking for problems. With nearly full access to the hospital’s departments and operating rooms, Fahey’s search seemed unbounded. During this time, he observed a number of patients on ventilators, some of whom succumbed to the potentially lethal problem of developing pneumonia—from the ventilator itself. The problem...
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Phineas Gage

On September 13, 1848, a 25-year-old railroad worker named Phineas Gage triggered an explosion that propelled a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod straight through his skull, destroying a good portion of his brain. Luckily, the iron missed the critical blood vessels and parts of the brain necessary for survival, but the injury spurred dramatic behavioral changes and made Gage’s accident one of the most...
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Divide, Conquer

Had it not been for that Saturday morning conversation, Michael Glotzer’s career would have taken a markedly different turn. Like all graduate students at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Glotzer rotated through several labs before choosing the one in which he would do his thesis work. He started off with Harold Varmus, whose trainees were working on everything from...
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Beth Shapiro: Creatures Great and Small

In 2001, while scanning a river bank in northern Alaska for fossils, Oxford PhD student Beth Shapiro saw her advisor Alan Cooper, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA, tugging on something big embedded in the frozen earth. When Shapiro got closer, she saw that Cooper had uncovered a late Pleistocene-era woolly mammoth femur, which was likely more than 21,000 years old. ...
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Addressing Cultural Caveats

As an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico, Esa La Beau was on her way to a promising research career. She joined a lab, presented her work at three national conferences, and contributed a significant amount of data to the project’s findings. But when it came time to publish, there was an issue over the order of authorship. La Beau, who comes from a Native American and...
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Calm in the STORm

Michael Hall has the dubious honor of having worked in the only lab that was ever shut down for recombinant DNA guideline violations. “It was very exciting,” he recalls with a smile. The local TV stations sent crews and the National Institutes of Health conducted a thorough investigation. “I had to write statements about what happened and tell the investigating committee what I...
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Right your Writing

When Judith Swan was a PhD student in molecular and cell biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her research on specialized microtubules in chicken cells went pretty smoothly. But despite expert guidance and advice from her advisor, “when it came time to write, nobody had very much to say,” Swan recalls. Swan was essentially told to write up her research, then was...
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Genome Guru

Tim Hubbard claims he knows nothing about genetics. But he was drawn into the high-stakes world of genomics by a job offer he couldn’t refuse. Hubbard had been working on algorithms for predicting protein structures at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering in the United Kingdom when he noticed that the Sanger Institute in Hinxton was looking to hire some new bioinformaticists....
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Audrey Dussutour: Insect Traffic Cop

Audrey Dussutour never had a special fondness for ants, but over the last decade, she’s gotten to know them very well—especially their propensity to act as a single organism though hundreds or thousands of individuals may comprise a single colony. “It’s fascinating, because it works exactly opposite to humans—there’s no leader,” she says. Her...
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Considering Consulting?

After working for DuPont (which became DuPont Merck) for 17 years, Bill Schmidt decided to take his act on the road. The company elected to stop developing drug candidates for pain that Schmidt had been working on, based on the belief that no new drug could compete with cheap generic drugs such as morphine and aspirin. (This was four years before Pfizer’s Celebrex and...
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Crossing Over

Talk about a rite of passage: In his first job out of Amherst College in 1980, Douglas Bishop worked as a tech for a scientist who had neither an alarm clock nor a circadian rhythm. David Kurtz at Cold Spring Harbor had a habit of staying awake for 24 hours, sleeping awhile, and then repeating the process. “The approach allowed him to work about 100 hours a week,” says ...
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