In 1990, Senthil Muthuswamy was a young graduate student in biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He had just moved to Canada from his native India after completing a bachelor’s degree in agricultural sciences at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and a master’s degree in genetics at…

Tom Maniatis launched his scientific career by experimenting with early ultraviolet lasers to scrutinize the development of chicken embryos. This undergraduate research experience, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, “taught me the importance of bringing technological developments to important biological problems,” Maniatis recalls. Tom Maniatis…

Early in his research career, Jeffrey Macklis set out to unite two seemingly disparate fields of neuroscience: neural development and brain repair. At the time, this was an unorthodox idea, and “being a brain repair guy was a little shady,” he says. Still, he thought, “if we figured…

A chance introduction to the tricky issue of water pollution first attracted Diana Bautista to science. Growing up in Chicago, she was the first member of her family to finish high school, and she began college as a fine art major. But she floundered, and soon dropped out…

Bruce Stillman counts himself lucky to have been born in 1953, the year James Watson and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, and to have embarked on his research career during the early days of recombinant DNA technology. “It was almost perfect…

Growing up in London, Thomas Jessell was immersed in both art and science from an early age. His mother worked as a paintings conservator, while his grandfather was an organic chemist who introduced him to the beauty of molecular structures. “I was torn between whether to train as…

Growing up, Susan Dymecki loved biology, math and engineering. But from the time she donned skates at age 13, she was consumed by an entirely nonacademic passion: ice dancing. She competed nationally throughout high school, and after enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania, took a leave of absence…

Robert Weinberg began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the intention of preparing for medical school, but before long he was dissuaded from this path. “I heard that doctors had to stay up all night,” he says, “so I switched to becoming a biologist.”…

As an undergraduate studying biophysics, Jon Levine didn’t see himself going into medicine. He trained as a neuroscientist, first earning a Ph.D. at Yale, and then beginning a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, on the genetics of flight in fruit flies. It was 1972, and on…

With epidemics and outbreaks of Ebola virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus and others posing serious threats, many virologists are scrambling to learn how to better fight these human pathogens. Luis Villarreal has studied viruses for nearly 50 years, and considers them much more than infectious agents. For…