Dee Denver: Shaking up mutation

Though it's been decades since he was a kid turning over rocks in St. Joseph, Missouri, Dee Denver, now assistant professor in the zoology department at Oregon State University, still enjoys looking at nematodes. "It's beautiful," he says, watching through a microscope in his laboratory as a tiny worm makes sinusoidal tracks through a plate of Escherichia coli. It's no coincidence that the animals that intrigue him have also allowed him to make dogma-shaking observations in evolutionary biology.