Mapping with Mice

It was 1980, in the early days of the molecular biology era, when Nancy Jenkins and her collaborator-and-spouse Neal Copeland accepted their first faculty positions at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. "Everyone told us that going there would ruin our careers," says Jenkins. The lab was populated by geneticists who were used to thinking in terms of mice, not molecules. "We were the first people at Jax who even knew what a restriction enzyme was, let alone used one," she says. So friends feared their science might suffer.