One summer in the late 1980s, Yuri Lazebnik needed to sort some cells. A graduate student at St. Petersburg State University in the Soviet Union, Lazebnik was studying proteins involved in regulating the cell cycle. The project required labeling and separating cells in various stages of division. So Lazebnik built a cell sorter, and when he realized he didn't have the necessary marker proteins, he headed to the Black Sea, fished out some red algae, and purified the fluorescent moieties himself. "It was warm and sunny and really fun," says Lazebnik, now a biochemist studying how cell death contributes to cancer at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.