Growing up in Liège, Belgium, Christine Jacobs-Wagner was ranked as the top badminton player in the country. She was planning to compete in the Olympics, when in 1993 she suffered a shoulder injury at the age of 24. That meant Jacobs-Wagner, a graduate student in biochemistry at the time, had to permanently trade her racquet for a pipette, but she didn't leave her spirit of competition behind.
"At our lab parties we would have pipette-throwing contests and do serial dilutions for speed," says Hue Lam, her first graduate student, who's now a postdoc at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Christine usually won. If she didn't, she'd be upset with herself. She's just the most driven person I know."
She brings that drive to her science. "I would worry about having to compete with her," says Jeff Errington of the University of Newcastle. "She's extremely dedicated, intellectually rigorous, and if you ...
