Alan Hinnebusch earned his scientific chops in the early 1980s, when yeast genetics, he says, was entering its golden age. At the time, Hinnebusch was a postdoc in the Cornell laboratory of Gerald Fink. "DNA transformation had just been developed in Gerry's lab," he says. That technique essentially allowed researchers to "isolate any gene, manipulate it, and put it back into the organism," making yeast "a eukaryote that you could study like Escherichia coli in terms of genetics."
That technologic potential piqued the interest of Hinnebusch, who even before his stint in Fink's lab was eager to study eukaryotic gene regulation. "It was fascinating to me that you could use genetics - isolating mutants and looking at how they behaved - to deduce what was happening at a molecular level," he says. "I just instantly decided that that approach was very cool."
That cool approach led Hinnebusch to the discovery ...
