When he was a boy, Eugene Garfield lived across the street from a branch of the New York Public Library.

As an undergraduate at St. Andrews University in Scotland, David Russell fell in love with infection.

Bruce Lahn has always been something of a rebel.

For Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Cori Bargmann, the worm's the thing.

Craig Thompson didn't set out to be a spokesman for the importance of bioenergetics in determining cell fate.

In 1991, Ewan Birney, a lad of 19, left England with his high-school diploma and went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to "fool around" for a year before going to college.

As a young scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, Andrew Murray once attended an opera wearing a red rubber dress.

One day in the early 1990s, Bert Vogelstein was showing fellow cancer researcher Sandy Markowitz around his lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.

"We have your dog," read the cut-and-paste ransom note taped to Chris Miller's office door one day in the late 1990s.

In John Eppig's world, the egg reigns supreme.

One summer in the late 1980s, Yuri Lazebnik needed to sort some cells.

On the desk in Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz's office sits a small box labeled "Mr. Wizard's Golgi Model Kit."