Contributors

Wolf Frommer (far left) was working nights and weekends at hospitals, gathering experience for a medical career, when a lecture on plant genetics by Peter Starlinger, a giant in transposon studies, changed his course. Inspired and fascinated, Frommer gathered “all of his courage” and asked for a project in Starlinger’s lab at the University of Köln in Germany. After a successful academic career in Germany, Frommer sought new adventures, ultimately landing at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. Frommer aims to help people through his plant-science research, which currently focuses on how pathogens can target sugar transport in plants. Jumping genes also captured the imagination of Frommer’s coauthor Thomas Brutnell, of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri, who had similar plans about medical school before attending a lecture on transposons. Brutnell now studies the evolution of more efficient C4 photosynthesis, in the hopes of ...