Contributors

Mysteries have always appealed to Manel Esteller, a self-proclaimed “aficionado” of Sherlock Holmes. “I like the possibility to deduce a whole starting from a minimal clue.” Trying to solve the mystery surrounding the molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma during his PhD program at Universidad de Barcelona led him to devote himself to epigenetics, after he found that pure genetics was unable to explain his results. He moved to the United States for a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studying DNA methylation’s role in human cancer, and in 2001 founded Spain’s first epigenetics lab. He is the Director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program of the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research in Barcelona, but relishes spending his free time with his family, including his six-and-a-half-year-old son. “A lot of developmental epigenetic changes are occurring in him while he is growing so fast!” Esteller describes how epigenetics has broadened ...