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 our understanding of cancer and pointed to new diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
If your ancestor’s career choices can alter your epigenome, affecting your own professional leanings, it happened to molecular biologist Robert Kingston, who comes from a long line of scientists. He now runs a lab at his alma mater, Harvard University, where his group dissected the functions of Polycomb proteins in animals and now studies long-range chromatin remodeling. Although his lab Web site states that he and his group live “with chromatin always on our minds,” Kingston makes plenty of time for running, cooking Italian food paired with the perfect wine, and doing puzzles. But science is his preferred puzzle. In this month’s Thought Experiment Kingston discusses a method to test the importance of histone marks in transmitting heritable information.
Growing up in the southwest United ...
