Pascale Cossart is fascinated by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes. Cossart started studying the deadly pathogen in 1986 at the Pasteur Institute. At the time, numerous labs were trying to identify genes responsible for virulence in various bacteria. Her work with Listeria led to new concepts in infection biology. "By chasing answers to the questions that struck my curiosity, I've let Listeria lead me into new fields of biology such as RNA-mediated regulation," she says. Now the foremost authority on the pathogen, Cossart's work (described in "The Maverick Bacterium") has won her multiple awards, which include the 1998 L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
As the Curator of Science and Technology for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, Deborah Douglas oversees the university's extensive collections, including those accumulating dust in basements. It was while rummaging through one of these storerooms in 1999 that she came across the forgotten, broken model of ...
