Blanche Capel studied to be an interior designer before making the switch to biology. “There’s something about using your mind to understand the biology of who we are and how we work that makes me feel alive,” she says. In 1993, Capel started her own lab at Duke University studying sex–or, more specifically, the mechanisms that govern sex determination, a crucial developmental process. She noticed that sex determination and sex reversal in the animal kingdom are actually quite common, but there was no single gene or common mechanism to explain it all. “I felt like there had to be more to this story,” she says. In Choosing Sex, she discusses her path to discovering specific genetic switches that control the differentiation of embryonic tissues into sex organs.
In 1994, Randy Olson experienced a rather unusual change of heart. At 38 years old, he left his tenured professorship in marine biology ...
