Susan Gasser was slow to find her calling in science; her first real focus in university was classical philosophy. "It was really reading things like Darwin that were very conceptual that made me interested in science," she says. She earned her Ph.D. working on mitochondrial protein trafficking with Gottfried Schatz at the University of Basel, which led to a postdoc studying chromosomes. "The organization of chromatin in the nucleus is not easily solved," says Gasser, now director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel and a professor of molecular biology at the University of Basel. In "The Shape of Heredity", she discusses discovering that proteins involved in DNA repression are bound to telomeres at the periphery of the nucleus—a finding that led her to uncover the function of other proteins that give DNA its shape within the nucleus.
While majoring in biology in college, Kirsten Weir "had ...
