Contributors

Michele Pagano wasn't even out of high school when he began his research career, growing bacteria or observing paramecia before the first bell rang. In an effort to appease his father, Pagano then headed to medical school and earned his MD in 1989, but he couldn't kick the research bug he caught back in that high school laboratory. So he received an additional specialty degree (a sort of Italian equivalent of a PhD) in molecular endocrinology, studying the phosphorylation of estrogen receptors. But this work was messy and inexact. "Everything for me has to be logical," he says. He therefore switched gears to the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS), in which "you can work out very clearly the biochemistry," he says. Lo and behold, he and his colleagues found (in "Tagged for Cleansing") there's a lot more to the UPS than first appeared, and its components are also involved in processes ranging ...