As a young assistant professor at the University of Washington in the late 1980s, Randall Moon stole into his quiet lab during a holiday break to run one experiment. He had a hunch that the INT-1 gene played a crucial role in development. It turned out he was right: In that one experiment he discovered a critical signaling pathway and the direction of his career for the next 15 years, which he writes about in "WNTer wonderland." "To go from asking a dumb question about why injecting this RNA could turn a frog into a two–headed frog, to having potential therapies for a wide range of diseases based on understanding that pathway, is a nice research arc," says Moon, now an HHMI investigator and professor of pharmacology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Based in Philadelphia, Dustin Fenstermacher's photos have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe ...
