CHRISTOPHER COEGrowing up in New York City with a father trained in psychology, Christopher Coe often discussed theories of nature versus nurture at the dinner table. Decades later, Coe would put some of those ideas to the test, conducting nonhuman primate research and clinical studies to understand how prenatal life influences later health. After majoring in anthropology and biology at the City College of New York, Coe earned his doctorate in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from SUNY Downstate Medical Center. His love for anthropology, however, remains strong. “I usually pick my holiday countries to visit based on both the people [and the] culture, as well as whether monkeys also live there,” he wrote in an e-mail while vacationing in the Namibian desert.
During a postdoc at Stanford Medical School in the early 1980s, Coe studied neuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology. Now, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, his research incorporates all aspects of his diverse training, with a major focus on infant anemia. “I believe that nine of the most important months of our lives occur before we are born,” he says. Coe describes how understanding the placenta can help reveal the developmental origins of disease in “The Prescient Placenta.”
COURTESY OF AL-KHALILIUniversity of Surrey physicist and Chair of Public Engagement in Science Jim Al-Khalili became accustomed to straddling two worlds as he was growing up in Baghdad with his Iraqi father and British mother. After earning a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Surrey and spending two years as a postdoc at University College London, he returned to Surrey, where he became a full professor of physics in 2005. A series of high school lectures Al-Khalili gave on behalf of the Institute of Physics turned into his first popular science book, Black Holes, Wormholes & Time Machines, and by 2007, Al-Khalili says he found himself spending half of his time in the lab and the other half working as what he calls a “public scientist.”
© PAOLA DEPAOLABiologist and science writer Johnjoe McFadden studied biochemistry as an undergrad at the University of London and molecular genetics as a PhD student at Imperial College London. While a postdoc at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, he examined the genetics of Crohn’s disease, but soon shifted to studying the bacteria associated with the condition. As a lecturer at the University of Surrey in the late 1980s, McFadden happened to read a paper on bacterial gene mutations around the same time he was reading a book on quantum mechanics and wondered if, like the observer effect in quantum mechanics, bacterial DNA was altered whenever a cell examined its own genome, biasing some mutations over others.
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