Talk about a rite of passage: In his first job out of Amherst College in 1980, Douglas Bishop worked as a tech for a scientist who had neither an alarm clock nor a circadian rhythm. David Kurtz at Cold Spring Harbor had a habit of staying awake for 24 hours, sleeping awhile, and then repeating the process. “The approach allowed him to work about 100 hours a week,” says Bishop. He tried to keep up with his new mentor, but soon they were out of sync. “Which meant we had experiments running 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he says.
Working with Kurtz, Bishop helped put cloned rat genes into mouse cells and examine their regulation. “The work went very well and very fast,” Bishop says. “It wasn’t a lifestyle you could maintain forever. But it was an exciting year and it showed that when push comes to ...
