As an incoming graduate student at MIT in the late 1980s, Michael Hengartner knew he wanted to work with David Baltimore on the transcription factor NF-kappaB. “He’s such a great scientist and NF-kappaB is such a cool protein,” he says. “So I thought, OK, I’ll go to David Baltimore’s lab and work on NF-kappaB.” Back then, first-year students didn’t do rotations, so they got a feel for various labs by sitting in on their group meetings. Although Hengartner was sure he’d be working with Baltimore, one day he tagged along with a fellow student who was headed to a chalk talk in the lab of Robert Horvitz.
“It was completely incomprehensible,” Hengartner laughs. “They talked in alleles—about genetic analysis, double mutants, and ‘n1046 is clearly epistatic.’ I had no clue what they were talking about. At the end of the hour, we tried to sneak out, but Bob knew we ...
