Had it not been for that Saturday morning conversation, Michael Glotzer’s career would have taken a markedly different turn. Like all graduate students at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Glotzer rotated through several labs before choosing the one in which he would do his thesis work. He started off with Harold Varmus, whose trainees were working on everything from retroviral integration to telomeres. He also spent some time in the laboratory of Christine Guthrie. She was using yeast mutants to sort out the components of the splicing machinery. Wowed by the beauty of the genetics, Glotzer was all set to sign on the dotted line. “I had pretty much decided to go to her lab,” he says. “We had to submit our choices on Monday morning.” Then Marc Kirschner called.
Glotzer had been working in Kirschner’s lab on the problem of cell-cycle control. At the time, researchers knew ...
