GREGORY COWLEY
Plant geneticist Dominique Bergmann seldom plays by the rules. In college, she was arrested for participating in a Gulf War protest, though she first confirmed with her biology professor that a makeup exam would be available should she miss her midterm as a result of incarceration. And as a young postdoc in the lab of Chris Somerville at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, she abandoned what he considered “quite an interesting result”—finding the gene responsible for the perfectly round seeds produced by a mutant Arabidopsis plant—because “she decided it wasn’t interesting enough.”
“Most people, when they’re entering a new field, are looking for anything that will work,” Somerville says. “But she was looking for something more exciting.”
METHOD: Bergmann found it in ...
