Early Indications: I hadn't necessarily intended to become a scientist. I went to a liberal arts college (Smith College, Northampton, Mass.) without any clear idea of what I would eventually do and just became captivated by cell biology. Arriving at Cambridge just sort of happened. I came to the end of my second postdoc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology without any prospects, and needing to stay in Cambridge because I'd married a tenured scientist at the LMB. Fortunately my current department at the time was keen for me to join them, even though they didn't have any positions. I applied for a Wellcome Senior Fellowship and got one. I've been there ever since.
Pivotal paper: I guess the first paper that distinguished my work as a scientist was the one I wrote as a postdoc (M. Robinson, B. Pearse, "Immunofluorescent localization of 100K coated vesicle proteins," J Cell ...
