As a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, Paul Turner declared he wanted to study vultures. "I had this strange appreciation for carrion birds," he says. "And I thought there must be something special about their digestive system that allowed them to tolerate and maybe even exploit the potentially pathogenic microbes that grow on rotting meat."
Rich Lenski, Turner's thesis advisor, was not enthusiastic. "I pointed out to Paul some of the scientific challenges of studying that sort of system," Lenski says. "Keeping a lab full of vultures would have been a logistical nightmare," laughs Turner. Not to mention the need for decaying carcasses.
Instead, Turner turned his attention to more accessible microbial systems. "Paul was immediately excited when I told him about the viruses and plasmids that infect bacteria, and how they could be used to study questions at the interface of ecology and evolution," says Lenski. ...
