In the late 1990s, Tim Keith was the leader of a team at a company called Genome Therapeutics that discovered ADAM33, the first gene to be associated with asthma. The milestone paper, published in Nature in 2002, "is probably one of the most widely cited papers in the asthma field," says Stephen Holgate of the University of Southampton, who supplied DNA samples collected from families in the United Kingdom. Although no drugs have yet emerged from the pipeline, Schering Plough (Genome Therapeutics' corporate partner in the ADAM33 discovery) has been working on turning the findings into novel therapies for the treatment and prevention of the disease.
Keith's career commenced far afield from human genetics, however: It started with flies. And not just any flies; she used Drosophila pseudoobscura. As a graduate student in Richard Lewontin's lab at Harvard in the early 1980's, Keith wanted to study how evolutionary forces contribute ...
