GREGORY J. HANNON
Professor and HHMI Investigator
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory© MAX S. GERBER As a student at Case Western University in the 1980s, Greg Hannon got his first taste of honest-to-goodness bucket biochemistry. “I was purifying something called Bence Jones protein from huge buckets of urine,” he says. “It involved running these giant, six-foot-tall sizing columns—a job that was not particularly pleasant, so perfect for an undergraduate.”
But Hannon was even more productive outside the cold room. “I had learned a little computer programming in high school—back when people were still writing code in Basic,” he says. “So, using the coordinates from the protein data bank, I wrote what was probably the first 3-D protein structure visualization program on a PC.” The effort allowed his advisor, Joyce Jentoft, to take a closer look at the Bence Jones protein—and a lot of other things. “For awhile she partly funded her lab distributing that program at 25 bucks a pop.”
The project also earned Hannon his first publication—in Computer Applications in the Biosciences—and ignited his passion for technology development. “Whether it’s writing thousands of lines of code or manipulating oligos on a microarray, I ...
