Elaine Ostrander's career got off to a strong start. As a graduate student at the Oregon Health & Sciences University in the 1980s, she published a couple of papers showing how chromatin structure influences gene expression in the tumor virus SV40. As a postdoc at Harvard, Ostrander continued to explore how changes in the conformation of DNA - this time, supercoiling - can regulate transcription; the work appeared in Science in 1990.
The academic world was her oyster. But something was missing. "I remember thinking that all through the years I did my graduate work and my postdoctoral work, I logged 70 hours a week and I loved what I was doing," says Ostrander. "But I was never quite consumed by it the way that, for instance, my brother the marine biologist was completely consumed by his work. He had fish tanks at home, fish tanks all over his office. ...
