KEVIN P. CASEY
When Harmit Malik couldn’t attend a molecular biology seminar at the Indian Institute of Technology due to a class scheduling conflict, the kindly professor invited the young chemical engineering undergraduate to his office to chat about biology one-on-one. Malik sat on a stool across from the professor and listened, transfixed, for two hours. He would visit the professor three times a week for the rest of the semester. “I never missed that appointment,” says Malik.
Soon after receiving his degree in 1993, Malik traveled to New York to attend graduate school at the University of Rochester, one of a few institutions willing to admit a biology PhD student with no background in the life sciences. There, he studied the evolutionary relationships of retrotransposable elements, mobile ...
