In a photo I often use in presentation slides of my work, I’m standing in nothing but my swim trunks and sunglasses, covered in mud up to my ears. Next to me is my long-time colleague Joe Trapani, in much the same state, with a raccoon-like pattern on his face where he has smeared the mud away. We’d just spent an hour lounging in the Israeli side of the Dead Sea, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world, full of rich mineral mud that attracted visitors for thousands of years. I explain to my audience that we’re grinning like fools in the photo in part because of the way we looked but also, perhaps, because we were feeling so clever for coming up with a new way to answer an old, nagging research question: Do cells of the immune system detect and kill cancerous cells?
We had just come from ...
