Chris and Susan Molineaux attended graduate school together at Johns Hopkins University and then landed postdocs in Baltimore and Washington, DC. When Chris got a faculty offer at Mt. Sinai, Susan followed him to Manhattan, dropping a hot NIH postdoc to take an even hotter one in the Columbia University lab of future nobelist Richard Axel, and eventually a job at Merck. Four years later, after a stint at a biotech, Chris wound up at Merck, too.
Not so long afterward, the twosome holed up for a weekend, combed through Nature and Science, and sent off a huge volley of packets, each containing both of their CVs and a single, joint-application letter. This approach won them dual appointments at senior levels - she in basic research, he in development - with Praecis, a Boston startup then still operating out of its founder's lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We're ...