Jean Pieters began his life in science in a slaughterhouse. As a graduate student at the University of Maastricht in The Netherlands in the mid-1980s, Pieters was studying the biochemistry of blood coagulation. “My first week there I had to go to the slaughterhouse with a 20-liter bucket,” he says. Driving back to lab with his liquid sample, Pieters says, “around every corner I was afraid the blood would slosh out onto the front seat.”
“But it was really great fun,” he says of the subsequent analyses: isolating clotting factors and testing different inhibitors for their anticoagulant abilities. “I enjoyed doing experiments and I really liked the lab atmosphere.” He didn’t even mind purifying proteins the old-fashioned way. “I must have spent half my PhD in the cold room,” says Pieters. “We had these giant columns that went up to the ceiling. I’d come back in the morning to find ...
