Eric Schadt doesn't care much about how he dresses. In fact, the executive scientific director of research genetics at Rosetta Inpharmatics has about 20 or 30 identical white polo shirts and about 10 pairs of identical khaki shorts hanging in his closet. He dons this recurring outfit - over white socks and Birkenstock sandals - every day before heading to work at Rosetta, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Merck.
The 43-year-old says he has more important things to concentrate on than fashion - like using expression microarrays to construct complex gene interaction networks which identify novel targets to treat diseases. "What I have to do every day is push super hard on the thinking front and on the doing front," he says. "It's much easier to push and think hard if you don't have to think about other things that don't matter so much."
Schadt has been championing the importance of ...
