He eschews awards, readily changes his baby's diapers, and still dreams of playing in the World Cup. Molecular geneticist Josef Penninger, 38, who likens cellular parts to Lego pieces, believes that science is simple because, he has said, its "pieces are always the same." Lured away from the University of Toronto last year to direct the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Penninger, a native Austrian, works with murine mutations to determine their effects on the development of the whole organism and in diseases. "You cannot argue," he told another interviewer, "This is what the mouse tells us. I mean this little guy is not lying to us."
Of which papers are you the proudest? In terms of impact I think our work on osteoprotegerine ligand (OPGL) was great.1 We could explain the whole osteoclast field--it defined a completely new research area, the interplay between white ...
