WOLF REIK
Associate Director of Research, Babraham Institute, Cambridge, U.K. Professor of Epigenetics, University of Cambridge Associate Faculty, Sanger Institute THE BARBRAHAM INSTITUTEAs a medical school student at the University of Hamburg in 1982, Wolf Reik heard a lecture by Rudolf Jaenisch on how retroviruses could be used in transgenic mice to probe gene expression during development. “I became totally electrified sitting in this lecture,” says Reik. “I thought, ‘This is the thing I must do.’” Medical schools in Germany at the time required a thesis project for graduation, but not necessarily several years of laboratory work; nonetheless, Reik decided he wanted the experience of working in a lab, something he’d only had a taste of before. “I had already started in a couple of laboratories, but I would get bored and leave after a few days. The first was a neurobiology lab. Because I had a great interest in literature and language, I thought neurobiology would be really exciting. But when I started, it was just incredibly dull.” Listening to Jaenisch changed all that.
But despite Reik’s enthusiasm, Jaenisch turned him down. “He told me he didn’t want any medics [in his lab]. He knew full well what he was talking about, since he was a medic himself. I think he thought medical students thought PhD research was a sideline that they didn’t take too seriously.” In the end, Reik’s persistence managed to persuade Jaenisch to take him on. “Maybe it’s because I just wouldn’t leave,” he says.
“In the mammalian field, the imprinting field, together with the X-inactivation field, was the birthplace of epigenetics.”
Reik found he enjoyed doing hands-on experiments. Jaenisch’s lab (which has since moved to the Whitehead Institute) had already demonstrated a link between de novo methylation in the mouse embryo genome and inhibition of ...
