Tom Griffiths fell for his wife, Margaret, while watching rats running on a treadmill. It happened 13 years ago in a lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Margaret was a doctoral candidate in exercise physiology, studying the effects of diet and exercise on the livers of rats.
Griffiths was a biology professor at the university. Introduced by a mutual friend, they started dating, and Margaret asked Griffiths to help in the lab with her experiment. In that romantic setting, surrounded by aerobically fit rats and (perhaps less fit) postdocs, Cupid let loose his arrow. "A technician said, 'This is the first and only time in my memory that we had a full professor doing work in the laboratory,'" relates Griffiths, 52, now a professor of biology and acting dean of faculty at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU), Bloomington.
Margaret Griffiths moved to IWU with her husband and has left ...
