Photo: Justin Ide, Harvard University News Office
As a young scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, Andrew Murray once attended an opera wearing a red rubber dress. "It was spectacular," recalls Tim Mitchison, then a colleague at the same institution. "I'll bet he can still fit into it." The pair periodically gave a seminar or lecture in similar costume to keep the students awake, recalls Mitchison. "Most of them liked it. And we trained a whole cadre of people who went on to become the next generation of cell biologists. It was a stunningly successful educational enterprise, even if it was occasionally a little lurid."
Although cross-dressing wasn't unheard of in the 1990s in San Francisco, Mitchison says the eccentric dress might also reflect a deeper truth about Murray's approach to science. "People like Andrew are driven to be not ordinary in everything they do," he says. "He's ...
