It was 1980, in the early days of the molecular biology era, when Nancy Jenkins and her collaborator-and-spouse Neal Copeland accepted their first faculty positions at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. "Everyone told us that going there would ruin our careers," says Jenkins. The lab was populated by geneticists who were used to thinking in terms of mice, not molecules. "We were the first people at Jax who even knew what a restriction enzyme was, let alone used one," she says. So friends feared their science might suffer.
But Jenkins saw things differently. "We thought that if you could combine molecular biology with formal genetics, you could begin to build incredibly interesting models of human disease." Turns out, Jenkins had it right.
"That was their brilliant scientific prescience," says Jeffrey Friedman of Rockefeller University. "They brought their skills to the Jackson Labs, where they were in a position ...
