ABBY DERNBURG
Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Faculty scientist, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory
HHMI Investigator© LEAH FASTENWhen I was a kid, I always felt stupid, in the sense that I didn’t understand how the world worked,” says Abby Dernburg. Although she can’t explain why her twelve-year-old self homed in on biology rather than physics or economics, Dernburg says she already sensed that understanding biology was the best way to understand the world she lived in. The teenage Dernburg would tell people she wanted to be a neuroscientist, to study how the brain worked. “I knew what the term meant, but I didn’t really understand what research was until I went to graduate school,” she says.
As a high school student in the 1980s, Dernburg happened upon an old computer in her school. “It was already an antique—it had a teletype instead of a screen,” she says. Dernburg decided to see if she could, without any help, program a blackjack game on the computer. “I became obsessed with it. I would skip meals, I would go early to school and stay late.”
“Structural biology, in the sense that it’s biology you can look at, appealed strongly to me. I like having a visual context in which to put biology.”
For more than 15 years, Dernburg has aimed that laserlike focus on meiosis—the two-part cell division process that reduces diploid germline cells to haploid gametes (such as ova and sperm)—using C. elegans ...
