Stan Fields was in need of funding. As an assistant professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in the late 1980s, he was studying a transcription factor involved in yeast mating and pheromone response. And like many young faculty members, he had an eye out for new grant opportunities. That’s when the university’s Center for Biotechnology announced that it was offering seed money for projects with commercial potential. “It was $35,000—I remember that quite vividly,” laughs Fields. “That seemed like a lot of money back then.”
So Fields put on his thinking cap. “I was trying to come up with a way to transform yeast transcription into an idea that would have commercial interest,” he says. Not long before, Roger Brent and Mark Ptashne at Harvard University had published a paper showing that a hybrid transcription factor—built from the activation domain of one factor and the DNA-binding ...
