The Scientist
Date: July 22, 1996
Mina Bissell, director, Life Sciences Division, Berkeley National Laboratory; president-elect, American Society for Cell Biology, Washington, D.C.
From the outset of her career as a scientist, Mina Bissell has been an iconoclast. For the past 25 years, she has been engaged in understanding how a normal cell remains normal in order to comprehend how a cell becomes malignant. In 1981, based on her work with cultured cells, Bissell developed the concept that the differentiated state of normal cells is unstable. In 1982, she proposed a model of "dynamic reciprocity," which argued that the microenvironment-and specifically the extracellular matrix (ECM)-has crucial information for functional differentiation. In the last 14 years, she and her colleagues not only have proved this concept but also have shown the central role of ECM in programmed cell death (apoptosis) and cancer. Bissell credits the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of ...
