When postdoc Don Ingber noticed strange fuzz contaminating one of his endothelial cell cultures in 1985, his first instinct was to hide it from his advisor, Judah Folkman. Ingber was studying the role of blood vessel cell shape in growth and survival at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital in Boston, Mass. He noticed that cells under the fungus died, while those a little further away were round—a sign of sickly cells. Cells at the edge of the dish looked flat and healthy.
Though he was curious, the overloaded postdoc already "had about 40 million projects. The last thing I wanted [was] to have another project," he says. He knew Folkman was "the type of person who would get really excited," and convince him to look into it, so he scooped the fungus into a test tube, locked the sample in the warm room, and promptly forgot ...
