From his earliest days at the bench, Jack Szostak has shown a penchant for "tackling difficult projects where nobody has succeeded," says Ray Wu of Cornell University, who oversaw Szostak's graduate work on cloning cytochrome c. "It was 1973 and no genes had yet been cloned," says Wu. So Szostak set out to chemically synthesize an oligonucleotide primer that would help him pull down the cytochrome c gene - an effort that required a collaboration with an organic chemist and a year-and-a-half of his time, all to accomplish something Szostak notes "you could now do in an hour." Szostak was successful: "We could light up the gene on Southern blots and detect a message and so on," he says, although another group beat him to publication.
That was just the first of Szostak's long list of successes. His identification and characterization of yeast telomeres, carried out in the 1980s in ...
