Gerald Rubin has been studying biology for 40 years, but he still can't name the parts of a flower. In the late 1960s, when a teenage Rubin attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, he says, "biology was not considered a rigorous subject worthy of being taught. And they were right. At that point, high-school biology was memorizing the parts of a flower" - a task that did not interest Rubin or his teachers.
So Rubin went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he intended to major in chemistry. "But I took the introductory biology course, which was based on Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, and I was hooked," he says. Investigators had just cracked the genetic code, says Rubin, "so it was a very exciting time." His passion for experimental science was further stoked at Cold Spring Harbor, where he spent two summers in the early 1970s (before and ...
