As a graduate student at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Amanda Fisher says she was incredibly naïve. "I thought science was just great fun. And it is. But I was very unworldly." So her thesis advisor, Geoff Brown, suggested that she do a postdoc in a lab that might expand her horizons: Robert Gallo's at the National Institutes of Health. It was 1983, at the height of Gallo's race with the French to isolate the virus that causes AIDS. "Now that was bang-on worldly!" she says.
Fisher got the experience she needed—and then some. "It was a tough lab," says Fisher, who was "shocked," for example, by Gallo's encouragement of competition within the lab. "It was very different from what I was used to. But it was a fantastic experience. I left there a very much more confident person, because I knew I could hold my own ...
