© AARON OTTISHouston, Texas–born biochemist Peter Cornish has always excelled at scientific research, be it his elementary school science project investigating which types of molecules give substances their smells or his work today on ribosome dynamics during translation.
Before heading to college at Graceland University in Iowa, he sat down with his parents and mapped out the next 4 years, with the goal of preparing for medical school. “I’ve always known what to do to get to the next stage,” he says. “I always had in the back of my mind what it [took] to get there.”
Cornish eventually majored in premed biology, chemistry, and math but later refocused his ambitions from medical school to graduate school in biochemistry. “It was intriguing to me that I could go to grad school and get paid to do that,” he says. METHODS: In biochemist David Giedroc’s lab at Texas A&M University, Cornish studied how ribosomes translate mRNA into proteins, focusing his graduate work on frameshifting, ...
