As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College—Harvard's allgirl sister institution—in the 1960s, Susan Gottesman earned pocket money working as a technician in Jim Watson's Harvard lab. "I would hear stories of people going to mixers at Radcliffe and meeting this strange guy who said he was a professor," she laughs. "But in the lab he was perfectly well behaved." And he encouraged Gottesman to get some hands-on experience by helping a grad student with his experiments. "I didn't know enough science to understand everything that was going on," she says. "But I got to do what I wanted, which was playing in a lab and learning through osmosis."
And through the years, Gottesman has certainly built on everything she's absorbed. As an independent investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—where she set up shop in 1976—Gottesman made major contributions in the field of prokaryotic gene regulation, uncovering key roles played ...
