As a graduate student at Stanford University in the late 1970s, Tom Tullius hung upside down off piers to pluck gelatinous, green-blooded tunicates off the pilings. He took to the fields to harvest bag after bag of bean leaves. And he imported envelopes filled with suspicious-looking, powdered Pseudomonas from an overseas chemical and biological warfare facility. All for the sake of his science.
“This was in the old days when you had to make your own protein,” says Tullius, now a professor at Boston University. “You didn’t just stick a gene in E. coli and overexpress it. You had to go to the source.” And sometimes the source was gallons of unpasteurized buttermilk—because pasteurization would denature the protein of interest. “We’d fly down to the Altadena dairy, which was infamous for its periodic outbreaks of Listeria,” says Tullius. “And then we’d take as much buttermilk as we could carry on ...
