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It was the first Saturday of Spring 2003, and Joe DeRisi and his postdoc David Wang were staked out at either end of the University of California, San Francisco's Genentech Hall waiting for the FedEx truck.

As an undergraduate at St. Andrews University in Scotland, David Russell fell in love with infection.

Bruce Lahn has always been something of a rebel.

For Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Cori Bargmann, the worm's the thing.

Craig Thompson didn't set out to be a spokesman for the importance of bioenergetics in determining cell fate.

In 1991, Ewan Birney, a lad of 19, left England with his high-school diploma and went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to "fool around" for a year before going to college.

As a young scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, Andrew Murray once attended an opera wearing a red rubber dress.

One day in the early 1990s, Bert Vogelstein was showing fellow cancer researcher Sandy Markowitz around his lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.

"We have your dog," read the cut-and-paste ransom note taped to Chris Miller's office door one day in the late 1990s.

In John Eppig's world, the egg reigns supreme.

On the desk in Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz's office sits a small box labeled "Mr. Wizard's Golgi Model Kit."

Mike SnyderCourtesy of Michael Marsland"We couldn't get that project funded for the life of us," says Yale University's Mike Snyder of the experiment that, in his opinion, launched the functional genomics era. It was the late 1980s, years before the dawn of DNA microarrays, and Snyder and his colleagues were proposing to use epitope-bearing transposons to tag every protein in yeast. With this collection, the scientists planned to track the positions of all 6,000 yeast proteins, information that

Drew EndyCourtesy of Sriram KowitzFor Drew Endy, heading up the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Synthetic Biology Working Group is like being "the lifeguard at the gene pool." Working with prefabricated snippets of DNA pulled off a freezer shelf, Endy and his MIT colleagues are attempting to design and construct new living systems.Their agenda, explains Endy, is twofold: "First, let's see if we can learn more about existing systems by rebuilding them." Next, he'd like to "take natural livi