GREGORY COWLEY PHOTOGRAPHY
Robert Blelloch started his career as a high school teacher, but quickly identified two problems with that path: it was repetitive, and the curriculum was oversimplified, he says. “I was reading the textbook and knew it was not quite right.”
So he went to grad school, studying organogenesis of C. elegans gonads and earning his MD/PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Blelloch watched—day and night—as the cells of developing worms migrated through their bodies, observing what went wrong when certain genes were knocked out. He learned, for example, that the distal tip cells of worms carrying gon1, a mutation in a matrix metalloprotease gene, failed to migrate properly in the gonad, resulting in a misshapen organ. His research made the cover of Nature in June ...
