© DUSTIN FENSTERMACHERRuben Gonzalez Jr. worked his way through a chemistry degree at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, first at a fast-food joint, then at a video store, where he eventually became assistant manager. Somehow, he also found time for science, spending his last three years in Stephen Winkle’s lab researching changes in the shape of DNA when it switches from a normal, right-handed helix to the opposite, left-handed form.
“I got lucky—hit the jackpot—[when] Ruben decided he wanted to work in my lab,” says Winkle, who knew Gonzalez as the student in his biochemistry class acing all of the tests.
Gonzalez had planned on becoming a high school chemistry teacher after college, but Winkle saw a different path for the young scientist and encouraged him to apply to graduate programs. In 1995, the pair were in San Francisco for a meeting of the Biophysical Society when Gonzalez got the news he’d been accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, where Winkle had done his own graduate work years earlier. They headed across the bay to meet Winkle’s former advisor, Ignacio “Nacho” Tinoco Jr., who immediately sold Gonzalez on RNA. “The idea that this molecule ...
