SCIENTIST TO WATCH

When facing the unknown, Helen Blackwell dives in without hesitation. At least three times thus far in her scientific career her work has taken her into unfamiliar territory, from organic chemistry, to chemical biology, to plant biology, to microbiology. And where sink or swim is the imperative, Blackwell sets an enviable pace.

Blackwell earned her doctorate in organic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. While finishing a thesis on olefin metathesis (a reaction that stitches together carbon-carbon double bonds),1 Blackwell pondered a move into biology. "I became very interested in making molecules that did things," she says, and so in 1999 she joined Stuart Schreiber's lab at Harvard University.

Schreiber's team was using chemical genetics to probe developmental pathways in classical animal models such as Caenorhabditis elegans and zebrafish. Blackwell chose to work with plants, a system unexplored in the lab. "Plants have really amazing ways of sensing their ...