Matthew Albert passes a bust of Ilya Mechnikov every day on the way to his office at the Institute Pasteur in Paris. Working in the same building as the man who discovered phagocytosis is "humbling," he says, but the young immunologist shares with the 1908 Nobel Prize winner a fascination with cell death and a fixation on how science can improve the human condition.
As a crystallographer at Brown University, Albert worked on technologies to convert sunlight to electricity. When Raytheon, the developer of Patriot missiles, appropriated the project, Albert decided that a change was in order. "If there was going to be an application for my work, I wanted to be a bit more confident that at the other end someone was benefiting in terms of quality of life." He started an MD/PhD program in immunology at Rockefeller University and Cornell Medical College in New York in 1993.
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