Little did Andy Johnson know that when he started working in Ronald Schwartz’s lab at the National Institutes of Health, he was entering a race against several other investigators all working independently (and secretly) on the same protein.
Johnson came to the lab with a mouse model with an apparent immune defect. Using T-cell proliferation assays, Schwartz’s team traced the problem back to the thymus. With the help of Johnson’s co-mentor, Richard Cornall at the University of Oxford, they found that the mouse was unable to express a thymic protein that appeared critical to T-cell development. Find this mysterious protein’s function, and Johnson would have a nice publication for his thesis defense.
But Johnson didn’t realize that just a few buildings away, Paul Love’s group at the NIH had been studying the same protein for several years, using different approaches. While Johnson was working on characterizing four mice with T-cell ...
