Leonid Kruglyak did his graduate work in physics, but when he dove into biology, he jumped with both feet. “The first thing I wrote about genetics was an eight-line letter to Nature,” he says. In it, he defended Dean Hamer’s 1993 discovery of a genetic basis for homosexuality—and took on Nature’s editor. “John Maddox had written this editorial basically trashing the Hamer paper, but he got the basic genetics wrong,” says Kruglyak. “You could have a lot of issues with the paper, but he suggested a model to explain the data that was completely inconsistent with the genetics. I was teaching myself human genetics at the time and I thought: ‘Wait a minute, the one thing it can’t be is this model you’re proposing.’ So I wrote it up.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he laughs. “Nature published two letters about that editorial. One from Dean Hamer and ...
