Heidi Elmendorf grew up wanting to be a veterinarian. As a teenager in upstate New York, she worked with a small-animal veterinarian on weekends and after school. And as an undergraduate at Princeton University in the late 1980s, Elmendorf spent a summer as an elephant caretaker at a zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, where she "learned how to feed elephants, bathe them, and shovel up after them," she says.
To be accepted into Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, Elmendorf needed to take a course in microbiology, a course that Princeton didn't offer. "So I asked a guy who I thought was a microbiologist if he would do a tutorial with me," she says. Every week, Elmendorf would meet with that guy - who happened to be John T. Bonner, a scientist who she says "more or less invented research on Dictyostelium" - and the two would discuss a paper they had ...
