Anne Brunet, a postdoctoral fellow in the division of neurosciences, Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, recalls that, in 1997, senior author Michael E. Greenberg, professor of neurology at Children's Hospital, published a paper in Science1 showing that a protein kinase called 'Akt' was crucial for transmitting signals from survival factors and mediating survival in neurons.2 Work by others quickly extended the discovery to other cell types. According to Brunet, the next step was to find out "how Akt exerted its survival effect and what were its substrates."
One possibility was that Akt acted within the nucleus, repressing death genes by regulating transcription factors controlling death gene expression. But a plan of attack was not formulated until Brunet's team noticed a paper from Gary Ruvkun's laboratory, also at Harvard Medical School, published that same year.3 Ruvkin's group found that the pathway that activates Akt in Caenorhabditis elegans regulates a member of ...
