Leslie B. Vosshall: Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Robin Chemers Neustein Professor, Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University ALLAN ZEPEDA/AP, ©HHMI
As a teenager in the early 1980s, Leslie Vosshall spent her summers in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “My uncle is a scientist and he’d rent a lab there,” she says. “He always needed someone to come and do the glassware. It was a plum job, generally handed out via the nepotistic network. Some kids didn’t do a good job, spending more time playing tennis and going to the beach. But I liked the whole process, and I pretty quickly graduated to doing actual experiments. It was so completely different from what I had experienced in high school, where the football coach had been pressed into teaching biology.”
Her uncle, Philip Dunham, and his colleague Gerald Weissmann “were good at making science seem like this big adventure ...
