Locher, a steely character with short dark hair and rimless glasses, suggests that Chang's blunder might have been a result of rushing. Even if you are racing to the synchrotron, you must still adopt an almost obsessive caution, Locher says. "Perhaps you have to be a bit of a nerd," he laughs. "You have to be the kind of guy who would stand in front of a dart board and not leave until you throw a triple twenty."
In 2006 and 2007, Locher's publication was just one of nine that the institute's structural biologists landed in Science and Nature, in which they reported the structures of several important molecules, including fatty acid synthases from mammals and fungi. These papers were among the 300 refereed publications by the Department of Biology's employees in that period, according to ETH.
Several floors upstairs from Locher's office, Croatian researcher Nenad Ban agrees that diligence ...
