Photo: Larry Canner
One day in the early 1990s, Bert Vogelstein was showing fellow cancer researcher Sandy Markowitz around his lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. "Suddenly, from halfway across the lab, this big hoot and holler goes up," says Scott Kern, who'd joined Vogelstein's lab as a postdoc after completing his medical training. People were huddled around a gel, excited by some eagerly anticipated result. Recalls Kern: "Sandy looked over and said something like, 'What's going on?"' To which Vogelstein replied, "Oh, they do that every day."
The eruption in question, Vogelstein says, was most likely another step along the road to identifying APC (named for adenomatous polyposis coli), a long-sought tumor-suppressor gene involved in a hereditary form of colon cancer. "There were explosions like that happening routinely," says Suzanne Baker of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, who, as a student in the ...
