In John Eppig's world, the egg reigns supreme. "It's where developmental biology begins," he says. Trying to understand the workings of eggs has occupied Eppig's entire career, the past 30 years of which he's spent at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine.
His affair with the oocyte began while he was a graduate student at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. His project involved studying the pigmentation of frog eggs. But long before that, Eppig says, "I found myself more interested in the eggs than in the pigment." After two years on the faculty of the City University of New York, Eppig moved to the Jackson Lab to "get in on the ground floor" of mammalian oocyte development. He says he believed that he could harness the power of genetics (which was moving forward faster in mice than in frogs) to crack the secrets of the egg, namely, ...
