Her initial model was deceptively simple. As a graduate student exploring Escherichia coli's response to oxidative stress, Gisela "Gigi" Storz proposed that a protein called OxyR interacts directly with potentially destructive oxidants, such as hydrogen peroxide, and then switches on the genes needed to neutralize the threat.
However, her colleagues were not impressed. "We thought her hypothesis was naïve," says James Imlay of the University of Illinois, who was a fellow student at the University of California, Berkeley at the time. "She was suggesting that this protein could directly sense hydrogen peroxide and then bind to DNA and act as a transcriptional regulator―that a single protein did the whole job. There was just no precedent." At a practice run of the talk that Storz was to present to her thesis committee as part of her preliminary exam, Imlay says, "we just tore her apart. In the time-honored, senior grad-student style, ...
