Naturally, this new research is controversial-paradigm shifts always are. But, says Brandeis University's Michael Rosbash, whose postdoctoral fellow is working on a similar problem, "Cook has gone a long way to making believers out of a lot of skeptics, including myself." Says Leslie Leinwand, chair, department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, University of Colorado, Boulder: "This goes against everybody's dogma so much that everybody, including myself, is saying, 'Whoa, this is just not the way you think about a cell.'" Cook was shocked himself. "[We] didn't believe the results [at first], and repeated them over and over and over again."
What Cook's work has done is invite new interpretations of long-standing dilemmas, most notably the puzzle of nonsense-mediated RNA decay. Moreover, if it is correct-and most researchers believe additional work is needed to definitively prove that nuclear translation occurs-it will likely change the way new experiments are interpreted. These ...
