ABOVE: © Adam Lerner
For Zach Lippman, it all started with seeds. As a teenager with a summer job on a small farm in Connecticut that grew primarily vegetables, he marveled at how, once planted, each one “would go from this little seed to this amazing, developing plant with all these flowers and fruits,” he says. Lippman, now a plant geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), was also struck by the variety in size, shape, and other traits that exists among varieties within a single cultivated species, such as the tomato plant.
That curiosity drove him to study plant breeding and genetics as an undergraduate at Cornell University, where he also worked in plant biologist Steve Tanksley’s tomato lab. He went on to earn a PhD with Rob Martienssen at CSHL, where he studied epigenetic control of mobile bits of the genome known as transposons. As a student, Lippman ...
