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In her first two years the University of Michigan will devote $200,000 in resources to get her genetics laboratory off the ground.After that she has to convince the federal government and private agencies to give her about $100,000 a year to keep the laboratory afloat. "My job is to be in this lab, to get research dollars, and to get this laboratory up and running," she says. "It builds up my reputation. It builds up the department. It builds up the university. That's my job." She is working on two of the hottest topics in biomedical research--cell fate and the mechanisms of cell cycle control. Using the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus as a model, Maddock seeks to explain how cells differentiate to assume different jobs and locations in a developing organism. "How do cells tell the difference between the end and the side of the bacterium, and why are the two ends different?" she asks. Caulobacter is a "beautifully asymmetric organism" for studying how proteins are asymmetrically directed to the two poles and elsewhere in this process. Maddock's research interests extend beyond developmental biology to include the cell cycle, the sequence of biochemical events by which a cell grows and divides into two daughter cells. Biologists have long been interested in cell division but only recently have begun to discern its complexity and relevance to cancer and other diseases. Maddock focuses on a specific checkpoint in the Caulobacter cell cycle, the moment when the cell completes its long "G1" gap and begins to replicate its DNA. She has uncovered one of the actors in this drama--a protein with an eerie resemblance to the ras protein, which is known to play a role in certain cancers. "What's exciting is that this protein appears to be conserved in all organisms, from yeast and worms to humans," Maddock says. "No one knows yet what the hell it does, but it seems to have something to do with cell cycle control." While still a postdoctoral fellow, Maddock published papers in Science and other leading publications. "The beautiful thing about Caulobacter is that the field's not terribly crowded," she notes. Nonetheless, she is hardly alone in studying questions that may shed light on some of biology's most perplexing mysteries. Her laboratory competes with others around the world that are much larger and better known. She seems to relish the challenge almost as much as the science itself. |
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rom the minute Janine Maddock stepped into her laboratory on the Michigan
campus in January 1995, the tenure clock started ticking. She came to Michigan
after completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Lucille Shapiro, an eminent
developmental biologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "I'm
constantly reminded that I don't have tenure," Maddock says. "I
have been told so many times not to do something because of tenure. I hate
having to think about it. I hate having to worry about whether they're going
to like me or not because I've put my nose in the wrong place when my heart's
in the right place."
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