And, as with the existing cadre of investigators, this new group challenges many commonplace myths about how science works:

Scientists have one-track minds and one-track careers: HHMI investigator Michael Eisen has racked up material for four careers. In 1996, he went from his Harvard Ph.D. commencement to the play-by-play announcer's booth for the Columbia Mules, a minor league baseball team in Columbia, Tennessee. Summer over, Eisen went back to science for a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford where he helped HHMI investigator Patrick O. Brown perfect the DNA microarray “chip,” now a fundamental tool of the modern laboratory. In 2001, Eisen became a publisher and a cofounder, with Brown and Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the flagship of the “open access” journal movement. At the University of California, Berkeley, Eisen has been building his own cross-disciplinary lab since 2000, bringing together geneticists, biochemists, molecular and cell biologists, ecologists, and computer scientists to explore development and evolution.

Scientists come from science backgrounds: HHMI investigator Erich Jarvis grew up under difficult family circumstances in Harlem but blossomed as a dance student in New York's famed High School of Performing Arts. He turned down an audition for the nationally renowned Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, however, to study molecular biology at Hunter College and neurobiology at the Rockefeller University. As an HHMI investigator at Duke University, Jarvis will continue his epochal work on using songbirds to study the molecular pathways of learning and the evolution of speech.

Scientists must be aloof from human suffering: HHMI investigator Scott Keeney is a biochemist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center with a highly personal stake in his field: the toughness and fragility of DNA. Keeney studies how reproductive germ cells undergoing meiosis—the duplication and segregation of sex cells into half-sets of genes—damage and repair their own DNA. When he was 35, Keeney was knocked flat by a germ cell tumor growing under his sternum. The drugs that successfully destroyed his tumor worked by attacking the DNA of fast-growing cancer cells. But all such drugs inflict collateral DNA damage in nearby noncancerous cells, raising the risk for new tumors. More than five years later, Keeney is cancer-free but acutely conscious of how his health and his research are bound up in DNA.

Science is a solitary profession: HHMI investigator Ning Zheng is a structural biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. One night, Zheng was hunched over his computer, stymied by an unrecognizable compound at the heart of a key receptor molecule that regulates growth in plants, when his father called. “I told him we had this structure we couldn't explain, and he asked me to describe it,” the younger Zheng remembers. Over the phone, the elder Zheng, a retired biochemist in China, immediately recognized the compound as the natural alcohol, inositol phosphate. His son listed him as a coauthor on the 2007 paper that landed on the cover of Nature, surely the ultimate “Thanks, Dad.”

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