In April 2000, Rubin testified before a Congressional subcommittee about genomic sequencing, along with (left) J. Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, and (right) Robert Waterston, then head of the department of genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Rubin's growing scientific stature caught the interest of Daniel E. Koshland, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who had taken on a controversial revamping of that institution's biological sciences program. Koshland wanted a rising star like Rubin, and he heard that the Carnegie geneticist “might be movable.” Koshland energetically recruited the Rubins, wining and dining and persuading, but he was foiled in his efforts to make a pitch to Lynn. “I always believed you should talk to the wife,” says Koshland, formerly editor-in-chief of Science, “but I could never get her on the phone.” Lynn, who in fact was eager to leave Baltimore, recalls the episode with amusement: “Gerry kept saying to him, `I don't know if Lynn will come.'” The Rubins' strategy worked, says Koshland, laughing at what became a legend of academic negotiation. “I gave him more than any professor we'd ever recruited. But he was a great addition to Berkeley.”

Rubin came aboard in 1983 as the John D. MacArthur Professor of Genetics and later became head of the genetics division. In 1987, a banner year, he was chosen to be an HHMI investigator and elected to the National Academy of Sciences—at the unusually young age of 37. Even after joining HHMI as vice president for biomedical research in 2000, Rubin maintained a lab at Berkeley, although it is winding down.

Robert Tjian, an HHMI investigator and molecular biologist at Berkeley who helped recruit him and became a colleague and close friend, recalls: “Gerry is the ultimate organizer, at every level, from the way the reagents are labeled to the way the lab is run. At the same time, he's not a micromanager. His philosophy is that you can be messy or you can be neat, but as long as you're thinking and working hard and tackling big ideas, you're not going to have a problem.”

While in California, Rubin and two colleagues founded a biotech company, Exelixis, located in South San Francisco, for the purpose of translating discoveries about genetic pathways in the fruit fly to problems of human medicine. Today, it has about 500 employees and a number of products in the pipeline. The effort was “financially rewarding,” Rubin says (he has divested himself of all interests in the company since moving to HHMI headquarters), but also is “relevant to Janelia because it was a startup experience, going from an idea to a fully functioning place.”

Photo: William Geiger

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