Follow Arthur Horwich into his first-floor laboratory at Yale’s Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine, and you will quickly see where status ranks among his priorities. Dressed for comfort in khaki corduroys and a worn North Face fleece, the 61-year-old medical geneticist drops his bag on a cluttered corner desk and reaches for a tray of DNA samples left on the lab bench in an overnight experiment. He grins from behind round wire glasses and an Einsteinian moustache. “I’m a little stunted,” he apologizes as he completes a task normally reserved for students and technicians. “I still function as a postdoc.”

Loathe to distance himself from data, Horwich keeps four microscopes (three dissecting, one confocal) in his small office down the hall. Chin-high piles of manuscripts are stacked against the far wall; he is on the editorial boards of three scientific journals. Photos of his wife, three grown children, and lab members, along with a former patient’s yellowed thank-you letter, decorate his bulletin board. What’s missing is any evidence of the many honors he’s received—including the prestigious Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which he shared in 2011 with Franz-Ulrich Hartl of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry—for his game-changing contributions to our understanding of protein folding.

Photo: Mark Mahaney