A convergence of serendipity—involving a sabbatical detour in Paris in 2005, a collaborative project with a Berkeley colleague, and a subsequent stint as a visiting scientist at HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus—has led my research in unexpected and illuminating new directions.

Imaging tools have long played an important role in cell biology, but the fuzzy world glimpsed through the lens of a microscope always seemed too qualitative for my taste. Then, during a sabbatical at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, I had the good fortune to occupy a lab bench next to Xavier Darzacq, a new faculty member who had just completed postdoctoral training in Robert Singer's laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The two scientists and their colleagues have contributed to major advances in our capacity to visualize actively transcribing RNA in live cells and to track the movements of RNA polymerase—the enzyme responsible for producing RNA during transcription—through the development of new molecular techniques, high-resolution microscopes, and sophisticated computational tools.

Back at Berkeley, physicist Steve Chu and I brought our labs together to build a new kind of microscope—one that uses multiple-color lasers to observe and measure complex events at the single molecule level. These collaborations developed into an international consortium that includes Singer, Darzacq, Chu, and many other scientists working at the frontiers of molecular and cell biology, biophysics, and mathematics. Our small collaborative project team also benefits mightily from interactions with Janelians Eric Betzig, Harald Hess, and Mats Gustafsson, who have done so much to advance light microscopy that we're now able to peer into cells with exquisite precision. It's been a literal eye opener for me. I'd describe it as biomolecular crowdsourcing—of a very different type—in a venue that allows us to cross national, disciplinary, and subject-matter boundaries to think about big interesting questions.

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