ow do you find FSH receptors on dog-fish gonad cells? That question, unlikely as it seems, sparked Zed Mason's love of science. To fulfill an undergraduate honors program at the University of North Wales, Mason undertook his first research project on those receptors. "It was the most daunting—and exciting—thing I'd ever done," Mason says. He was hooked.

Today, Mason is a marine biologist at California State University, Long Beach. A believer in passing the torch, Mason participates in a new HHMI-funded program to give undergraduates their own shot at lab life. "At least a quarter of my students could probably be better scientists than I—you just have to generate that spark," Mason says. And he's not the only one hoping to light a fire or two. At colleges and universities across the country, researchers are looking for new ways to nudge promising researchers into the lab.
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Photo: Melissa Goodlett/TTU

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
January 2001, pages 30-33.
©2001 Howard Hughes Medical Institute