Bonnie Bassler sensed that a tiny, light-emitting organism could reveal big things about bacterial communications.

Bassler has picked up speed since then, becoming what one colleague calls a "rock star" of microbiology and earning a 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as a "genius" award. "Bonnie stuck to her guns and knew what she was doing," says Richard M. Losick, an HHMI professor at Harvard University with whom Bassler has collaborated and published. "She is quite extraordinary in her energy and breadth of interests."

Thus, it comes as no surprise to people who've worked with her that Bassler's unglamorous experiments with barnacle-involved bacteria led to the puzzle of how and when a little-known ocean-dwelling bacterium becomes luminescent. And in solving that puzzle, she moved from an obscure area of research to a central unsolved problem in microbiology: How do bacteria communicate with each other?

The answers she found have transformed thinking about bacterial communities. She has shown that bacteria, far from being opportunistic loners, are highly social creatures that incessantly chatter among themselves, with the hosts they infect, and even with other species of bacteria by means of a common "language" that no one thought existed. That signaling system has been dubbed "quorum sensing" and Bassler is poised to devise a radically new type of antibiotic based on interrupting bacterial communication—one that might work against all kinds of bacteria, not just one or a few species.

Bassler, often described as a force of nature, is known not only for her research achievements. She is a distinguished speaker, a gifted teacher, and having a conversation with her is like taking a drink of water from a fire hose. Ask her why she became a scientist, for example. "I had this wonderful experience in graduate school, where I loved doing experiments. I really liked being at the bench, and I really wanted to keep being in school, because Heaven forbid I should actually have to get a real job, I mean, I wasn't going to do that...and so anyway..."

Or ask her about teaching an introductory biology class to non-science majors. "We use the word 'evolution' in every lecture. We use it to explain how every protein folds to make its binding site, how the cell membrane and the proteins in it function. We don't use the word to imply anything about monkeys but, rather, to explain every single reaction in one's body that has been optimized to make us alive, or how things have gone wrong to, say, give you cancer. We try to convey to the students that evolution underpins every single, beautiful, magical biological thing that happens." Where she finds time to take a breath is itself a kind of magical biological thing.

Five days a week, Bassler begins her day with a 5:42 alarm, giving her just enough time to get to the YMCA to teach a 6:15 a.m. aerobics class. She met her husband, actor/dancer Todd Reichart, shortly after she moved to Princeton, when she signed up for a swing dance class; he was the teacher. They still dance off and on. "We look really good at weddings, but that's it," she jokes. Her dual interests in dance and biology led to a friendship with choreographer Liz Lerman, who received a MacArthur Fellowship the same year that Bassler did. Bassler participated with other researchers in the development of a Lerman dance piece called Ferocious Beauty: Genome.

Bassler and Reichart (who refers to his wife as "hyperkinetic") also canoe and hike whenever they get the opportunity, often taking an extra week after one of Bassler's far-flung scientific meetings to climb the nearest 14,000-foot peak. "I don't do anything where I have to be attached to a rope and could fall off and die," she says. "But I will walk forever."

Photo: Greg Miller

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