AS EVIDENCE, she holds up three of the last five winners of NSF's Alan T. Waterman Award—three HHMI investigators who have shown "unequivocally that women scientists can compete."

Angelika Amon, Kristi S. Anseth, and Jennifer A. Doudna work in different areas of science, but they share similar career stories. Each, for example, won the Waterman award, a $500,000 honor that recognizes significant research by an investigator under the age of 35 (see sidebar). “Significant” may in fact be an understatement. Anseth’s work in tissue engineering, Amon’s contributions to cell-cycle regulation, and Doudna’s discovery of RNA ribozyme structures have fundamentally changed the ways their peers approach critical questions.

What’s more, these women stand out not only for their scientific successes, but also for the ways they run their labs and their lives. Colleagues of the three describe similar traits among them—self-assurance without arrogance, an enthusiasm that moves projects forward, boundless energy, and personal warmth. Setting an example for young scientists, their mix of optimism, confidence, and unending curiosity has resulted in successful careers.

“It’s a combination of being extremely motivated and yet optimistic that things are going to work out. It’s a very refreshing personality to encounter in science,” James M. Berger says of Doudna, his fellow faculty member in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In her office at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU), as the winter sun bounces off her strawberry-blonde hair, Kristi Anseth is the very picture of scientific gusto. Animated and enthusiastic, she scrolls through slides that illustrate her research in tissue engineering—an intersection of biology, chemistry, and engineering. Her casual minilecture heats up when she starts talking about an area where she’s clearly made a mark—applying the principles of light-activated polymers (chains of molecules) for regrowing tissues.

Throughout the early stages of her research career, Anseth gave those particular polymers a lot of consideration. “I thought the advantages of photo-polymers would be tremendous for biological applications,” she says. “But we had been working on things for high-tech processes, so we didn’t have biocompatible materials, yet.” As a postdoctoral fellow and later in her own lab, Anseth persistently pursued her hunch. Eventually she developed and refined a technique in which liquid materials are injected into the body and then activated by light to form a gel-like scaffold. This structure then enables the delivery of cells and provides a framework for them to repair damage or lay down new tissue in an organized fashion. And the light-activated chemistry is safe to use around the cells.

A scaffold starts as a relatively simple mix of components. Its basic building block is a core molecule, bracketed on either side by a cross-linking molecule, with each chemical chosen to encourage a particular kind of cell to grow. The final ingredient is a tiny dash of an initiator molecule that, once activated by a particular wavelength of light, causes the cross-linker ends to polymerize, or form a compound. This chemical stew can be manipulated to change the meshwork’s density, deliver growth factors to cells, and control how the scaffold degrades once its job is done.

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