Rick Horwitz: Words do not suffice

Around the turn of the century, the advent of large-scale, collaborative genomic se-quencing efforts greatly accelerated the pace of biomedical research. Genomic data allowed biologists to single out genes and proteins and probe their functional and structural activities. However, scientists still don't have a very good understanding of how different proteins work together in functional complexes and how these complexes interact with others to affect the overall behavior of a cell. Rick Horwitz's lab at the University of Virginia is well known for its contributions to the fi elds of adhesion (1, 2), cell migration (3, 4), and neuroscience (5), and he's always loved studying how these topics interconnect and overlap (5, 6). Although recent advances in microscopy and automation make it possible to uncover how well-studied systems interact to affect cellular behavior—for example , by exhaustively describing and cataloging the organization and functions of these systems in living cells—such a project wouldn't fit into the mission or budget of a single government-funded research lab. That's why Hor-witz jumped at the chance to head up the newly created Allen Institute for Cell Science in Seattle, which is poised to take on exactly this task. How did you go from a PhD in biophysics to studying cell adhesion and migration? In college and high school I really enjoyed chemistry, physics, and math. I was always interested in biomedical research, particularly neuroscience; but I never had much biology in school because I'm very squeamish. The big transformation for me was when I learned about cell culture. When I found out you could get cell lines and grow them in a dish like a bacterium, I saw my entry point. By that time I had already started a postdoc studying magnetic resonance , but when I learned about cell culture , I asked a biologist if I could serve as a tech in his lab at night to learn how to culture cells. Around that same time, there was this feeling in the air that adhesion was really important, explaining morphogenesis, cancer, immunology, and neuronal speci-fi city. But again, I didn't have an entrée to that fi eld because the biochemistry and fractionation assays used at that time seemed so diffi cult and tedious. Then, the hybridoma and monoclonal antibody technology emerged. I thought it would be relatively easy to make an antibody that blocked cell adhesion and use it to purify an …