Curling Up with a Story: An Interview with Sean Carroll

To meet Sean Carroll on his home turf in the early spring of Wisconsin is like encountering a bear cuddled up in his lair, waiting out the cold winter. I burrowed into the softly lit cave of small offices, with stalactites of yellow post-its dripping from every imaginable surface. Tiptoeing over misaligned stacks of books and reprints, I had to resist the urge to pick up one of the worn works, settle into a corner, and join in the reverie. Carroll (Image 1) is an expert in the field known as ‘‘evo devo,’’ an amalgam of developmental molecular biology as applied to the workings of animal evolution. Following his initial work with fushi tarazu (ftz)—one of the segmentation genes in the Antennapedia complex of Drosophila—he has been instrumental in elaborating the developmental regulation and interaction of a variety of genes, at first in the developing embryo, and later in the genesis of leg and wing appendages. A chance encounter fueled his long-standing interest in evolution and prompted him to re-tool his lab for the study of butterfly wing development; comparison between the two species led to groundbreaking insights into the subtle evolutionary changes that can give rise to spectacularly different appearances. Carroll now leads a double life, and what captured my attention was his new-found voice as a writer about evolution, with three books already in print and, as I learned during the interview, two more ready for publication in 2009. We got the ball rolling by recalling how we had been introduced in Boulder, Colorado, while he was still a postdoc with Matt Scott, and I began by asking him about that period of time.