01/02.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 9When cell biologistJimena Giudice was an undergraduate studying chemistry at the University of Buenos
Aires, Argentina, one of the few biology-related classes she took was on alternative splicing, a process by
which different proteins can be produced from the same gene. While she continued to study chemistry, she
remained fascinated by the topic, and when she became a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Bio-
physical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, during her doctoral work at the University of Buenos Aires, she got
the chance to take a week-long course on splicing. “Instead of taking vacation days, I took those days to do that
course,” she says. After receiving her PhD in 2011, Giudice did a postdoc at Baylor College of Medicine in Hous-
ton, Texas, until 2016, when she started her own lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of
Medicine. Her lab studies how alternative splicing controls the function of proteins necessary for heart and skel-
etal muscle development.
Giudice, collaborated with her graduate students Gabrielle Gentile, Hannah Wiedner, and Emma Hinkle to
write an article on the biological importance of alternative splicing, which can be found on page 38. Gentile, who
played the key role in organizing the article, received her bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of
Pittsburgh in 2018. She recalls staying up late one night studying for a genetics exam because she was so intrigued
by the concept of alternative splicing. “Looking back, I laugh because that was perhaps a foreshadowing.”Neuroscientist Scott Grafton has been interested in using math to study the brain for decades. He majored
in mathematics and psychobiology as an undergraduate at University of California, Santa Cruz—but what
really got him “hooked on doing neuroscience” was a semester at the National Institutes of Health’s clini-
cal hospital, where he worked in a neurochemistry lab and volunteered to take part in several research stud-
ies. “Researchers would come to me and ask, ‘ He y, can we inject this protein in you and see what happens?’”
Grafton recalls. The clinical experience helped him decide to attend medical school at University of Southern
California. After he graduated in 1984, he completed residencies at the University of Washington and the
University of California, Los Angeles, and developed brain imaging programs at the University of Southern
California, Emory University, and Dartmouth College. In 2006, he joined the faculty at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, where he is now director of the university’s imaging center.
Grafton wrote his first book, Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each
Other Through Life, “to celebrate how much intelligence is required to even do the simplest of things. It’s not
just speech and memory and social intelligence,” he says. Even simple tasks take “an enormous amount of com-
putational horsepower.” Read his essay about walking on ice—which Grafton describes as a surprisingly complex
task—on page 55.Researcher and entrepreneur James Sherley knew early on that he wanted to be a scientist. After graduating
from Harvard University in 1980 with a degree in biology, Sherley pursued medicine to gain a clinical perspective
on cancer research. He received his medical degree, along with a doctorate in molecular biology, from Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1988. Afterward, Sherley did postdoctoral work at Princeton
University before taking his first principal investigator position at Fox Chase Cancer Center. Later, he moved
to MIT, where his lab focused on stem cell research. After leaving MIT, he became a senior scientist at Boston
Biomedical Research Institute until founding Asymmetrex, a stem cell biotechnology company, in 2013.
On page 12, Sherley criticizes ghostwriting, the widespread practice of having early-career researchers peer
review journal articles under their principal investigator’s name. He explains that the onus is on academia to
properly train manuscript reviewers instead of involving them in the process of scientific publication too early
in their careers. “The real issue is changing the culture,” says Sherley. He’s facing a similar issue at Asymmetrex,
where he and others have developed a method of counting stem cells that could help precisely measure out stem
cell treatment doses. It’s a challenge to convince researchers that the technique is possible, he says. “[We’re] really
trying to introduce this new technology to a field that has operated for 60 years without any counting of adult
tissue stem cells.”JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020Contributors
UNC-CHAPEL HILL; COURTESY OF GABRIELLE GENTILE; COURTESY OF SCOTT GRAFTON; COURTESY OF REBECCA ROLLINS