Switched on: “In lab mice all over the world, genes are being turned

on and off like light bulbs to find out what they do.

Scientists have rewound Huntington’s disease,

probed the roots of memory and staged the onset of

prion disease. And that’s just in the brain. The man

who made it all possible is Hermann Bujard, chairman

of the Centre for Molecular Biology at the University

of Heidelberg, Germany. With his colleagues, Bujard

developed the Tet system which allows genes to be

controlled remotely–from outside a living organism.

What started as a hobby has spawned two thousand

research papers and contributed to work that led to a

Nobel prize last month–for somebody else.” New Scientist