Bruno Reversade

CAREERS in Durham, North Carolina. He points to Family Planning 2020, an ambitious initiative to roll out contraceptive services to TURNING POINT 120 million girls and women in developing countries by 2020. Donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bruno Reversade governments of both developed and developing nations have pledged $2.6 billion to the programme, which was launched last A molecular biologist at the Agency for July at a meeting in London spearheaded by Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Melinda Gates. “This will define the future Institute of Medical Biology in Singapore, for public-health jobs in the reproductive Bruno Reversade is the first scientist based sciences,” says Cates. outside Europe to win the European Molecular He adds that the initiative will create Biology Organization Young Investigatorship jobs, mostly in the developing world, for Award, which he collected last November for researchers who know how to cost-effec- his work on genetics and twinning. tively implement such services and for scientists who can evaluate their impact Do you thrive in a competitive environment? — by, for instance, assessing the uptake of Yes. I realized that university would be com- contraception and its effects on popula- petitive when one of my first professors said tion growth and women’s and children’s that 60% of the class would not make it to the health. The effort will require research- second year. After that, I sat in the front and ers with backgrounds in areas such as worked hard. demography, sociology, economics and public health. What led to your fascination with embryonic She kindly invited me to work with her. Cates says that researchers with a development? basic-science background in reproduc- I went to the University of Western Ontario How were you able to rush out to Jordan? tive sciences and extra training in fields in London, Canada, in my fourth year as an I wanted to test my ideas as quickly as possi- such as epidemiology often have a leg up undergraduate and worked on early zebrafish ble, and I didn’t want to do a postdoc. Perhaps when competing for jobs in areas includ- development. The developing embryo was so that was arrogant or unrealistic, but I wanted ing clinical-trial design, because of their beautiful and fundamental to life that I realized to be independent. Fortunately, Swiss philan- understanding of biology. it was a special area. At the time, medicine and thropist Branco Weiss was seeking young sci- Patricia Sadate-Ngatchou earned a PhD biology were all about identifying and treating entists who were pursuing a biological problem studying sperm development at WSU. disease, but I found a resonance with birth and with societal impact for the Society in Science But a visit home to Cameroon during a development. I went to the Pasteur Institute in fellowship. I met Branco and explained that major cholera outbreak in 2010 changed Paris for a year to work on early head develop- identical twins can develop through several the course of her career. “How do you help ment after seeing a knockout mouse with no mechanisms, including embryonic bisection people on the ground?” she asked herself. head on the cover of Nature (W. Shawlot and and possibly genetics, which for me calls into Sadate-Ngatchou is now studying for R. R. Behringer Nature 374, 425–430; 1994). question the moral uproar over cloning. I con- a master’s degree in epidemiology at the vinced him that the idea was worth pursuing University of Washington in Seattle. Her What was the biggest challenge of your PhD? and he gave me the money. ultimate goal is to move into a decision- I did most of my research at the University making position in government or a foun- of California, Los Angeles, where I spent the Have you published this work? dation involved in reproductive health; first half of my programme chasing chordin, Not yet. I’m now working with samples from a suitable post might be as a programme a protein that my adviser, Eddy De Robertis, other families with multiple sets of twins. We officer overseeing grants. However, Sadate- and I thought was circulating in the blood. found a gene that is overexpressed in identical Ngatchou thinks that she may first have to After three years we found we were mistaken. twins and encodes a protein. We are making do entry-level work as an epidemiologist, I persevered, however, and we detailed how sure it is well protected by patents. for instance in disease surveillance. multiple proteins help embryos that are cut The variety of questions and opportu- in two to self-regulate consistently. Eddy and What is your most important career move so far? nities in reproductive biology keeps some I published the work in Cell (B. Reversade and In 2008, I was the first A*STAR investigator researchers hooked on the field, despite the E. M. De Robertis Cell 123, 1147–1160; 2005). recruited as an assistant professor at the Insti- tough market. Some end up in niches they tute of Medical Biology. They offered me carte never expected, such as facilitating panda What led you to focus on genetics in twinning? blanche: I have no teaching or grant-writing or reptile reproduction in zoos, or assessing Sitting in the lab cutting frog embryos day after responsibilities. Everything was new and the toxicants for their effects on embryonic and day led me to a defining realization. Identical country was investing so much in science. I have pubertal development at government insti- twins occur once in every 300 births, more fre- blossomed here because I got that freedom just tutions such as the US Environmental Pro- quently than most genetic diseases. The dogma as the revolution in human genetics began. tection Agency. Clement is open to a variety at the time was that twinning just happens, of possibilities. “If you are a reproductive but I started to look for evidence of a genetic What do you plan to do next? biologist,” she says, “you have to prepare trigger. Then Hanan Hamamy, a genetic cli- I want to work on rare diseases ranging from for option one — but have option two and nician who at the time was at the Jordanian developmental anomalies to inherited cancers. three in the wings.” ■ National Center for Diabetes, Endocrinology If you want to understand a trait in the general and Genetics in Amman, identified 13 pairs population, you need to look at the outliers. ■ Charlotte Schubert is a freelance writer of identical twins across multiple generations based in Seattle, Washington. of a single family — hinting at a genetic link. INTERVIEW BY VIRGINIA GEWIN