12. A tour de force from Tom Eickbush

In 1993, Tom Eickbush and his graduate student, Dongmei Luan, at the University of Rochester, made a truly amazing discovery. Since Tom had completed his graduate work for his Ph.D. in the Johns Hopkins’ Department of Biology 13 years earlier, he had been invited to present a seminar at the Homewood campus soon after his breakthrough paper was published in Cell. That is when we first met. Tom was a pleasant, extremely knowledgeable man. He had been working on D. melanogaster (fruit fly) and Bombyx mori (silk worm) biology since his postdoc with Fotis Kafatos at Harvard. Tom specialized in the non-LTR retrotransposons R1 and R2, each of which inserted at a different particular site within the ribosomal RNA ...

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