Genetic Breakthroughs— Their Implications for You and Your Health (Collection)

20. Young ladies in the back bay

This chapter deals with two inseparable young ladies who shared the bay at the far end of the lab. One was Bolivian, Maria del Carmen Seleme, called Marie, and the other was Russian, Daria Babushok, called Dasha. Let me begin with Marie Seleme.

I first met Seleme at the railway station in Avignon, France. In 1999, Marie was finishing her Ph.D. with Alain Bucheton, a noted expert on non-LTR retrotransposons in Drosophila, and applied to me for a postdoc position at Penn. Seleme had an interesting background. She was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia, but attended university in Barcelona, Spain, and then continued her graduate studies with Bucheton in Paris. When Bucheton moved to the Institut de Genetique Humaine ...