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…