By John F. Lauerman

In 1997, Harvard toxicologist Leona Samson sent a postdoc to Santa Clara to participate in an Affymetrix user program. She thought the experience could help her lab get “ahead of the game” in its studies of yeast’s response to DNA damage. She was right: Early last year, Samson dropped a bombshell in her field when her data showed that expression levels in about one-third of the S. cerevisiae genome change significantly after damage from alkylating agents.