From Painting to Genomics

David Haussler started out in painting before a summer in his brother's lab studying vitamin D convinced him to follow his scientific interests, according to this profile in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Haussler was elected to the Academy in 2006.) The article also describes how Haussler began to apply his mathematics degree to genomics and helped develop a program to assemble the draft human genome.

In the same issue, Haussler and his lab report on an algorithm that can determine the most parsimonious evolutionary history of related, modern genomes. "Even a single base change, such as A to C, can have enormous evolutionary consequences," says Haussler.