Jinek’s cautionary note, he says, was “one hundred percent accurate,” but that made her lab an exciting place to work for a self-driven person. “She definitely doesn’t hover over you,” says Wilson, who now runs his own Berkeley lab aligned with Doudna’s, “but when she goes over your experiments and results with you, there are times when she will lower her voice a bit, look you right in the eye, lean in, and say, ‘What if you tried…?’ ” Then she would describe a new approach, a new experiment, or even a big new idea, usually involving some new way of deploying RNA.
