It should hardly come as a surprise, then, that neu was barely forgotten in Weinberg’s laboratory when it was resurrected in another. In the summer of 1984, a team of researchers, collaborating with Weinberg, discovered the human homolog of the neu gene. Noting its resemblance to another growth-modulating gene discovered previously—the Human EGF Receptor (HER)—the researchers called the gene Her-2. A gene by any other name may still be the same gene, but something crucial had shifted in the story of neu. Weinberg’s gene had been discovered in an academic laboratory. Much of Weinberg’s
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