One-night mushrooms

Ron Laskey — soon to head a new institute in Cambridge, UK, devoted to the molecular biology of cancer — is probably one of the few scientists to derive inspiration from the French existentialist André Gide. Pinned on the notice board above Laskey’s desk, alongside holiday snaps of his family climbing in the French Alps, is a quotation from Gide: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” Ask Laskey, 53, for the secret of his sustained scientific success, and he’s liable to reply: “bungling incompetence.” Pressed, he elaborates: “I don’t plan a particular track; I like stumbling along with my eyes open. Funding bodies expect you to have a clear vision, but I do not necessarily go in the direction I initially pointed.” Some of his best results, he says, arose from experiments that didn’t go smoothly, encouraging him to explore “tangents that proved to be productive.” He advises his students above all to “take note of your results when experiments appear to have gone wrong. Open your mind to things you weren’t looking for.” In Laskey’s hands, it’s a research philosophy that works remarkably well. He has made “seminal contributions,” colleagues say, in areas as seemingly disparate as cloning, DNA replication and the targeting of nuclear proteins. “At times his research could seem slightly chaotic” one former student remarks. “With so many things going on at once, trying to pin him down was difficult; a quick answer was not possible.” Yet time and again he has produced stunning results, “findings that really surprise you.” Beneath a conservative demeanour lurks “an intellectual risk-taker, though you wouldn’t think it to talk to him.” The day I meet Laskey, his cautious exterior is to the fore — he is still wincing from his first brush with the popular media. A national newspaper had just claimed infallibility for his team’s new screening test for cervical cancer, a by-product of years of basic research into how cells divide. “Infallible is a word that no respectable scientist